In a dimly lit dining room in Miami, a waiter places a course of hamachi crudo in front of Travis Kelce. “We don’t get fresh fish like this in Kansas City,” Kelce says. We are sitting in a horseshoe-shaped booth, and Kelce’s voice can just be heard over that of the young woman on the restaurant’s stage, covering Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo” and other quiet storm standards. Kelce did not encounter fish like this—raw, finely sliced, opalescent—growing up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, either. “Red Lobster was the nice spot for us to go to as a kid. We used to go there, see the lobsters in the tank like we were at an aquarium. We put on pants for that shit.”
Kelce is here, in the swank, lean-protein-and-rich-people capital of the world, not just because it is a comfortable off-season home for a 35-year-old multimillionaire. Kelce is here in South Florida to get back to his roots, to reunite with Fort Lauderdale–based speed-and-agility coach Tony Villani. Villani trained Kelce for his NFL combine more than a decade ago and has worked with Kelce during the summers for most of his professional career. Kelce took a hiatus from Villani a few years ago, when the Kansas City Chiefs tight end moved his off-season operations to Los Angeles, near his burgeoning second career in film and television. Now, though, Kelce has come back east to regroup from last season’s lopsided defeat in the Super Bowl.
“Win a Super Bowl is the only goal,” Kelce says. “It’s the only goal. It’s every goal.” It’s been nearly four months since that defeat, and Kelce is still hard on himself about it. “I think it might have slipped a little bit because I did have a little bit more focus in trying to set myself up. And opportunities came up where I was excited to venture into a new world of acting and being an entertainer,” he says. “I don’t say this as ‘I shouldn’t have done it.’ I’m just saying that my work ethic is such that I have so much pride in how I do things that I never want the product to tail off, and I feel like these past two years haven’t been to my standard.” He adds, “I just have such a motivation to show up this year for my guys.”
His past 24 hours have been ridiculous. Yesterday he woke up at five to drive to the Everglades for this story’s photo shoot. He spent 12 hours trudging through swamps and cradling alligators and riding airboats. From there he drove to the airport to catch an evening flight to Kansas City for a children’s hospital charity event that night. The next day, he drove to the airport, caught a flight back to Miami, and came right to dinner. At some point in this itinerary, Kelce got in a workout. And, after he’s done with me, he’s due to interview Shaquille O’Neal for an episode of New Heights—the podcast he cohosts with his brother, former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, which was licensed by Wondery last year in a deal reportedly worth $100 million. Beside the plate of hamachi is a cup of coffee, the only hint that he might be experiencing some fatigue.
Kelce is not, to be clear, letting his squandered shot at a historic Super Bowl three-peat or his punishing off-season training stop him from having fun. His unapologetic zest for life is one of his superpowers, and it’s key to his popularity, the sense that he knows what a lucky schmuck he is, can’t believe it any more than you can, and damn if he isn’t going to enjoy every second while it lasts. The impression he gives off lately is of unrepressed joy—squint-smiling through his newly long hair and the glare of paparazzi flashes as he goes to dinner or a Stanley Cup game with his partner, Taylor Swift. And, besides, brooding self-pity is simply not in his nature. “I love being the happiest guy in the world all the fucking time,” he says.
Kelce is famously bad at hiding his emotions. One story he tells me is of when he was 23 years old, preparing for his NFL draft, and had the opportunity to meet with Rob Chudzinski, then head coach of the Cleveland Browns, the team the Kelce brothers zealously rooted for growing up: “I cried in Chud’s office and said, ‘I will fucking die for this city!’ ” Kelce tells me. “I literally was in tears. I said, ‘I’m sorry I’m getting emotional. I grew up down the street. I would fucking do anything to play for the Cleveland Browns.’ He looked at me like I was insane. I don’t think he’d ever had somebody just pour out their emotions.”
The Browns passed on Kelce. So did every other team until the third round of the 2013 draft, when he was selected by the Chiefs, where ultimately Kelce turned out to be a perfect complement to the incoming future MVP quarterback Patrick Mahomes. On the other end of so many of Mahomes’s scrappy schoolyard plays, there was Kelce, improbably open, commemorating a completion with a wider array of dance moves than a junior high mixer. “When I was younger in the league,” he says, “I used to have some of the older players come up to me and be like, ‘Man, you celebrate after every fucking catch!’ I’m like, ‘I’m in the NFL, dude! I love this shit! I finally get the ball in my hands and I have millions of people watching me, this shit is exciting!’ ”
Five Super Bowl appearances and three rings later, and having surpassed Jerry Rice for the all-time lead in postseason and Super Bowl receptions, Kelce has made a strong case to be considered the greatest tight end ever. “There will be arguments about him versus Gronk, versus Tony Gonzalez,” says Jason Kelce, who, as New Heights listeners know, is more prone to giving his brother shit than praise. “But I don’t think anybody has ever been as unique of a player in that spot.” Yet age and success have not tempered Travis’s intensity. Not toward opposing players, not toward referees, not even toward his head coach, Andy Reid, whom Kelce infamously and heatedly confronted on the sideline in the 2024 Super Bowl. (He would later apologize and say the two men had laughed about it.) “I get all my negative energy out when I play football,” he says. “When I’m out there on the field, I can hit somebody, I can talk shit. That’s where the meaner side of me is or the asshole side of me.”
Still, the Travis Kelce I spend time with is different from the Travis Kelce I expected. Though no less ebullient, he is more introspective. “That football is shaped funny,” Kelce says with Yogi Berra–like sagacity. “That thing can bounce your way, and it can not bounce your way. There’s a lot of fortune that goes into playing this game.” It’s this slightly philosophical bent that complicates the carefree, club-hopping Midwestern bro persona that has made him so relatable and beloved. “I’m starting to phase out of wanting to be known as the party guy,” says the guy who emcees a namesake music festival in Kansas City that draws 20,000 spectators to see the likes of Diplo and Lil Wayne, the guy whose post-playoff victory routine is a guttural rendition of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).”
“When you see me hanging out at the US Open with Taylor, it may look like the two of us are partying,” Kelce says. “But I’m just enjoying the fun of being at this really cool event that I always wanted to go to with the person that I love.” Put another way, he says, “I’ve become way more strategic in understanding what I am portraying to people.” Later during our time together he tells me, “I have a good understanding of how I want to be portrayed.”
It’s not a new interest, exactly. In college, when Kelce was suspended from the University of Cincinnati team for a marijuana violation, his brother, Jason (who also played for UC), advocated for his reinstatement, and Travis was given another chance, but only if a number of conditions were met. Some of these have been well documented in the brothers’ Amazon Prime and ESPN documentaries—no missed classes, a grade point average of 3.0. A lesser-known condition was, as Kelce tells me, “I had to sit down with a shrink for an hour a week. He got me to look at my life way more strategically. He got me to understand that you go through these emotions, and your reaction can either help you or hurt you or be indifferent. He walked me through all these different phases of my life. ‘How did this make you feel? How did you react?’ I started to understand and process these emotions completely differently. You start to control it and not let it get too crazy.”
I’m curious how the media scrutiny—increased exponentially since he started dating Swift—affects him. Does he pay any attention to it? “You can’t block that out,” he says. “If someone says something that they don’t like about you, you have to be able to understand how you are portraying yourself for them to say that. I’m a guy who doesn’t want anyone to say anything negative about me. Some people don’t give a fuck. I’m someone who does care.”
It requires a certain amount of vulnerability and bravery for someone of Kelce’s renown to admit what Kelce is admitting here. Even with all his professional accomplishments, all his money and the luxury it buys, all his romantic prosperity, he still cops to the desire to be liked by strangers. He’s willing to keep working to make you like him. Kelce continues: “I do want people to look at me like I’m doing good in the world, I’m influencing and using my platform for the better, being a role model, being somebody that has done it the right way.”
We’re wrapping up dinner so Kelce can get some much-deserved sleep before his morning speed workout when the restaurant singer approaches our table, holding a wireless microphone. She starts to sing again, serenading us and only us with Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor.” I feel my face go red and try to suppress an uncomfortable chuckle. This is way too intimate. I glance over at Kelce, expecting to catch his eye and exchange some recognition of the awkwardness. But Kelce has been quick to understand what I have not. The singer is simply doing her job, our table one mandatory stop in her nightly loop around the room. So he treats her with the same respect he has shown every other employee in the restaurant thus far, making eye contact with and thanking the waitstaff who bring our food and fill our water glasses and clear our plates. He watches her attentively for the full minute she croons away at us, until she slinks off to the next table.
When you’re trying to win your fourth Super Bowl, you don’t go to a “studio” with eucalyptus-scented towels, an apparel shoppe, and a coworking space. You go to a gym. XPE Sports in Fort Lauderdale is a windowless warehouse-size space situated in a commercial complex, between a shooting range and an escape room, and immediately upon entering you understand you’re not here to film TikToks and grab-ass.
Kelce has shown up in a hat with “Cincinnati” in minimalist block type, a logo-less black tee, black Nike shorts, and vintage LeBrons. He prefers basketball shoes for training. “I don’t find that much power in the shoes that are meant for more speed,” he says. “In the low-tops, that’s just what you get: the lighter fabrics. Everybody wants to feel like they’re out there almost barefoot.”
I watch him spend an hour cycling through a series of high-tech, data-yielding drills: 15-yard flies measured by Brower Timing Systems lasers, split squats calculating bar-speed acceleration with a Vitruve velocity app, standing jumps on the Hawkin Force Plates, Shredmill sprints, resistance work on the OHM Run Delta-Kinetic Trainer. He is not doing this alone but in rotation with a few other XPE clients.
“I like being part of the action,” Kelce says. “You’ve got people doing it with you that motivate you.” One of them is a kid who can’t be more than a high school senior and who impresses me by how chill he is getting in reps with a future Hall of Famer who has more than 6 million Instagram followers. Both of us manage to resist the urge to retrieve Kelce’s hat when it flies off during each of the sprints.
The session concludes with a half hour of legs: dumbbell box step-ups, single-leg RDLs. You don’t ever get to see them, hidden by game pants and socks, but his legs are tremendous, real Bernini shit. And to witness him perform a Nordic hamstring curl is something I will never, ever forget. On his knees, his ankles held by a trainer, his arms at his sides, Kelce slowly, methodically lowers his torso toward the artificial turf, the angle steadily collapsing from 90 degrees to 45 degrees to still lower, inconceivably lower, to the point where his chest is nearly parallel to the floor and seems to be levitating. Only when his nose is practically touching the turf does he extend his hands to brace himself. Then he pushes himself back up and does it a few more times.
After Kelce finishes, he lingers nearby as Tony Villani, his baseball hat curved and low like we’re at a World Series of Poker final table, explains his approach to Kelce’s speed training. “I started to realize that when you got too fast, you couldn’t decelerate,” Villani explains. “All Travis is trying to do to the linebacker or safety is make him chase him. Once that linebacker or safety chases him and runs, he’s out of control…. Travis plays between 12 and 16 miles per hour. That’s it. If he goes past his zone, then he turns into a track athlete and can’t change direction. He caught a pass in the Super Bowl three years ago and he jumped it up to 19 miles an hour, the fastest speed he hit in three years.”
Kelce recalls and says, “You know what’s funny? During that run, I felt how out of control I was and the guy had the angle on me. I just didn’t even have a move.”
“He’s set every tight end record known to man without ever really being above 19,” Villani says with the contented look of a teacher praising their star pupil. “This is what he’s an artist at. This isn’t just, Did he go from A to B as fast as possible, which he knows how to do, but he also knows how to be an artist creating illusion with agility.”
Villani draws my attention to two whiteboards. Using a dry-erase marker, he covers them with fractions, percentages, decimal points, arrows, triangles, triangles within triangles, and a house-shaped polygon. His arcane formula amounts to shaving a few tenths of a second off Kelce’s movements so that he can gain an extra half-yard of separation from a defender—so that there’s a higher probability of a catch than a deflection. I nod along and pretend I know what the hell he is talking about. “I haven’t released all this yet, but you’re going to make me,” Villani says.
Nothing to worry about, I think. I couldn’t report on Villani’s proprietary theorem even if I wanted to. Kelce, however, is clearly not confused. It all makes perfect sense to him.
In our conversations, Kelce is ambivalent about the meathead jock stereotype that he sometimes seems to wear (like when, shortly after we speak, he goes viral for this comment about his experience guest hosting SNL: “The table reading, for a guy that can’t really read that well, it was kind of a fucked situation”). “I find it funny,” he tells me. “I joke about it. It is what it is. I’m just out here living life,” he says. “I don’t necessarily want everyone to think that I’m an idiot.” But he’s earnest about his belief that it’s more powerful to know what you don’t know. “There’s always something to learn. Acting like you’re the smartest one in the room just isn’t the way to go.”
Twice over dinner the night before, Kelce told me stories that began with him missing school. The first came after his Red Lobster quip. His dad once worked as a waiter there. Ed Kelce had a lot of jobs. His main job was sales for a company that made insulation for factory furnaces and kilns. He also picked up part-time jobs around the holidays. One of those was at the See’s Candies kiosk at Beachwood Place mall.
“He never told me,” Kelce said. “I found this out when I was skipping school one day and saw him there. I got right out of there.”
(When I speak to Ed and tell him this story, he says, “I’ve never heard this one! He must have turned and ran because he would have definitely caught hell, no question about that.”)
The other story was about his mom’s work. Donna Kelce got her college degree in communications, with the aspiration to go into radio or television. “It really didn’t go to waste!” she tells me, shortly before it is announced that she will appear in the next season of the reality competition show The Traitors. Those industries, she says, “would put up with [women] but didn’t see us as anything serious.” So she entered the field of banking, eventually landing at KeyBank, based in downtown Cleveland.
“When I would get kicked out of school for fighting,” Travis said, “I would sometimes have to go with my mom to work and hang out with her.” Over the years, and with each successive suspension, he was able to witness his mother’s ambition realized. “It went from cubicles to a really nice office in the back, to all of a sudden the offices are getting bigger and bigger and now she’s got a name tag on her office. I literally saw my mom go through it by being a little bad-ass kid.”
(Donna contends her son wasn’t sent home for fighting: “Sometimes he went above and beyond overboard trying to make the other kids laugh. He just loved attention. Which he still does, God bless him!”)
Now, Kelce didn’t tell me these stories to show how crappy he was at school. He told them to show how he gets his work ethic from his parents, how determined they were to give their two sons a chance to find and pursue their dreams, and how much he loves them for that, among so many other reasons. Still, I also knew from my research that he’d been ineligible to play football his sophomore year of high school because he failed French class, and that he didn’t get his college degree until 2022. So: How is a guy like that—a guy who during a live taping of New Heights at the University of Cincinnati chugged a beer in cap-and-gown while belatedly receiving his diploma—able to look at Tony Villani’s graffitied whiteboards and easily decipher all those complex diagrams seemingly straight out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory?
“He’s incredibly intelligent,” says Jason Kelce. “But he never really cared enough about school to be in AP courses. I was always in AP courses and then we’d take the same proficiency test, and he’d get a higher grade. It’s like, ‘How are you getting a better math grade when you haven’t even taken algebra yet?’ ”
Jason then tells me a story of how one Christmas when he was eight and Travis was six, they both got the same Erector set. They sat at the kitchen table with their father putting them together. Ed and Jason carefully read the instructions before beginning the assembly. When they were done reading, they looked up to find Travis had already finished.
“Travis has always had these moments that we refer to as ‘Travis Moments,’ ” Ed says when I ask him about the story. “He will suddenly surprise you by doing something or knowing something or seeing something.”
Ed provides another example. “When Travis was in grade school, we were called in to discuss some problems he was having: his teacher and a counselor and Donna and me. I wasn’t buying that there was anything wrong with him. But I shut up, listened to them, let them do their spiel. And the teacher said, ‘Travis, I want you to write your name so that I can read it.’ Travis was sitting across the table from her. He wrote his name upside down and backwards.”
Alex Smith also had his share of Travis Moments. Smith was the Chiefs’ starting quarterback for Kelce’s first five years in the NFL, before he was succeeded by Patrick Mahomes. Most people credit Mahomes with helping Kelce achieve his full potential, including Kelce himself. But Kelce also acknowledges how crucial Smith—“one of my favorite teammates, favorite people in my entire career”—was in his development. The Chiefs offense favored wide receivers. As tight end, Kelce would often be by himself on one side of the field. So he started tweaking his routes, tinkering and freestyling, just to see if he could get open.
“I like to play to the rhythm, if you think of it as a piano player,” Kelce says. One hand provides the structure for the song, while the other hand crafts the melody your brain can’t help but follow. “But I’m always on the quarterback’s timing. I’m always making sure that I’m not screwing up anybody else’s route. But at the same time, I’m going to manipulate the defense…. I’m nonstop trying to get in those guys’ heads. One, keeping them in a reactionary position. But two, if I understand what this guy is being taught on this play in terms of leverage, in terms of when I threaten him, I can move him, now I can move guys to open up windows. Now I can attract attention to open up somebody else.”
In Kelce’s third season, with the Chiefs’ offense struggling, Smith and then quarterbacks coach Matt Nagy sat down to watch film from their most recent game.
“I’ll never forget,” says Smith. “Every single pass play, wherever I was going, whatever the concept intended for me to throw, whatever defensive look I was getting, it didn’t matter: Travis was open. He was supposed to turn out, but on this one he flipped in, and he was open. He always put his little twist on it, and it worked. The number one insight for us coming out of that meeting was that we needed to get the ball to Travis way more. When in doubt, throw Travis the ball.”
Soon after, they were playing the Denver Broncos. Kelce had already caught one pass on a fake shallow cross that he turned back out. They ran it again. This time the defensive end didn’t bite on the fake.
“As a quarterback,” says Smith, “I have to generally know where you’re going to be. It’s part of accountability and timing. I’ve got to trust that when I throw it, you’re going to be there. Travis instinctively did this weird little hesitation and then just kept running the shallow [cross]. This is an NFL game! We had never talked about this! This was not remotely a possibility for him when we installed this play! It turned into a 35-yard gain. This is the brilliance of Kelce. He did the Randy Moss—put his hand up. There aren’t many guys you can trust when they put their hand up. I trusted him and he made it right…. It’s pretty savant what he’s been able to do.”
Kelce and I are supposed to spend an afternoon playing nine holes of golf. But rain is forecast, so we sit in a rooftop lounge area at the golf club and talk. He wears a Kith for USA Basketball collared long-sleeve and sips an iced coffee.
I ask him about his hallmark first down gesture—one of the all-time athlete celebrations. So simple, so cocky, so devastating to opposing fans. Across from me, Kelce chuckles, raises both hands, points his fingers in the same direction, though not as emphatically as in games. It’s the slight dramatic pause followed by the assertive point that makes it so savage.
“When did that start?” I ask. “What was the inspiration?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I know Tay picked it up and she did it in New Orleans.”
Last October, on a Louisiana stop of her Eras Tour, Swift worked the first down point into her choreography. And the internet went crazy, as it always does over anything having to do with the pair. I’ve been looking for the right way to ask Kelce about Swift, without reducing him to a sidekick. As it turns out, taking turns being a sidekick sits just fine with him.
“I get to be the plus one,” he says. “I get to go and be that fan. Because I am a fan. I’m a fan of music. I’m a fan of art. And it’s so cool that I get to experience her being that plus one for me on the football field…. I feel that same enjoyment every time she comes to my shows.” A few weeks after we speak, Swift will join Kelce in Nashville at Tight End University, a training camp and charity fundraiser Kelce cofounded with George Kittle and Greg Olsen, and put on an impromptu performance. “I sort of made her a football fan,” Kelce says. “She is the most engulfed fan now. She knows what the injury reports look like. She understands what special situations are, third and short—all these things because she just naturally loves to hear about my job.”
Kelce says he and Swift have a lot in common, entertaining sold-out stadiums. “I hadn’t experienced somebody in the same shoes as me, having a partner who understands the scrutiny, understands the ups and downs of being in front of millions. That was very relatable, seeing how exhausted she would get after shows. She may not think of herself as an athlete. She will never tell anyone that she is an athlete. But I’ve seen what she goes through. I’ve seen the amount of work that she puts on her body, and it’s mind-blowing.”
Swift’s training regimen of singing her entire set while running on the treadmill has been widely covered; what Kelce emphasizes is the conditions in which she performs. “To go out on a stage, on a computer, essentially, for three hours. The [Eras Tour] floor is literally—I’ve seen underneath that thing. It is a football-field-sized computer. You take that into Singapore, where it is scorching hot, and all of a sudden you’re feeling the fumes from the computer and you’re feeling the fumes from the sun and you’re doing a show for three hours with a lot of energy, bringing it every single song. That is arguably more exhausting than how much I put in on a Sunday, and she’s doing it three, four, five days in a row.”
Kelce talks about Swift freely, with the confident adoration of a sturdy relationship, and with obvious pride. Not macho pride in his having attained the seemingly unattainable, or the overprotective possessiveness so often confused for chivalry. Kelce expresses selfless pride. Immaculate pride. The kind he, of traditionally Midwestern stock, has been unwilling to express about his own accomplishments when I’ve raised them. I think of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe—how when she returned from entertaining troops in South Korea, she said, “Joe, you never heard such cheering.” To which he replied, “Yes I have.” There is no such ego when Kelce speaks of Swift, praising the creative purposefulness of the Eras Tour.
“Have you learned anything from her about how to hold a crowd’s attention or harness its energy?” I ask.
“People gravitate towards how she performs and how she makes it feel like the entire stadium is in this little room with her. She is so good at mesmerizing everybody and making everybody feel like it’s an intimate situation. I think that alone—there is so much calm and coolness. She’s beautiful. She’s up there making everyone feel at ease.
“Whenever I get in front of a crowd, I feel like I’ve got to be like, Woooo! Like, excited, bringing the energy. Then I saw that coolness and that calmness and that relatability that she is so good at presenting. I really grabbed that. Like, Man, I can use that side of entertainment as well. It’s not just always being the guy that brings the energy and creates these exciting moments.”
I remind him of an interview he once did in which he said his ideal partner would share some of the same qualities as his mom.
“Are there any similarities between the two of them?” I ask.
“Their kindness, their genuineness, their ability to say hello to everyone in the room,” he says. “Their ability to show love and support no matter what. And on top of that, their work ethic. I saw my mother reach goals that she had set for herself, go from being a teller to working all the way up in the KeyBank building.”
Here, thinking of his mom’s determination and perseverance, Kelce gets a bit emotional and pauses briefly to collect himself. “I’ve seen Taylor do the exact same thing of setting goals for herself and exceeding the expectations and really captivating the world in that regard.”
In documentaries about the Kelce brothers, the family has been open about how Donna and Ed kept their marriage together for the sake of Travis and Jason, finally divorcing after 28 years when Travis was in college. “They were always the ultimate partners in terms of being there for us as kids,” Kelce had told me. “There was no division in terms of anger at each other. I think the romance of it all might’ve just kind of faded, being so focused on their careers and raising a family. It’s probably hard for parents to keep that romance, especially when you’ve got kids that are into fucking everything, you know? My brother was into so much more stuff than me—he was a musician, he was doing all this theater stuff—outside of just sports. I’m doing all these sports—two sports every season. So there’s so much shit going on.”
I had asked Kelce how visible the strain in his parents’ marriage was growing up, and he recalled just one, small moment. “We always had the calendar on the refrigerator of everything, and it said ‘25th anniversary’ on it. Might have been 15. I don’t want to get this wrong.” More so than at any other point in our conversation, Kelce deliberated, scrupulously, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether he should reveal this memory, and if he was going to do so then he wanted to be certain he wasn’t mischaracterizing it in any way.
“I don’t want to get this wrong,” he repeated. “It had to be around 20. Let’s say 20. I remember seeing it and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s their anniversary. I wonder what they’re going to do.’ And it was kind of just another day almost. Another day of knocking out things for the kids.”
Kelce was quick to explain that his parents’ wedding anniversary was not overlooked out of neglect. “I’m sure my father probably did something, ’cause he’s always been very good at making sure we celebrate our mother when it’s Mother’s Day and all that. He still to this day will text, like, ‘Hey, it’s your mom’s birthday coming up. Don’t forget about it,’ ” Kelce said. “But at the same time, I never saw the romance of it all. A lot of friends I grew up with shared that. The handful of my friends whose parents are still together and still thriving—those are situations I would love to have. Not that I think my parents dealt with it the wrong way or anything like that.
“It’s more so, if we’re gonna start this and do it, why not try and do it to last forever? Not just in a ‘It’s just for the kids’ aspect.”
Now, sitting with him in the golf club lounge, its windows streaked with rain, I remind him of this story and ask how he and Swift—also two very career-oriented people with unrelenting schedules—manage to keep their romance from waning.
“Whenever I’m with her, it feels like we’re just regular people,” he says, not exactly answering the question. It might not need answering yet; they are only two years in. But he goes on: “When there is not a camera on us, we’re just two people that are in love. It can be perceived as something else because of how much it is talked about and how much we are tracked whenever we do go out, but I would say that it’s as normal of…. It happened very organically even though from a media standpoint it was being tracked. It still happened very organically.”
“Nothing I’ve ever done has been a controlled, organized process. When I say it was so organic, we fell in love just based off the people we were sitting in a room together with. We are two fun-loving people who have the morals to appreciate everyone for who they are. We share all those values. It kind of just took the fuck off.”
Talking about Swift, Kelce brings up the question of his legacy. Early in his career, he says, he was motivated by the stats and records that would be attached to his name but, “nowadays, I just want to be respected and loved by the people that I’m surrounded by in my work. I want to leave it better than where it was when I started. And I see her having those same values.”
While Kelce does not discuss the timing or terms of his NFL exit, he says he has been thinking about what his life looks like when he’s done playing. He’s now in the last year of his contract, but, unlike many who have been in his position, he does not necessarily need to take a team-friendly deal or grind it out in a new city. He has built his own media enterprise, one that benefits from the fascination with his relationship with Swift but is in no way dependent on it. Whatever he does next, he will begin from the starting point of, roughly speaking, the largest pop cultural platform in modern American history. What will it be?
Kelce describes a process not of relentlessly upward ambition, but of a curious searching, an improvisational trial and error similar to how he mastered route running. “I know to stay away from a few things that I dabbled in early,” he says. There are still a couple years on the New Heights agreement. He’s got an investment in some Missouri car washes, family businesses that invest in their local communities. “The whole ‘teaming up’ aspect is something that I’ll always kind of desire,” he says. He’s enjoyed acting, and finds developing his on-camera skills satisfying. “I don’t necessarily know if I’ll take it and run with it when I’m done playing,” he says, “but I know that I want to stay around the football world as a profession and then dabble in other areas as well.” When he looks around at his fellow former players, he admires people like ESPN’s Pat McAfee, who are “making it fun.”
“I think there is a happy medium,” he says. Kelce seems to be looking for the pieces of a life that will satisfy his abundant passion and drive but also allow him to remain being the happiest guy in the fucking world all the time. The secret, he thinks, is balance. “I do want to have free time. I do want to have the ability to be around my family. I don’t want to get too busy to where I’m traveling all over the world and I’m not present at home.”
A lot of players take years to figure this out after they’ve hung it up, if they ever do. Kelce is way ahead. Quietly wise. Consider it yet another Travis Moment: What he’s experienced of fame and influence so far, he explains, just makes him appreciate where he comes from all the more. “There is an easier and a better way of life,” he says. “A more fun way to live.”
Sean Manning is the publisher of Simon & Schuster.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of GQ with the title “How Travis Kelce Spent His Summer Vacation”
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ryan McGinley
Styled by Law Roach
Hair by Thom Priano
Skin by Leslie Lopez at Tracey Mattingly
Tailoring by Tina Manners
Movement direction by Ash Rucker
Animal handling by Native Village Rescue
Flyboard by Atlantic Flyboard
Produced by Nicole Tondre at Hen’s Tooth Productions
Shot on location at The Beach Club at The Boca Raton, Marine Stadium Marina, and Mack’s Fish Camp
