Taylor Swift, Can You Please Go Home?

It looks, alas, like this relationship is for real. Taylor Swift was in the sky boxes again on Sunday, for the fourth time in the past five weeks, to cheer on her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.  Every time the cameras cut away to the pop star — even before her choreographed touchdown celebration that went viral — I cringed. 

For a lifelong Kansas City sports fan, the whole Swift-Kelce romance has been hard to process. I’ve always been proud of my hometown team’s no-nonsense, Midwestern anonymity. Big cities like New York and LA are where showbiz celebrities sit at courtside, and star baseball pitchers get paid huge salaries to come and flame out in the media glare. No Brazilian supermodels for our quarterbacks. In Kansas City, we simply buckle down and play the game.  

It hasn’t always been easy. The town’s first major-league baseball team, the Kansas City A’s, traded away their best players so regularly that they became known as the New York Yankees’ farm team. The expansion Royals have faced the same obstacles as any small-market team, unable to compete with the big-city franchises for expensive free agents.  Almost miraculously, the team made it to two straight World Series in 2014 and ’15 (and won the second time), but then set a land-speed record for unloading their best, soon-to-be-unaffordable players. They’ve had three 100-loss seasons since. 

The football Chiefs have always been the city’s pride and joy. They came from the old American Football League; got trounced by the Green Bay Packers in the very first Super Bowl; and have played as if they had something to prove ever since. They assembled good teams, largely without superstars; filled their stadium every week; but, after one Super Bowl victory in 1970, went a half-century without returning to the big game. The Dallas Cowboys may have been America’s Team, but the Chiefs were its dogged also-rans. 

That all changed with Patrick Mahomes — the phenom from Texas Tech who became the Chiefs’ starting quarterback in 2018. A once-in-a-generation talent, he has led the Chiefs to three Super Bowls; dazzled the league with his uncanny improvisational skills on the field; and charmed the nation with his unaffected, always-sunny-in-Kansas City personality.

Travis Kelce is something else. He’s not a flashy quarterback, or an acrobatic wide receiver, or a bruising, Dick Butkus-style defensive star. He’s a workmanlike tight end, who simply manages to get open and catch passes. He played college ball at the University of Cincinnati, but likes to credit his Cleveland Heights high school instead during those national-TV introductions. He can be a hothead on the field — slamming his helmet down when things go wrong, getting penalized for taunting opponents when they go right. But he does the job, as well as any tight end in history.

The surprise is that when Saturday Night Live came calling, after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory last February, it was Kelce, not Mahomes, who got the invitation to guest-host. Even more surprising, he was good at it. (Good enough to return for a cameo appearance on the show’s season opener two weeks ago.)  Now he’s challenging Mahomes as the NFL’s busiest commercial pitchman, starring in ads for everything from the Experian debit card to Pfizer’s Covid vaccine. 

I’m happy for Travis, but his sudden fame has left me with mixed feelings — like when your favorite neighborhood restaurant gets a rave review in the local paper, and suddenly you can’t get a reservation on Saturday night. Kansas City is happy to share Mahomes with the world. But Kelce was our little secret.

For the NFL, of course, he’s been an unexpected bonanza. When word leaked out that Swift might show up for the Chiefs’ game against the New York Jets a few weeks ago, tickets sold out in minutes. TV ratings for the games she’s attended have set season records. It fits right in with the league’s long-running effort to expand its audience beyond hard-core (largely male) football fans. Hence the proliferation of female sideline reporters; the Carrie Underwood pregame folderol on Sunday Night Football; and a Super Bowl halftime show that has grown so long and overproduced that I’m surprised players emerging from the locker room can even remember what team they’re playing.

Kelce, at least, is handling the frenzy as well as could be expected. He and his brother Jason (who plays center for the Philadelphia Eagles) have joked about it amiably on their podcast, New Heights. Kelce caught 12 passes for 179 yards in Sunday’s game against the Los Angeles Chargers. And the Chiefs keep winning. 

Still, I’m looking forward to November. Swift will be out of the country, on the start of her world tour in South America. Where, I hope, she’ll be able to get the games on TV.