Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
Now that Taylor Swift has announced her new album on an episode of Travis Kelce’s podcast, it’s hard to remember that their relationship wasn’t always just a fact of life. If you think back to two years ago, Swift’s appearance at Arrowhead Stadium felt like a seismic event to basically the whole world — including the entire Kansas City Chiefs staff. In The Kingdom, a new ESPN docuseries about the NFL team, the people in Kelce’s orbit admit that they were not fully prepared for what happened when Swift attended her first Chiefs game.
To set the stage, in case you’ve forgotten, back in September 2023, there were a lot of rumors that Swift and Kelce were dating, but many people (myself included) just could not wrap our heads around it. Then, on September 24, there she was in a box at Arrowhead Stadium with Kelce’s mom, Donna. Turns out, the people closest to the situation were just as shocked as the rest of us.
In the series, Lara Krug, the Chiefs chief marketing officer, recalled receiving a call from the team’s president, Mark Donovan, the Friday before the game. “I remember getting off the phone and looking out the window and being like, Huh, that’s a big deal,” she said. Donovan said that Krug later came into his office to ask a question that was on all of our minds. “This isn’t, like, normal, is it?” Krug said, to which Donovan replied, “No, Lara, this is not normal.”
Also not normal: Sports writers suddenly had to analyze the romantic relationships of the guys on the field. In perhaps the funniest moment of the episode, The Athletic writer Nate Taylor explained how he knew the rumors were true. “Travis Kelce pulled up in that burgundy top-down convertible, and I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s real,’” he said. “’Cause you wouldn’t drive that unless you knew she was coming to the game.”
Patrick Mahomes, the Chiefs quarterback and one of Kelce’s best friends, was told Swift was coming ahead of time and still didn’t believe it. “He told me during the week,” Mahomes said. “It was one of those, like, I gotta see it, you know?” When he finally did see it, there was an energy shift. “You definitely felt the buzz and you could see people in the stadium gravitating toward where she was,” Mahomes said.
The most charming memory came from defensive tackle Chris Jones, who talked about the energy in the locker room when people realized Swift was in the building. “We were like, oh my God, Travis pulled Taylor Swift,” Jones said.
And the rest is history! Now we all just accept that the two are baking sourdough and looking at real estate in the Cleveland suburbs, but it’s nice to remember that their relationship was, at one point, the most wild thing in the world.
