Travis Kelce Admits his performance slipped a bit due to opportunities in entertainment

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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.”

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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 fricking 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 fricking 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.”

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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 frick. 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.”

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