Rolling With Travis Scott, a Big Man on Many Campuses

Travis Scott has stopped answering the first question of this interview to sign a sneaker that’s been shoved through the rear passenger window of his Range Rover. Dozens of USC students have piled around the car, hoping to catch even a glimpse of one of the biggest stars their generation has seen. The lucky ones get close enough to push phones, sneakers, or hands through the cracked window, angling for a photo, an autograph, or a quick fist-bump. Scott obliges as he’s able, and the car’s driver inches the vehicle forward as he’s able. “What’s up, baby? What’s up,” he says, vamping out the window, nodding to his driver before insisting, “Go slow, go slow.”

The fervor builds as more kids join the crowd, but Scott keeps his cool. That makes one of us—the tension in the car is palpable. There is a moment where there is a tangible shift in the energy of the rush, which is to say it’s starting to teeter from “crowd” to “mob.” As soon as it comes, Scott rolls up his window, careful to make sure it’s free of hands, fingers, or other appendages, and begins calmly directing the driver on how to navigate a tricky right-hand turn now obstructed by a hundred-plus fans. He spots an opening—a gap in the crowd through which the car can escape without causing harm—and tells the driver to move. The Range Rover lurches forward, building speed as a few stray students sprint after it, waving and snapping photos from the sidewalk. After a couple hundred feet they’re outpaced. The car’s other three passengers exhale, and Scott grabs a rolling tray.

“All right—what was the question?”

Scott’s visit to USC is the last stop on a whirlwind tour—a 36-hour sprint celebrating a collaboration between the rapper’s Cactus Jack apparel line and Mitchell & Ness (by way of Fanatics). As exclusive merch designed by Scott goes on sale at over a dozen college campuses across the country, Scott and Fanatics founder Michael Rubin have showed up at three of the schools participating— Louisiana State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Southern California.

Their timing proved better than anyone could have anticipated. Just a day prior to the tour kicking off, the NCAA’s women’s March Madness tournament delivered a banner night for the sport. “Today might be one for the illest days in women’s sports historyyyyyy,” Scott tweeted that morning, and the man called it right. Face-offs between University of Connecticut and USC and a rematch of last year’s final between LSU and Iowa drew in record-breaking viewership, outdrawing nearly every conceivable major league in American sports over the past year. The games themselves lived up to the hype as well, delivering an all-time great night of sports (“Start interviewing for the Iowa-LSU-USC-UConn 30 for 30 this evening,” one Twitter user suggested.) Seemingly overnight, collegiate players like Paige Bueckers, JuJu Watkins, Angel Reese, and Caitlin Clark became bonafide household names.

Watkins and Reese’s USC and LSU teams ended up on the losing end of their matchups, but their stars shone brighter than ever in the aftermath. Reese declared for this year’s WNBA Draft the day the tour started and made an appearance alongside Scott at LSU, while Watkins (among the best players in the game as a mere freshman) cemented herself as the future of college basketball. “Obviously we’d love for them to still be competing for a title,” Rubin tells GQ, “But the timing worked out well for us.”

This is all just to say that there is a particular energy on the campus of a college with a team in the running for a title, and that if there has ever been a week to celebrate the culture of college sports this is the one, and that this energy is amplified to heights beyond belief when you throw Huncho Jack into the mix. When asked why he pursued a collaboration with the rapper, Rubin just laughs. “It’s incredibly obvious why we’d want to work with Travis,” he says, nodding to the riled-up crowd. Point taken.

The love makes sense. There are few musicians as tapped into youth culture as Scott, and that’s evident in his reception. When Scott arrives at USC on Thursday afternoon there are students who have been waiting at the barriers outside the campus bookstore since 8PM the night prior, around the time the tour was stopping at LSU two time zones away. By the time I arrive the student body has surrounded the building in a way that seems to draw from medieval siege tactics. “There’s no way he can get in without using this entrance,” I overhear one student camped out behind the store near the underground freight dock telling his friends, “So if we wait here we can’t miss him.”

Unfortunately this strategy doesn’t pay off. Scott, Rubin, JuJu Watkins, and USC point guard Isaiah Collier pull up right in front of the bookstore, where Scott conducts the raucous crowd like a maestro of pandemonium and Watkins is received with equally thunderous enthusiasm. By the looks of the crowd and the hour there are certainly professors on campus lecturing to half-empty halls, their inboxes full of half-assed excuses. One wonders how many imaginary grandmothers, uncles, and family dogs passed away that day.

From the moment Scott enters the bookstore he’s in his element. Scott’s passion for collegiate culture and athletics runs deep. The rapper attended University of Texas at San Antonio for a year before dropping out and told GQ last year he plans on pursuing a degree in architecture from Harvard University in the future.

“I really admire kids that take this journey right here,” he says, explaining why he wanted to start his collaboration with the brand at the collegiate level. “This generation, they move the needle. I’m not saying they aren’t instilled in other major league sports, but it starts here at the collegiate level.” Scott, for his part, seems as authentically stoked to be here as any of the kids. “I just love the energy on college campuses,” he confesses, “It’s ill. Football games, basketball games, the energy is just super high.” The sentiment rings true—in a video from the USC stop, Scott can be heard muttering, “Damn, I wanna go here.”

Most of the crew rolling with Scott for this tour—his entourage plus a handful of Rubin’s staff at Fanatics and Mitchell & Ness—is running on little to no sleep. Nobody’s nodding off, but between the overnight flight, the early morning in Austin, and the overall pace of the tour, everyone’s clearly a little frazzled. Scott is the exception—when he hits the bookstore he’s not just high-energy but sharp, like he’s fresh off a full eight hours. He careens through the store, bouncing between students, posing for selfies and videos with aplomb, and scribbling signatures on whatever’s put in front of him; at one point, he gleefully autographs a student’s forehead. The only request he denies (politely, and with a grilled-out grin) is to record a shoutout for a fraternity’s rush video.

Perhaps predictably, he and Rubin only man the registers for a few minutes, but they stay in the bookstore entertaining the masses for over half an hour. When it’s time to dip, he continues slapping hands and signing until the crowd is out of reach.

We move through a corridor in the bookstore down to a small parking deck in the back and hop into his Range Rover. It takes all of a minute for that aforementioned medieval siege line to surround the car. Once we break free, though, Scott’s able to take a breath for what must be the first time since touching down on campus.

As it turns out, Scott wants to use the oxygen in his lungs to keep talking about sports, immediately circling back to the NCAA tournament. “[Tuesday] was just an amazing day for sports,” he says. “It’s like I woke up and it was fucking Christmas. I’ve been watching [Caitlin Clark] since high school. One of my favorite players.” He picks Iowa and NC State to win the women's and men’s tournaments, respectively (an 0-2 prediction, unfortunately). For someone who professed to GQ that he sometimes grows weary of people asking him questions, Scott can talk pretty endlessly once you get him started on sports—so much so that he never quite finishes the work he’s started on his rolling tray.

He notes that the same night as the esteemed Elite Eight matchups his hometown Houston Astros notched a no-hitter thanks to pitcher Ronel Blanco. “We’re watching the USC game and we’re like, wait, do we change it right now?” he laughs. “We had to flip real quick for the last inning.” Scott’s love of sports started in his hometown following teams like the Astros, the Rockets, the Texans (then the Oilers), and the University of Houston (who of course were included in the Fanatics collaboration) and that pride shines in the effusive tone with which he starts talking about the ‘Stros. He counts watching the legendary 2005 14-inning World Series matchup between the Chicago White Sox and the Astros as his favorite memory of watching sports. “True story, I went back to the kitchen,” he laughs. “I hid under the table. I could only watch when they were at bat.” For the curious, he names Jeff Bagwell (“My man JB”) as his GOAT Astro, but shouts out Craig Biggio and Nolan Ryan as well.

When we park the car in a gated area next to USC’s legendary practice field, he greets a few of his crew members before retreating back into the car for a moment of quiet (and, presumably, to finish what he started on that tray). The quiet doesn’t last. It’s time to do the same thing he’s been jetting around the country to do for the last 36 hours: surprise the school’s football team. Armed with a giant plastic sword and decked out in the collab’s USC swag, he storms the practice field as his music thumps and the team charges towards him, yelling like—well, like an army of Trojan warriors fresh out the horse. Watkins lingers behind with a few friends and family members, taking in the scene with the rest of Scott and Fanatics’ crew. A couple of players tell me that this has been mostly a surprise; no one told them why they were supposed to gather on the field that day. That said, USC football players are still college students. Many of them follow Scott on social media and quickly put together that he’d probably be pulling up when they saw footage of his other campus drop-ins.

Photos are taken and jerseys with CACTUS JACK emblazoned on the back are swapped, then USC head coach Lincoln Riley gets his team to take a knee while Scott delivers a speech. As he concludes, a player chimes in, “And we got JuJu Watkins!” The rest of the team joins in at a volume that would have you believe a second Travis Scott had just stormed the field. The team chants the young star’s name until she bashfully joins Scott in the center, and soon Scott has pulled on her number 12 jersey over the custom one he’s already wearing.

Scott lingers behind to take photos with every player who asks for one as the rest of his crew begins to head back to their cars. The tour is officially concluded and everyone seems ready to get some sleep, be it in a hotel room or on their flights home. When I pass the bookstore on my way back to my car, there’s still a crowd outside. I continue across campus; half the students I pass have already changed into the fits they purchased earlier. You have to wonder how many of them will show up to class next week in Scott’s campus gear and find themselves interrogated by the college professors whose classes they skipped. For a collaboration that seems to have taken everything into consideration, the only thing the drop is missing might be a signed note from Scott excusing their absences. Jack’s Orders.

Originally Appeared on GQ