I didn’t know Marty Smith when I volunteered to write about him for The Athletic’s sports media blitz.

I knew he lived in the Charlotte, N.C., area, had seen him at Bank of America Stadium a couple of times and, of course, was familiar with what seemed to be his trademarks — spiked hair, sharp suits and an accent straight outta Appalachia.

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The NASCAR-turned-college football reporter for ESPN seemed like an interesting person to profile. When I mentioned to friends I was doing a story on Smith, all agreed he is a charismatic and telegenic personality, but a few questioned whether some of his on-air antics and even his Southernness were a bit put-on.

I got Smith’s number from an ESPN publicist and reached out.

“My man. Love your work. Let’s chat next Friday afternoon if that works for you,” Smith texted back. “I’m piling up the Clampetts in an RV and we’re going on a family trip. I appreciate the interest, bud.”

Smith borrowed a friend’s RV and took his wife and three kids on a weeklong trip that included stops in Charleston and at a trout hatchery in north Georgia and Fontana Lake in western North Carolina. It was Smith’s first time behind the wheel of a 40-foot motorhome.

“After all of the obstacles that I faced, I feel like I’ve gone to RV Harvard,” Smith said. “My kids loved it.”

Smith, 44, grew up in Pearisburg, Va., a small town about 30 minutes from Blacksburg in the southwest corner of the state. Every morning, Smith’s father would take him to his grandparents’ beef cattle farm so he could help with chores before school.

In the summer, Smith and his middle school buddies would bale hay on their family’s farm, scheduling the work around their Pony League baseball schedules. When he got to Giles High, Smith played three sports and was a defensive back/kick returner on the school’s 1993 state champion football team.

“I was 138 pounds of whoop-ass,” Smith said, “and I got ran over a lot.”

Though Smith wasn’t one of Giles’ best players, he took a lot of satisfaction in representing his school and his community.

“It’s one of those ‘Friday Night Lights’ towns, man, where football is so much more than just something that young boys and young men do. It is almost an expectation,” he said. “When you look back on it, you realize that in a small town like that, that is an underdog, that folks work for what they get and there’s not a lot of jobs. …

“You realize that when you’re No. 1 on Friday night, your community is No. 1 on Saturday morning. And they all take their identity from that, and there’s such a tremendous pride in that.”

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Smith went to Carson-Newman for a year before transferring to Radford, where he unsuccessfully tried out for the baseball team — an experience that left him in a funk for months. He credits a friend’s girlfriend, who volunteered in Radford’s sports information department, with throwing him a lifeline.

“I was laying around just like a useless slob. And she came in one day and she’s like, ‘You need to get up off your ass. You need to stop sulking and you need to come with me to work in the sports information office,'” Smith said. “I was so insecure and conceited, I was like, ‘I ain’t no stat-taker. People take stats on me.'”

But Smith eventually followed her suggestion and began helping out in the SID office, which led to a stringer position with The Roanoke Times. At the end of his junior year, the paper sent him to cover racing at the New River Valley Speedway, a local short track.

“I thought it was so cool. The sound of it, the passion of it and the smells,” Smith said. “There was a really neat driver rivalry that summer at the track. I was like, ‘Man, I think I might want to hitch my wagon to this sport.'”

Smith moved to Charlotte in 1999 to take a job writing for NASCAR.com, a team-friendly site whose editorial content at the time was closely monitored by NASCAR. Smith was watching at home in 2000 when 19-year-old Adam Petty died at the New Hampshire race.

“When he died, I was going to my own website and I couldn’t get it,” he said. “Then you contrast that with the very first race I covered for Turner Sports (which acquired NASCAR’s internet rights in 2001). Dale Earnhardt died (at the Daytona 500), and it crashed the server.”

Earnhardt’s death thrust Smith into his first live TV reporting assignment from Daytona.

“I had this bleached hair and they’re putting me on CNN trying to articulate, having never made TV, what just happened,” Smith said. “I was about to throw up on myself.”

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But ESPN senior writer Ryan McGee thought Smith had the chops for television. McGee, who at the time was producing a nightly NASCAR show for Fox Sports Net, brought Smith on as a NASCAR insider.

“I just knew that he had come so far, so fast in the writing world that if he was given the right platform, he could become a big deal,” McGee said. “I knew people would like him. It was just a question of if somebody was willing to give him a chance.”

McGee also knew that no one in the NASCAR garages would flinch at Smith’s Southern drawl.

“You know the deal,” McGee said. “When you’re coming along in broadcasting in the ’90s, if you didn’t sound like Tom Brokaw, they didn’t want you to bother with it. So if we had him on the show talking about Ricky Rudd and Hut Stricklin, I didn’t think his accent was gonna matter. And it didn’t.”

McGee and Smith, who have co-hosted a daily show on ESPN Radio for the past six years, used to travel together on the NASCAR beat. McGee, who grew up outside of Raleigh, says fans would stop them at restaurants or on the infield at races and tell them their accents were fake.

“Especially when we’d go to Pocono or New Hampshire or whatever, we would get the whole, ‘Y’all are hamming it up and you don’t really sound like that.’ We’d be sitting in a restaurant in Manchester, N.H., and we would just say, ‘Well, what do we sound like right now? Because I don’t think we’re faking it,'” McGee said.

“But we get a lot of it from Southerners — ‘Y’all are overdoing it.’ I always laugh because I’m like, ‘You should hear the guys we went to high school with.’ We’ve actually toned it down, 10 years ago versus now. Same with Marty.”

Smith, who uses phrases like “smoked” (tired) and “juiced” (the opposite of smoked), says he appreciates that no one has ever asked him to lose the accent.

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“Very rarely in broadcast journalism do you have an accent like ours or any sort of regional accent. Most folks just dictate so well and so perfectly, and that’s just not me,” he said.

“I came to ESPN in a NASCAR reporting role. So there was a bit of authenticity that the accent brought to covering that sport. I still — even though since we lost the broadcast rights and I’ve graduated to other sports — not once, no one has ever asked me to change.”

Smith arrived at ESPN in 2007 after ABC/ESPN became one of four networks to share the NASCAR rights. ESPN executives had seen Smith’s work on the Speed Channel and Fox Sports Net and were confident he was a good fit.

“I think it was the combination of his magnetic personality and his relationships that at the time were mostly limited to NASCAR but have continued to grow into a whole lot of other sports,” senior vice president Jill Frederickson said. “And his attention to good reporting. He’s entertaining. But he’s also an incredibly diligent, detailed, strong reporter. I think sometimes people think that you’re either entertaining or have journalistic integrity, and he’s really managed to have both.”

McGee likes to give Smith crap about his hair — “He’s Jimmy Neutron. He’s Woody Woodpecker!” — and his wardrobe.

“Marty gets very aggressive with his suits. His suits are schmedium, is the size,” McGee said. “My outfits are much more off the rack, Men’s Wearhouse.”

Smith also is fanatical about his Nike/Jordans collection, which started in middle school with his first pair of “fire-red 5s” with a clear polymer sole.

“Back then if you wore the Jordan 5 outside, it would turn bronze on the bottom. And that terrified me,” Smith said. “You’re talking about hayfield money (that was) used to buy those. So I would carry my J’s to school, and I would put them on once I got in the hallway.”

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Smith guesses he has more than 40 pairs in his closet, many of which are part of his colorful, on-air ensembles.

“God have mercy on the person who accidentally steps on Marty’s toe and gets a fleck of mud on his shoes,” McGee said. “I have seen him stop in the middle of a conversation and pull, like, a wet wipe from his pocket and take his shoe off in the mud and scrub it down, right there in the middle of a conversation, like a famous country singer.”

But Frederickson, who oversaw ESPN’s motorsports coverage when Smith was hired, said Smith’s style shouldn’t be confused for a lack of substance.

“He has both at such a great level. I think that’s where we as producers have to make sure that his great style doesn’t distract from you from the great content that he has,” she said. “He’s so entertaining, and he’s so fun. But he’s not a caricature. That is who he is. And he is so authentic. And his information is so good. We try to make sure our viewers don’t get lost in the entertainment part of it and really still comprehend and take in all the great information he gives us every day. In whatever he’s put on, he does really, really well.”

Smith’s star began to rise after shifting to college football in 2014 after ESPN lost the NASCAR deal. Lee Fitting, who at the time was executive producer of the popular “College GameDay,” told Smith he planned to embed him with Ohio State during the inaugural College Football Playoff.

“They drop me into Columbus, Ohio, like an alien from Mars,” said Smith, who proceeded to follow the Buckeyes’ national championship run behind a star-studded roster that included Ezekiel Elliott, Michael Thomas, Joey Bosa and Cardale Jones.

Smith was in Phoenix for the championship game the following year when he bumped into Buckeyes coach Urban Meyer, working for ESPN as a guest analyst, in the production room. Meyer brought up that Smith had covered the Buckeyes the previous year with next to no college football experience.

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“He goes, ‘Florida State gets Tom Rinaldi. Oregon gets Samantha Ponder. Alabama gets Kaylee Hartung. And they give us this redneck from NASCAR?'” Smith said. “Then his voice shifted and he hit me on the arm and he goes, ‘But I want you to know something. It took me three days to know you were the perfect guy for us.'”

Smith asked him why.

“Because we were underdogs. Nobody believed in us, and you were an underdog, too. Nobody believed in you, and that includes me. You had passion for what we were doing. You believed in the people that were on our team, those players, and you got deeper than just what was happening. You told people why it was happening and who was doing it.”

Smith has since become one of the more recognizable reporters in the country, regardless of the beat.

Besides his radio show with McGee and his broadcast work with ESPN, Smith also has a podcast, “Marty Smith’s America,” that highlights his storytelling skills. Last year he wrote a memoir that spent time on The New York Times’ list for bestselling sports and fitness books.

And he’s proved he’s not afraid to get a little goofy, from milking a cow at Penn State’s creamery to jumping off Nick Saban’s boathouse with the Alabama coach and Tim Tebow to doing a backflip off a high-dive at Miami to help former Hurricanes coach Mark Richt kick off camp.

Those stunts and others like them are what prompted some viewers and critics to label him as over the top.

“That narrative of not being authentic has really waned a bit. Because I went through a period where I was doing some crazy stuff on TV. I was doing backflips off a high-dive in Miami, and that turned a lot of people off,” he said. “I did those kind of things, and some people don’t like that stuff. But ultimately, I look at it as such a great blessing because, man, it was part of the journey. And I didn’t hurt anybody.”

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Smith said ESPN has shifted away from “that kind of TV” and is “back to much more standard, straightforward reporting.”

He’s trying not to care so much whether people like him and is focusing on his kindness, passion and effort, which was a major theme in his book.

“In this world and especially in the job I have, you simply cannot please everyone. It’s an impossibility if you’re doing your job right,” Smith said. “I can’t overwhelm myself if somebody doesn’t like me. Now, I’m still working on that. That’s a work in progress.”

McGee, who’s known Smith for 20 years, says when you get past the funky hair, tight suits and Appalachian accent, Smith is, at heart, a reporter with a knack for connecting with people.

“If you want somebody to open up, ask them a question that no one else in the room asked, for whatever reason. You can see the faces of the subject change when they go to answer the question. That’s how he’s always been,” McGee said. “That’s why he was a great writer at NASCAR.com when he was in a job that didn’t require you to be a great writer. And it’s why he’s a great interviewer now.

“I think people understand very quickly, even if they think he’s a guy you just described, I think they’re a little shocked when they finally sit down and talk to him. Like with what happened with Urban Meyer, who now opens up to Marty at the drop of a hat. And at the beginning, he was insulted that Marty was sent to cover the team. It’s that relatability. It’s just being real, which is hilarious because what he gets criticized for is being fake.”

Smith, who lives on Lake Norman, spent an hour on the phone with me last week. He told the story of his great-great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side, a preacher named Dan Call who also owned a general store in middle Tennessee. Call kept a still behind the store and, as Smith put it, “brewed up a little brown sauce every now and then.”

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As the story goes, Call became conflicted about making bourbon while also doing the Lord’s work. He ended up choosing the church and turned the still over to an orphaned boy named … Jack Daniel.

“You just go, ‘Holy smokes, what if he’d chose the booze?'” Smith said.

After our interview, Smith sent me a screenshot that showed Call at the top of an ancestral tree of Smith’s family, the result of some online research by Smith’s cousin.

Smith then sent a picture of several bottles of Jack Daniel’s, along with this text: “Be a hell of a lot cooler if this said DAN CALL TENNESSEE WHISKEY 😂😂😂😂”

I’m not sure how much better you can know a person after one interview and several text exchanges. But based on my few interactions and what I’ve heard from McGee and others who know him, Smith seems like a genuinely good dude – the kind of guy you’d be happy to sip whiskey with, Jack Daniel’s or otherwise.

(Top photo: Rich von Biberstein / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)