FAYETTEVILLE - His ironman suit of armor is made up of pads, helmet and Arkansas Razorbacks uniform.
Travis Swanson is big, 6-5, 317 pounds. He smiles and laughs easily. He’s very polite and plain-spoken, but the guy who was a lightly recruited guard out of high school has done more than start at center the past three seasons for the Arkansas Razorbacks.
He’s played every series.
“Knock on wood,” he said with a laugh, “I’ve never been seriously injured.”
Swanson is a young man who knows the difference from pain and injury, and he’s played in pain plenty of times - he just won’t talk about it.
Swanson is a preseason nominee for the Rimington Award, given to the best center in college football, a position he never played in high school. During his official visit to Arkansas, Bobby Petrino suggested that he “Learn how to snap the ball.”
Swanson went home to Kingwood, Texas, and immediately added three days of snapping the football to his training program that began at 4:30 a.m.
Swanson continued to practice as a redshirt freshman, and a week before the 2010 season opener against Tennessee Tech, Petrino informed him he would start but didn’t tell anyone else. Petrino wasn’t big into depth charts.
With his excited parents, Todd and Gina Swanson, in the stands (they haven’t missed a game), the big scoreboard showed the starting center was Patrick Swanson.
The next week it happened again, and a third week.
By then it had become a family joke, but that was more than 2,000 offensive plays ago, and Travis Swanson is still snapping and blocking. In all three seasons, the Razorbacks passed for more than 3,000 yards, and in 2010 they had a 1,000-yard rusher, too.
In the trenches he’s a brawler, and Arkansas defensive tackle Robert Thomas said he’s the player he hates to face most during the football season. Coach Bret Bielema,who has a noted eye for offensive linemen, has called him the best center he’s ever seen.
Swanson, though, is not your stereotypical center. He’s a big-boned athlete. In high school he played lacrosse and basketball for two years. In the three-cone drill, he recorded a time of 7.39 seconds, which is NFL first-round fast.
There was a reason he was selected first-team preseason All-SEC with almost three times the votes (90) as the second-team center (33). He’s on everyone’s preseason All-American watch list.
Much will be written about him in the weeks to come, mostly about his play. But things that jumped out during a recent interview included his intense loyalty to the University of Arkansas and that “millions of men would love to have my opportunity.”
He says he has learned from all three of his position coaches, but he talks immediately about how Sam Pittman, his new offensive line coach, changed his foot position and how he put his hands on the ball. Swanson also nonchalantly mentions that he’s the biggest he’s ever been but is in the best shape of his life.
Yet, when asked about being a captain for the second consecutive season, a smile splits his boyish face.
“I admit, in the back of my mind, I always dreamed about being a captain,” he said. “To be the guy in the team room my teammates can talk to is an honor.”
Recently he cut his hair into a mohawk, and most of the offensive linemen, in a show of unity, followed suit.
“It is like going to SEC media days,” he said. “I know some guys see it as a chore, but I wanted to go. I wanted to represent the Razorbacks. I’m only going to get to play football for a certain number of years and I want to enjoy all the experiences.
“I don’t ever want to look back and say I wish I had done this or that.”
After 38 games and more than 2,200 snaps, Swanson has no regrets, including those early games when he was known to fans as Patrick.
There’s no mistaking Travis Swanson anymore, or that he’s the ironman Razorback.
Sports, Pages 15 on 08/13/2013