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It is, objectively, a lot of fun to watch Travis Kelce play football. The Kansas City Chiefs tight end pulls together a unique combination of traits—size, speed, and surprising nimbleness—that, alongside quarterback Patrick Mahomes, creates poetry in motion. There are hourlong sizzle reels on YouTube showcasing Kelce’s ability to slip beyond the watchful sentries of the opposing secondary and become basically untackleable in the open field.
But as he drifts into his mid-30s, those days are unavoidably coming to an end. Thus kicked off a new phase for Kelce to stay relevant, and a far trickier one. He has this transition easier than most: He is hot and dating Taylor Swift, two facts that led to easy tabloid saturation. Kelce parlayed that into the megapopular New Heights podcast he hosts with his brother, Jason, and a hosting gig on Amazon’s game-show reboot Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? It is also why the man has found himself on the cover of GQ’s September issue, unveiled on Tuesday, intended to inform the world that football isn’t the only interesting thing about him. All Kelce had to do was display a little charm, reveal interiority, and—barring that—be capable of stringing together a couple of compelling sentences. A doable assignment, right?
Hm.
Nowhere in the magazine, teased online, does Kelce come close to meeting the moment. In fact, this profile crystallizes something that has become glaringly obvious about the most famous NFL player in the world. Despite an A-list entourage and ridiculous physical dimensions, the man is singularly incapable of producing a memorable quote. Kelce is an utterly null character in pop culture, a dud of a celebrity. Attempting to mine insight from him is like staring into the sun. Just look at this lede, man:
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.
Are readers to surmise that the single most lucid observation GQ was able to conjure about its cover star—the anecdote that ostensibly allows the rest of us to peer deep into his soul—is that he enjoys ordering raw fish when he’s in South Florida? Scintillating stuff. Later on in this section, Kelce speaks about what motivates him for the upcoming NFL season, unleashing a tried-and-true classic in the great canon of athlete pablum. “Win a Super Bowl is the only goal,” he said. “It’s the only goal. It’s every goal.” Unbelievable. Paradigm-shifting.
It goes on like this. Writer Sean Manning introduces a potentially engaging topic of conversation, which Kelce immediately neuters. Everything you could ever ask him is immediately refracted into bromides about good vibes. Whether that’s a result of razor-sharp media training or just good old-fashioned dumb-guy pontification is unclear.
Did he enjoy traveling to the U.S. Open with Swift? “It may look like the two of us are partying,” said Kelce. “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.”
OK, but what about the “Eras” tour? What was it like being at the epicenter of perhaps the biggest cultural event of the 2020s? “I get to be the plus one,” he explained. “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.”
Ah. Let’s try a different approach. Does Kelce have any thoughts about retirement? What does he want his life to look like when he steps away from football? “I do want to have free time. I do want to have the ability to be around my family,” he said. “I don’t want to get too busy to where I’m traveling all over the world and I’m not present at home.”
In previous eras of profile writing, the platitudes served up by Kelce would be appropriately harangued. Profile writers once wielded more leverage to be mean to their subjects, subtly or not, but in the industry’s terminal decline—in which access has been relinquished to an army of PR flacks and bloodthirsty agents (it is not an accident that this profile was published on the same day Swift announced her new album)—that tradition has fallen by the wayside. Manning’s profile takes baffling narrative liberties to portray Kelce as a person of profound emotional insight. My favorite example occurs when the piece asserts that Kelce is both “ebullient” and “introspective.” The quote to support this? Kelce says that footballs are “shaped funny” and that it can bounce “your way” because a lot of “fortune goes into playing this game.” The magazine refers to this aside as demonstrative of a “slightly philosophical bent” in his persona. I’d compare it more to a koan after a head injury.
It’s hard to blame GQ for this. I am confident that the magazine’s interactions with Kelce were meted out in tightly controlled environments and under strict time constraints, leaving it to squeeze the transcript for a few sour drops of juice before moving on. But even by contemporary profile standards, we are a far cry from, say, a night in the desert with Channing Tatum here.
For what it’s worth, the magazine isn’t the only entity to discover that writing anything provocative about Kelce is basically impossible. His own girlfriend stared into the same abyss on her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department. Its track list is composed mostly of wounded breakup songs about her previous flames, actor Joe Alwyn and 1975 front man Matty Healy. Those songs tend to be pensive, angry, and rife with hot emotion. And yet, when Swift attempted to pen lyrics about Travis Kelce, she came up with—quite literally—the worst shit she’s ever laid to tape: You know how to ball, I know Aristotle / Brand new, full throttle / Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto,” Swift sings on the deep cut “So High School.”
Kelce is such a cipher that even the greatest songwriter of her generation draws a blank when she thinks about him. It’s a quality that probably makes him a good partner—but a tragically dull celebrity. Unfortunately, a new Swift album is around the corner, and the Kelce void will continue to block the sun. Release us from this misery. If more profiles are on the way, then Kelce must be put on the spot. I don’t know—someone ask him about the Epstein files. Or the downballot races in western Missouri. Anything other than the shape of a football.
