Traditionally speaking, athlete-celebrity romances fall into one of three categories.
There are the somewhat problematic but mostly harmless couplings of two incredibly famous, often troubled people who have collided with each other while on otherwise separate journeys. Madonna and Dennis Rodman constitute the most famous example here, though Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez might also apply. (Madonna and A-Rod are the exemplars of this particular relationship style and, inevitably, had a brief, very bizarre relationship themselves.)
Then there are the normie relationships, in which two incredibly attractive and famous people get together and become a charmingly, dully happy couple. These are your Dwyane Wade–Gabrielle Union, David Beckham–Posh Spice, Andy Roddick–Brooklyn Decker, Russell Wilson–Ciara marriages. Such pairings both warm your heart and make you gag a little, like all happy couples do. The only interesting thing here is that when couples who fall into this category blow up, they tend to do so in spectacular fashion.
But the most common and generally most amusing romantic configurations are those between a celebrity and an athlete who isn’t nearly as famous as the celebrity, and has no idea what they just got themselves into. The axiomatic examples here are former NBA players Lamar Odom and Kris Humphries, whose relationships with various Kardashians ended up turning both of them into jokes on and off the court. (Humphries, a middling backup center, was notoriously booed every time he entered a game.) Other fun ones include Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo, David Justice and Halle Berry, Nick Young and Iggy Azalea, and, for the olds, Jason Sehorn and Angie Harmon. The athlete — a person who has worked their entire life in a fiercely competitive field to break through on the grandest possible stage — is inevitably swept up in the TMZ Industrial Complex maelstrom, often left with a bruised public image, a lot less money in their pocket, and a locker room full of teammates laughing at them. The world of celebrity is a lot bigger than the world of sports, something many athletes realize far too late.
Which brings us to Travis Kelce. Before a certain pop star showed up in his team’s luxury box during a game three weeks ago, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end was already among the most popular players in the NFL. Along with his brother, Jason, who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles, he was one of the signature story lines of this year’s Super Bowl, which is why NFL commissioner Roger Goodell watched the game next to Kelce’s mom. He’s an eight-time Pro Bowler, a two-time Super Bowl champion, a member of the all-2010s team, and, eventually, an easy first-ballot member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. How famous is Travis Kelce? Well, remember that Saturday Night Live episode a lot of people skipped last year because it was hosted by an NFL player they’d never heard of? That NFL player was Travis Kelce. And he was pretty good at it too. (I’m particularly fond of the “Straight Male Friend” sketch with Bowen Yang. “Yo, my dad died last week.”)
Shoot: Kelce was even once on his own dating show, called Catching Kelce. He let his hair grow a little higher back then.
Still, there was always a ceiling on Kelce’s celebrity; he does, after all, wear a helmet at his job all day. But that changed forever when Taylor Swift — who Kelce had been “courting” from afar for weeks mostly as a bit on the podcast he hosts with his brother — showed up in that luxury box, then did so again for his next game against the New York Jets, to the delight of the NFL and the league’s broadcasters, who have been cutting to Swift incessantly. How big a thing has this turned into? It was actually news last week that Swift did not attend a football game.
All this attention on Kelce would seem to doom him to Humphries status or at least the Romo experience — a brief flash on the gossip pages before being relegated back to the safe passages of football-centric media. But for all the speculation that Swift and her people orchestrated the relationship to drum up publicity (you may have heard her concert movie just premiered, not that she exactly needs help selling tickets), one shouldn’t forget that Kelce is a particularly savvy media mover himself and surely went into this situation eyes wide open. He understands his inherent utility to Swift and what he brings to the table for her. And unlike fellow NFL media star Aaron Rodgers — who, tellingly, saw Kelce’s celebrity start to eclipse his own this week and felt obliged to lash out — Kelce doesn’t operate from a place of Rogan-esque fake-profound bro malice. Whether this is real or not, it should be said: Kelce is generally one of the good guys.
It’s worth remembering how this whole Swift thing got started in the first place. On that podcast, Kelce had an ongoing bit where he was trying to get a friendship bracelet to Swift on her tour. It was a good bit.
And it worked. But it worked in large part because Kelce was already so central to the NFL’s marketing plan for this season, even before Swift emerged on the scene. Kelce has been unmissable on NFL broadcasts, serving as the centerpiece of two different marketing campaigns: One for Dish Network (which actually earned the company an admonition from the league) and one for Pfizer, in which he encourages fans to get their COVID vaccines. The Pfizer ad was amusing the first couple of times it aired, but has become so ubiquitous that NFL fans will be hearing it in their sleep for years. It’s still a positive message, though.
Sad as it might be, “encouraging people to get a COVID booster” has become, in lunatic and opportunist circles, a potentially controversial take. (The lunatic opportunists are personified by sports blogger turned right-wing-radio-wingnut Clay Travis, who tweeted an instant man-someday-your-children-are-gonna-see-this classic, “Travis Kelce is doing Bud Light and covid shot commercials. He needs to fire all his marketing agents. Or he needs to just go ahead and cut his dick off, become a chick, and endorse Joe Biden.”) This of course caught the attention of Rodgers, who, with his season-ending Achilles injury, has had a difficult time capturing the nation’s attention in the way he has long desperately craved. So the man who lied about his own vaccination status and has since become a full-blown election denier snarked that Kelce was “Mr. Pfizer.”
After watching Rodgers’s depressing decline into nutterdom the last few years, it was downright encouraging to see Kelce’s calm, funny, and refreshingly sane response.
Rogers proceeded to double down, challenging Kelce and Dr. Anthony Fauci (whom Rodgers called a “phamacrat”) this week to come on ding-dong Pat McAfee’s show to “debate the vaccines” with him and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kelce seems highly unlikely to take the bait.
If you’re the NFL and you’ve been dealing with Rodgers and everything else, Kelce is obviously the guy you want out in front of your league — the guy you want dating (or “dating”) the biggest pop star in the world. And though he may have a publicity-hunting streak, Kelce has generally shown himself to be particularly thoughtful — for a football player from Ohio, anyway. During the Colin Kaepernick anthem-protests six years ago, he was one of the very first white players to kneel. He’s also well known for his philanthropic efforts, most notably his “Eighty-Seven and Running” charity, which aims to “empower disadvantaged youth to achieve success by providing resources and support to their communities and cultivating their talent in the areas of education, business, athletics, STEM, and the arts.” And, for what it’s worth, he has yet to go take a bunch of mushrooms and film himself in a yurt, which I’m calling a win.
Kelce, in many ways, is the NFL version of Swift, at least an earlier, not-quite-megastardom version. He understands how to manipulate the media spotlight, is supremely talented in his field, is clear-eyed about the celebrity swirl, and, on the whole, seems to be a fundamentally decent person in an extraordinary position. For the last three years, the most prominent, over-covered person in the NFL has been Aaron Rodgers. Today, it’s Travis Kelce. No wonder that bothers Rodgers so much. The rest of us might call it progress.
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