“Let me help you,” Travis Hunter says, quietly but firmly. “Bring him right to me.” We were on a boat in a private lake west of Fort Worth, doing what Hunter loves to do more than anything but playing football. We had driven his Dodge Ram TRX Sandblast Edition pickup on a two-lane road until the houses disappeared, unlocked a gate and rolled down a gravel path that took us to Hunter’s happy place. Surrounded by brown prairie and brown cows, we had come to this brown body of water to catch largemouth bass.
And the action had just begun.
After feeling the tell-tale, tink-tink tug on my line, I had set the hook with a forceful yank of the rod. Adrenaline surged. The fish flashed his white belly before submerging again, confirming that it was a fat one. As I strained to get him to the boat, the Heisman Trophy winner and potential No. 1 NFL draft pick was every bit as excited as I was.
Then the rush of the moment was interrupted by an urgent problem: The drag on my reel wasn’t adequately adjusted to maintain tension on a 4 ½-pound bass that was fighting mightily to evade capture. I’d just bought the rod and reel upon arrival in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex the day before, and—a potentially calamitous error—I hadn’t checked the drag. Thus I was reeling but not bringing the fish any closer. There was a risk the line would go slack, the fish would spit out the artificial worm I’d caught him with, and one of the biggest bass I’d ever hooked would get away.
But as his football career has demonstrated, Hunter is an adept multitasker. He stopped guiding the boat from the bow with the trolling motor and hustled over to the rescue, adjusting my drag while I held the rod and battled the fish.
“That’s a good one,” he said enthusiastically. “Don’t lose him! Keep it tight!”
As I tugged and reeled the bass to the side of the boat, Hunter dropped down to grab the beast by the lower lip and bring it onboard. I howled like I’d just made a diving interception or hauled in an end-zone fade—things my angling partner did regularly, sometimes in the same game.
“Nice fish, dude,” Hunter said as he deposited the lunker in the boat’s live well. “Told you I was going to put you on the fish. I’m a great teammate. That’s my job.”
Hunter will have a new job and a new set of teammates soon, after his name is called very early at the NFL draft. The two-way star from Colorado is the most intriguing—and perhaps divisive—pro prospect in a very long time, one who played both wide receiver and defensive back full-time in college at an All-American level. Two-Way Travis defied 60 years of precedent in doing so, averaging more than 100 snaps a game, and he intends to keep defying precedent as a professional.
Whichever team drafts Hunter would be foolish to put limitations on him before seeing exactly how much he can handle. There is a school of thought that his best position will be cornerback, with a limited package of plays as a receiver. As of now, Hunter has no interest in those limitations.
“I’m not going to let anybody tell me that I can’t do something that I’ve already done,” he says.
Here’s the thing about Travis Hunter: He could be a pro cornerback, a pro wideout … or a pro fisherman. He grew up fishing canals and ponds in Florida, and now, at 21, his angling skills are considerable. In roughly two hours on that private Texas lake, Hunter landed half a dozen quality bass, with a high weight of 5 ½ pounds. (He says his personal record is a 12-pounder.)
He’s an accurate caster with an advanced eye for reading a body of water and deducing where bass might lurk. He understands lure choice, water conditions and weather variables—he’s a quick study, befitting his Academic All-American status at Colorado. He pilots a boat with assurance. And, just like on the football field, Hunter can go all day.
Two-Way Travis could actually be Three-Way Travis, if there were no limit on hours in a day or days in a year. Last year, Hunter spent a day on a lake in Florida with Major League Fishing pro Matt Becker, and Becker came away impressed.
“The man definitely has a love for bass fishing,” Becker says. “It was super cool to see his passion for it. He started smack-talking instantly—I could tell he’s the ultimate competitor. If he focused on fishing as much as football, he could be a tournament angler.”
If it seems like Hunter can do anything, keep in mind what he won’t do. He will not be involved in the social ramble, as Satchel Paige once put it. He will not be out on the town until all hours. He will not lose focus on his football future.
“I don’t like parties,” he says. “I don’t like doing nothing else but playing video games, football, chilling with the family, fishing.”
Since his college career ended, Hunter and his fiancée, Leanna Lenee, have relocated to a guest home on the property of Athlete Performance Ranch in Fort Worth. The former cattle ranch is now a sprawling, one-stop training shop for athletes in almost any sport. The primary clientele is younger athletes, but professionals and Olympians have come through as well. Anna Cockrell, silver medalist in the 400-meter hurdles in Paris last summer, shared workout space with Hunter one recent morning.
There is a huge weight room with an indoor sprint track, a 60-yard outdoor artificial turf field and, across a couple of ponds, a castle-like basketball gymnasium that also includes bunk beds for overnight guests. Hunter has VIP guest privileges, courtesy of AP Ranch founder Mike Dry. He’s got the guesthouse that is a short drive from the training facilities, sitting up on a windswept hill. There are some warehouses in view, but that’s about it in terms of nearby civilization.
“It’s still a little too close to everybody,” Hunter says.
While his tolerance for crowds is low, his tolerance for work is limitless. The training staff at AP Ranch has a million drills to enhance strength, speed and aerobic conditioning, yet they’re still trying to get to the physical bottom of Hunter.
“I’ve worked with a lot of elite athletes—Olympic sprinters, NBA guys—and by far Travis is the most unique,” says Greg Sholars, director of AP Ranch and a former NCAA champion sprinter himself. “He has the aerobic capacity of an elite middle-distance runner or miler, but he has the sprint speed of a world-class sprinter. He’s different.
“There’s been two questions I’ve never heard him ask: How many? or Are we done? Most people, that’s the first thing they want to know. He just goes and goes and goes. We should dedicate his body to science.”
“He has the aerobic capacity of an elite middle-distance runner or miler, but he has the sprint speed of a world-class sprinter. He’s different.”Greg Sholars, director of AP Ranch
Strength and conditioning director Johnathan Gray played running back at Texas and gained more than 2,600 yards after a legendary high school career in the state. He’s leaned on Hunter in the weight room without any pushback.
“He’s just a dog,” Gray says. “The years I played, I thought I was the man with a plan and never got tired. He’s on a different level.”
Between sets with a medicine ball, heavy ropes and on an incline bench, Hunter plays with Gray’s toddler, Siena. She is the star of the show at this particular workout, picking up footballs and foam rollers for her personal entertainment. Hunter gravitates to her as a sort of natural buffer between him and the photo and video crews that are filming him for the day.
Television screens line the walls above the equipment. When Hunter isn’t slapping hands with Siena, he’s looking at the ESPN morning shows—peering through omnipresent glasses that correct his one physical flaw, his vision. “My eyesight is trash,” he says with a chuckle.
NFL topics dominate the morning TV shows, even in March. More than once in recent weeks, Hunter has glanced up to see himself as the topic of debate. The airwaves are full of hot takes about Two-Way Travis’s pro future.
“It’s a blessing to have people debate about me, but it doesn’t change anything that I’m going to do,” Hunter says. “People are only talking about me because my name is hot, so they don’t know where I came from, don’t know where I grew up. They don’t understand my story. I just let people talk.”
Hunter says the neighborhood where he grew up in Boynton Beach, Fla., “was bad, but I made the best of it.” Travis Hunter Sr. was a standout high school football player who fathered Travis Jr. as a teenager. His mother, Ferrante Edmonds, made a pivotal decision to move with her husband and four children to suburban Atlanta when Travis Jr. was in his early teens.
“People are only talking about me because my name is hot, so they don’t know where I came from, don’t know where I grew up. They don’t understand my story. I just let people talk.”Travis Hunter
There was a period of time when the family of six lived together in a single room with two beds at the Metro Extended Stay hotel in Lawrenceville, Ga. Later, as his star began to burn brightly at Collins Hill High, Hunter spent more than a year living with one of the team’s assistant coaches.
Whatever instability Hunter endured never derailed his love of football and drive to excel. If anything, it might have enhanced it. He was relatively unknown when he committed to Florida State in March 2020, but he eventually became the No. 1 recruit nationally in the class of 2022. On National Signing Day in December 2021, Hunter for the first time defied conventional wisdom.
He shocked the football world by flipping his commitment to Jackson State, an HBCU at the FCS level—a cut below the top rung of college football, and light years removed from the power programs like Florida State. The reason was Deion Sanders. The two had bonded over a love of bass fishing, but their shared football vision was a difference maker.
Sanders was in his second season as coach at Jackson State, and he presented a compelling pitch to Hunter: If you want to play both ways at defensive back and wide receiver, learn how from someone who did it at the highest level. There were other elements involved, like making an impact at an HBCU, but the lure of Coach Prime was the prime selling point.
Not that Sanders made playing both ways easy. In fact, Hunter’s first year at Jackson State was primarily an immersion in playing defense with some dabbling on offense.
“I had to earn it by playing one side of the ball first, so that’s kind of what he made me do,” Hunter says. “I had to dominate on one side of the ball to be able to get to the other side of the ball. Once he saw that I could do it, he started gradually to put me out there [on offense].”
By the time Colorado hired Sanders before the 2023 season, Hunter was as much a part of Coach Prime’s family as his sons Shedeur, a quarterback who could also be a top-five pick, and Shilo, a defensive back who could be a late-round selection. They transferred as a package, arriving in Boulder with a lot to prove.
Hunter says his parents are his “best friends” but describes Deion Sanders as “like a father to me.”
In Hunter’s first FBS game, against TCU, he flashed a combination of instinct, awareness and athleticism that dropped jaws by breaking for a diving interception near the goal line that prevented a Horned Frogs touchdown.
Hunter was primarily a defensive back during his first season at Colorado, but he still caught 57 passes for 721 yards and five touchdowns. By 2024, he was ready to go the full 60 minutes and 120 snaps on both sides of the ball. The precedent-shattering result: 96 catches for 1,258 yards and 15 touchdowns; four interceptions, 11 passes broken up and 36 tackles; a nine-win season for the formerly downtrodden Buffaloes and a runaway Heisman victory.
That pushed Hunter to the forefront of NFL draft discussions. For a time, Shedeur was right there with him, but in recent weeks his stock is perceived to be sliding. Miami’s Cam Ward is now the consensus top quarterback draft prospect, with Sanders’s appeal in question. Hunter has some thoughts on that.
“It’s just hating,” Hunter says. “They dislike Coach Prime, so they’ll try to take shots at us. A lot of people are going to make a mistake if they pass him up.”
Not many teams are going to pass on Hunter, who is widely projected as a top-three pick. But beyond team interviews at the NFL combine and working out at Colorado’s pro day in early April, there isn’t a lot more Hunter can do to control where his future lies. So until the draft he’s hunkering down on the Texas prairie to work out and catch fish.
“Peaceful” is Hunter’s description of what he likes about fishing, and there certainly can be a calming effect that comes with the quiet. But peaceful doesn’t mean passive. Hunter has all the characteristics of a fishing obsessive, always seeking the next pinpoint cast and the next massive strike.
As Norman Maclean wrote in the seminal fishing novel, A River Runs Through It: “Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart.” So it is for Travis Hunter. It’s his refuge.
On the day we fished together, he kept circling the lake well after our designated stopping time, blowing past the start of a scheduled yoga session back at the ranch. The football stamina easily translates to fishing stamina. There is no stopping.
More than finding peace on a lake, Travis Hunter appears to be finding a release from the pressures of being a rising star facing major (and uncertain) life changes at the age of 21. Out there, rod in hand, nobody else around, doing what he’s loved since childhood, he is in command of his surroundings. On this particular day, with a drone camera and a dozen other people watching every move, Hunter finished the afternoon by steering his boat away from it all. He faced the cows onshore, his back to everyone, and kept casting for fish.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Travis Hunter Is the Biggest Fish (and Fisherman) in the Pond.
