Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates after the AFC Championship NFL football game against the Buffalo Bills last month. Photo / Getty Images
On Fridays, Travis Kelce wanders.
Before games, as the Kansas City Chiefs go through their practice protocol – 10 plays for the offence against the scout-team defence, and vice versa – Kelce is a man unto himself, locked into the task at hand and transfixed during what would otherwise be dead periods. When the first-team defence takes its turn, while the rest of his offensive teammates watch from the sideline, Kelce roams onto an adjacent field and enters his own realm. He paces and stutter steps, cutting in and out of imaginary breaks, running through plays in his head while talking to himself.
No one disturbs him. No one questions him. In the Chiefs’ inner sanctum, it’s merely an accepted fact that one of the NFL’s most accomplished players is also one of the sport’s most serious men when it comes to preparation.
Mentally, coaches and teammates don’t know where Kelce goes in those moments. They just know that he’s very much at home.
“Trav is a guy that, you can tell, he’s always in his own zone,” said veteran receiver DeAndre Hopkins, whom the Chiefs acquired in a trade with the Tennessee Titans last October. “He’s always locked in at practice. He takes everything seriously. How he practises, and how he goes about his day, is incredible to see.”
This is the Kelce that the rest of the world doesn’t see, the onetime screw-up who has matured, become obsessive about his craft and wants to keep doing it at a high level for as long as that is athletically viable. A 35-year-old tight end, Kelce has a chance to earn his fourth Super Bowl ring Sunday, when the Chiefs face the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX, and add to his future first-ballot Hall of Fame CV.
He has many good reasons to call it a career, including broadcast stardom, acting opportunities and a romance with singer Taylor Swift, perhaps the world’s biggest celebrity. Yet Kelce’s intention – win or lose, as reiterated during the Chiefs’ media session Wednesday at their New Orleans hotel – is to keep playing the sport he reveres, on his terms.
“I want to play as long as I can play,” Kelce said.
Two days earlier, Kelce had expressed a similar sentiment, telling reporters, “It’s months like these that make me feel like I can play forever. I’ve still got a lot of football left in me.”
As Kelce’s fame has grown – at first because of the popular “New Heights” podcast he co-hosts with his brother, recently retired Eagles centre Jason; and then, exponentially, once he and Swift became an item early in the 2023 season – his workplace has become his protective cocoon, an environment where he can be a leader and tone-setter and have the freedom to prepare in his own idiosyncratic manner.
One of only 14 players, and three tight ends, to have recorded more than 1000 career receptions, Kelce will go down as one of the greats. Many players in his age bracket regularly take days off, in training camp and during the season, but Kelce refuses to do either. Even when Kansas City coach Andy Reid or his assistants suggest that Kelce scale back his repetitions in practice, Kelce pushes back.
“He’s getting older, and so we’re trying to cut back some of his reps, and he won’t do it,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said Tuesday. “He gets mad at you if you take him out of practice. And that bleeds into the entire team. Whenever you’re tired and whenever you’re not wanting to take a practice seriously or take a rep seriously, you look at him, and he’s going full speed, scoring touchdowns after every catch, and it motivates you to take your game up to another level.”
Kelce’s motivational magic was on full display in the Chiefs’ 32-29 AFC championship game victory against the Buffalo Bills. Early in the game, second-year punt returner Nikko Remigio called for a fair catch despite having some room between him and the Bills players charging toward him. Remigio later told FanDuel TV’s Kay Adams that Kelce approached him on the sideline and said, “That’s not being great, bro”.
On his next return opportunity, in the second quarter, Remigio raced 41 yards, setting up a touchdown that gave Kansas City a 21-10 lead. “He was the first one to greet me coming to the sideline, and he was like, ‘That’s how you be great, dog,’” Remigio said. “And I was like, this is a dream.”
Teammates and coaches say that Kelce is often the first and most vocal person to greet new acquisitions, even when they are relatively anonymous practice-squad signees. He clearly relishes his role as an organisational standard-bearer, especially in light of the way he began his career and how far he has come in terms of his professionalism.
Once infamously suspended from the University of Cincinnati football team for an entire season after failing a marijuana test, Kelce still had some rough edges when he arrived in Kansas City as a third-round pick in the 2013 draft. Early in his career, he made an obscene gesture that Reid called “an immature act” during a defeat to the Denver Broncos on Sunday Night Football. He has since described himself as having been selfish, stat-obsessed and overly casual in his work ethic.
When Kelce was asked last week how different his approach is now than it was in his first few seasons, he shook his head.
“It’s night-and-day different,” he said. “I was a lot more focused on individual success, and, you know, what comes with having the individual success is being able to be comfortable in who I am and confident in who I am.
“And I think with that individual success, I’ve started to really understand what’s real – and what’s real is this game’s only fun if you win football games with the people around you. And once I figured that out, it really just took off for me, and I’ve loved playing in the league ever since, man.”
This is not to say that Kelce’s fire has disappeared. Remember his confrontation with Reid during the second quarter of last February’s thrilling Super Bowl LVIII victory over the San Francisco 49ers? Kelce, removed from the game on a pivotal red-zone play that resulted in a Chiefs fumble, was irate when he came to the sideline and bumped up against Reid, nearly knocking over his coach.
While quarrelling with the perception that he pushed Reid, Kelce’s recollection is not a pleasant one.
“A push is a bit of an exaggeration,” Kelce said. “I would never push my coach like that. I was fired up, though, and coach Reid knows I get fired up, and sometimes he gets fired up the same way to get me going. And at that point in the game, I just wanted to let him know, ‘You can put it on me, man. I’m ready for it.’ I was pretty heated in that moment. I know I can’t catch him off guard like that to where he stumbles.”
Three weeks ago, Kelce caught some fans off guard in the Chiefs’ playoff opener when he recorded seven receptions for 117 yards and a touchdown in a 23-14 divisional-round victory over the Houston Texans. On some plays, including a 49-yard catch-and-run to the Houston 1-yard line in the second quarter, the tight end evoked images of his physical prime.
At times during what for him was a relatively tame regular season (97 catches, 823 yards, 8.5 yards per catch, three touchdown receptions), Kelce appeared to be visibly slowing down, to the point where some wondered whether the end of his time with the Chiefs might not be voluntary. His performance in the Texans game shredded that storyline, but few premier pass catchers have thrived into their late 30s, and Kelce knows that nothing is promised.
Because of that, he is savouring every second of his team’s quest to become the first to win three consecutive Super Bowls.
“It’s such a special time in Chiefs history, and this legacy is just so fun to be a part of, because of the people that we have here,” he said. “And I’m just trying to cherish all these memories and make the most out of all these opportunities that we have chasing these rings.”
As he tries to add to his gaudy post-season profile and hoist another Lombardi Trophy, Kelce is excited for the players around him, especially those newcomers who have yet to be part of a championship run.
“I think at this point, I just want this Super Bowl even more so for the guys around me than I do myself,” he said. “It’s just where I’m at in my career, and I feel like I’m a lot more selfless nowadays than I was early on. This team is more special than any I’ve ever been on.
“You know, I used to want to be known as the greatest tight end ever, but I think it’s just more so enjoying these moments that I have with my teammates and trying to get these wins and create these memories. I’ve gotten away from wanting to be known as that. I think I want to be known as just one of the best teammates these guys have ever had.”
Kelce will, because his energy is infectious – and because on any given day at the facility, and especially on Fridays, it’s obvious how much he cares.
He’s not ready to walk away from the game he loves. So on Fridays during the season, for as long as he can, Kelce will wander off and enter his distinctive, rambling realm, and no one in his presence will say a word.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Silver / The Athletic
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Live updates of the ODI Tri-Series clash between the Black Caps and South Africa.