Looking back on Packers history over the past 30 years or so, one can visualize a number of running backs who wore green and gold and made big names for themselves on the football field: Ahman Green, Ryan Grant, Eddie Lacy, Edgar Bennett and Dorsey Levens leap to mind.

However, there’s one former Green Bay Packers Pro Bowler and Super Bowl champion who is remembered for different reasons: Travis Jervey.

A fifth-round pick out of The Citadel in 1995, Jervey came into a loaded running back room with Bennett, Levens and William Henderson in line ahead of him. Carries for Jervey were non-existent his rookie season, but the determined rookie, wearing jersey number 32, made a name for himself on special teams, being named to the Pro Bowl in 1997.

Over his four-year Packers career, he carried the football just 109 total times for a total of 431 yards. He also caught 9 passes in 1998, turning those touches into 33 yards. He scored one regular season touchdown as a Packer.

Meager stats? Definitely. But no Packers fan is going to forget the South Carolina native.

For starters, he and fellow rookie LeShon Johnson were cited and fined for setting illegal deer snares in the back yard of the house they shared outside the city. That cost them $200 each.

Shortly after that fiasco was wrapped up, Jervey decided to build a fire in the home’s fireplace. For some reason, Jervey poured gasoline on the wood before tossing in a match. It exploded, catching Jervey on fire.

Per former Sports Illustrated writer Peter King, “He rolled around on the floor, snuffing out flames that singed his eyebrows and eyelashes and the hair on his arms and legs.”

Shortly thereafter, Johnson and Jervey decide to get a pet. Um, a pet LION. For a reported $1,000, the two ordered the animal from a Texas wildlife dealer. Then Head Coach Mike Holmgren got wind of the purchase and told the roommates/teammates to cancel the order.

“Just a little one,” Johnson pleaded. “And he’s had his claws taken out, and his canines. He can’t hurt you.”

“Maybe we’ll get something else,” Jervey said later. “I think I’d like a tiger.”

But they stuck with the lion plan, despite Holmgren’s orders to the contrary. And so, they brought their new pet into a home that already housed Johnson’s 18 – yes, 18 – pit bulls. The female lion cub, which they named Nala after a character in “The Lion King,” apparently fit right in. At least, at first.

"It did bite me one night and that's pretty much when we decided to get rid of it," Jervey told Packers.com 10 years later. "Once it got to the size of a dog, it started to get pretty aggressive. I mean, it was so durable, and it looked like a cat, but acted like a puppy. It started to chew on everything.”

Looking back in a 2015 interview with the Appleton Post-Crescent, Jervey said he “realized that at this point, I could take (the lion) if we had to go one-on-one (in a fight). But I knew that in about another six months, maybe we’d be equal.” 

“I felt sorry for it, too,” he said in the Packers.com interview. “We played with it all the time, but obviously it's cold in the winter and we had to keep it in the house.”

Nala ended up on a ranch in Oklahoma. Jervey said in 2015 the exotic animals ranch where she was sent was specifically designed “for people that were stupid and got exotic animals and couldn’t take care of them.”

Holmgren reportedly was pleased that the lion had been re-homed. 

"He was more concerned than anything," Jervey said of Holmgren in 2006. "He just wanted to find out if it was true that we had it and why we did. It was funny. He didn't want it to affect our game, I guess."

In his book, “Packers By the Numbers: Jersey Numbers and the Players Who Wore Them,” sports writer described the lightning-fast and hard-hitting Jervey as being “a few yards shy of the goal line” during the player’s four years in Green Bay. Maxymuk even claimed that Jervey was known to sleep with a football in his bed. And let’s face it, a guy who would adopt a lion would probably do just about anything.

Jervey would sign with the San Francisco 49ers in 1999, and the move to the Atlanta Falcons from 2001-2003. After his retirement from the NFL, he moved back to South Carolina, married, started a fitness business and reportedly would spend a lot of his free time surfing in Costa Rica – something he couldn’t do while in Green Bay.