WSJ.’s exclusive profile of Travis Kelce dropped just hours before his big game against his brother Jason’s Philadelphia Eagles yesterday. I’m guessing that was always the magazine’s rollout plan – it was a huge matchup on the NFL calendar, the previous year’s Super Bowl finalists meeting again on Monday night, and that would have lined up well with WSJ.’s release strategy. Of course no one could have known that the timing would have been complicated by what happened during Taylor Swift’s concert in Rio de Janeiro on Friday night, resulting in the death of Ana Clara Benevides. And over at The Squawk there were some commenters wondering about the decision to still move ahead with the drop.
I understand the questioning, because of how powerful and strategic Taylor and her publicist, Tree Paine, have been. And whether or not they could have or would have insisted that the feature be pulled. But then again, to go back to the schedule, this is American Thanksgiving week, and this is WSJ.’s December/January issue. You can’t really put it off too much longer in publishing. Many if not most North American magazines have already put out their December issues. Vogue’s for example dropped on November 9. ELLE was the day before. So pushing it by another week probably wouldn’t have worked for WSJ., no matter how much they want to please Taylor.
But also, Taylor’s not even the cover subject. And so you get into a sticky situation here about who this is really about. Like, no doubt, would Travis be on the cover of WSJ. if he wasn’t Taylor’s boyfriend? No, and nobody is pretending that he would, not even him. And yet, given that he was chosen for this profile, as his girlfriend, if you’re Taylor, are you and your publicist all like, no, this isn’t good timing for me, yank it off the printer right now… ?
As influential as Taylor is, and even if Tree Paine might be more involved in Travis’s PR these days, I’m not sure that I buy that part of the deal is the complete surrender of Travis’s autonomy over to the Taylor Swift matrix. On both the personal and professional level, that doesn’t work for anyone. In her personal life, Taylor’s not trying to be Pygmalion. And it also does nothing for her reputationally if the people who are living for this show think she’s a puppet master who controls her boyfriend. Part of the appeal of this rom-com is that Travis seems, legitimately, to be his own person who just happens to be HER person, someone perfectly suited to her. And we get our best sense of that in this piece, written by one of the best, JR Moehringer.
You know him most recently because he worked with Prince Harry on his bestselling record-breaking memoir, Spare. But if you’ve been reading this site, you know him from his own wonderful memoir, The Tender Bar. One of the reasons this profile is so special is because of Moehringer’s writing. This is the same person who collaborated with Andre Agassi on Open, widely considered to be one of the best sports memoirs ever. And he’s edited a very good collection of sports essays. JR Moehringer has experience writing in the intersection of fame and sport. Which is why this profile is suuuuuuch a great read. Of course Travis is an interesting and generous subject. But let’s credit the journalist too. If Taylor Swift’s glow gave shape to Travis’s celebrity, it’s JR Moehringer’s words that have filled in the spaces. The descriptors are insightful, affectionate, and hilarious. At one point Moehringer writes that Travis “paws his eyes with his giant hands” and I had to stop and guffaw out loud on the train. This is what you miss if you just go by the excerpts out there that mostly have to do with what he says about Taylor without enjoying the connective tissue.
So the excerpts really don’t do justice to this profile, sorry. And I really don’t want to pull them here because I think that takes away from the work as a whole. It’s not just one or two quotes that bring Travis to life, it’s the way all of these quotes and Moehringer’s observations flow together.
Rather than excerpting then I’ll just give you my takeaways.
1.Travis Kelce is better at being a Big Name Celebrity in the infancy of his Big Name Celebrity era than many if not most Big Name Celebrities.
If he trained for this and rehearsed his answers, you wouldn’t be able to tell. If it was a performance, it was effortless. All of his responses are exactly right. When he talks about Taylor and reveals more than he really has to, it’s done in a way that doesn’t seem self-serving. He doesn’t front like he doesn’t want the attention but he also doesn’t come across like he wants too much of it. At the same time, he doesn’t share so much that there isn’t still mystery. Which means, whether he’s conscious of it or not, he understands exactly how much to give and how much to withhold to keep our interest.
This, in my opinion, is innate. You can try to teach it but it’s hard to learn if it the person doesn’t get it. And Travis GETS it. He was made for it.
2.Travis Kelce is READY for this kind of celebrity.
Call it a sort of graduation, if you will. But Taylor Swift is never going to fall in love with someone who is more famous than she is because that person might not exist. Everyone she’ll ever date will always be a supporting character. And it just so happens that Travis’s own celebrity had been progressing steadily before they connected.
There’s the small time little pond celebrity that comes with being a football player growing up in America from high school to university to the pros. There was his reality show. He didn’t go from 0 to 100 on the fame scale. Instead he’s inched up that scale in increments like the school system: kindergarten, elementary, etc etc… and has now matriculated to the biggest league of them all.
JR Moehringer does a great job laying out all the stages of Travis’s preparation, from the mistakes he made as a young man f-cking around with his potential to the way his non-football career has been managed, even before he was allowed into Taylor’s universe. There was already an infrastructure in place around Travis that has nothing to do with the NFL. As his co-manager says in the article, “the NFL is just his side hustle”. Like there are members of his team who are talking about putting him in action movies. The word “Marvel” actually comes up at one point, LOL. If Travis Kelce is in a f-cking Marvel movie before Keanu Reeves…
3.Travis Kelce knows his role
We’ve already seen this in the weeks since he and Taylor have been together because he is content to be on the sidelines when it’s her time and is under no illusions that the reason he’s such a big deal these days is 100% because of her. But we haven’t heard it from him until now. And in this interview, he spells it out. And SINGS it out. This man is out here on these streets in an interview with WSJ. dropping song lyrics and gushing, and I mean GUSH, about Taylor’s songwriting talent. He is her biggest fanboy, and the reason why that’s making our rom-com hearts explode is because it’s hitting the rom-com G spot: the mind. Her mind. Her words. It’s what Taylor is most proud of and it’s critical to her identity: she sees herself first and foremost as a songwriter, a storyteller.
And this supersized meatloaf she’s just fallen in love with is apparently studying her work like the x’s and o’s in his team playbook…
(Flip to the 5th slide for the quote)
I can’t with this man, he is FICTION. He materialised out of a romance novel, right? It’s the only explanation!
4.Travis Kelce is corny AF
I’m not complaining but he’s corny. What I’m referring to is the car. Like I said, you just have to read the piece to truly appreciate what I mean here about the car, which is a loud ass Rolls Royce that he drives around casually in Kansas City that has a light up roof of the galaxy like it’s his own personal mobile planetarium and I AM SCREAMING. I am screaming and picturing Taylor Swift getting into that car for the first time and looking up at a comet shooting across the f-cking sunroof and then looking back at this giant cheeseball behind the wheel and bursting into laughter because staring back at her is someone who is as corny is she is!
And maybe that’s what he can teach her, which is a question he is asked by JR Moehringer that he doesn’t seem to have an answer for. But this might be it. Travis can show Taylor that she doesn’t have to be embarrassed for being corny. And I think that’s what we’ve been seeing over these last few delightful weeks. She is as loose and as free-corn as she’s ever been. Because she’s with someone who quite obviously lets his corn flag fly high in the sky. Which means around him she never has to try to be cool.
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