Travis and Taylor and that moment

Maybe we can change how we cover athletes, what traits we celebrate

Let's talk about the Travis Kelce-Andy Reid moment at the Super Bowl.

You know which one. 

Typically, this wouldn’t be that big a deal. Players blowing up and yelling at coaches or each other is a relatively common thing in sports, especially football¹. 

But it’s not typical, because it’s Travis Kelce, and he’s dating Taylor Swift, so everything is a big deal.

And there are important conversations to have here, ones that honestly my wife is helping me steer through. It’s a conversation where everyone has a point worth hearing, where nobody’s wrong and we can all learn something. 

Let’s start with the reaction most football fans or sports fans had to this moment. 

Which was … meh. 

When you’ve been around sports, it’s easy to shake off things like this. Happens all the time, right? 

But plenty of Swifties who are new to the game didn’t see it that way. 

I find this one tricky. On one hand, this is a deep parasocial relationship that Taylor’s fans have with her. It’s powerful and real. And parasocial relationships are healthy and normal². But there can be a thin line between protective concern and labeling someone a potential abuser.

On the other hand, you can’t just shrug this away. You start defending it too much, and there’s big “boys will be boys” energy that’s just not cool to celebrate in 2024. (Spoiler: It never was.)

My wife’s point in all this is that it’s concerning, because it’s Travis Kelce. I’ll let her explain it: 

His actions in the heat of the moment, in context, don't damn his character. But he had the eyes of millions of girls and young women who only know him as the man Taylor Swift approves of. They listen to her, they like what she likes. Most of them are too young to understand the nuances and context of football emotions, so all they saw is the aggression. And they see it as something Taylor approves of, because it's coming from the person Taylor approves of. This doesn't make him a bad person or a threat to his girlfriend. But he doesn't have just football fans watching his behavior now—his actions are by default seen as actions their favorite person approves of."

It’s a good point. Girls were watching last night. Girls who wouldn’t normally pay attention to football were last night and are now because Taylor and Travis are dating. We celebrate this, rightfully. Anything that brings me and my 13-year-old closer together is something I’m going to celebrate. 

But the fact that they’re watching means that they’re watching. And they see this. They see the anointed guy, the one dating their beloved, the one who for months has handled all of this with humor, with grace, and who has genuinely been a role model for being a supportive boyfriend, someone willing to show up for and celebrate his partner’s accomplishments while not dimming his own. 

And now they see him do this. 

So how do we talk with them about it in a way that doesn’t minimize what they saw but also doesn’t make it larger than it needs to be?

Let me pull this out one step further. 

Because it’s not just girls watching. It’s boys, too. And nonbinary kids, gender-fluid kids, kids across the spectrum. 

They see this kind of reaction when things go bad. They see us shrug it off as not a big deal. They see him succeeding not in spite of it but really because of it.

Pro athletes are, in the words of Michael Schur, psychotic competition monsters. Let’s be real — it’s this kind of emotion and energy that makes football popular. It feels hypocritical to want players to achieve at the highest level in a game that demands you physically run into other people at high speeds and then ask them to conduct themselves in a gentlemanly manner when things go askew. 

This gets to one of my favorite theoretical concepts from sports sociology, The Sport Ethic. The danger of The Sport Ethic is that it leads to deviant overconformity — where athletes conform so much to what’s needed to succeed in elite sports that they can damage their health and wellbeing. 

I wrote about this a few years ago:

You see paragraphs like this in so many sports feature stories, it is almost a trope. The athlete who is so competitive that he (or she, but let's face it, in these stories it is almost always a he) refuses to lose at anything ever. … This is a horrible personality trait. … Sore loser. Kick you out of the room if he lost a game. "Surprised he had friends."

We've all met that person (or, in lower moments, been that person) who has been the sore loser at a game light. They're not popular people. They're not people whom you want in your life. We mock these people. Except when they're athletes. Then, we celebrate them.

I see that at play here. Because the same intensity that makes Travis Kelce one of the best tight ends in NFL history, that made him so famous that he could end up dating the world’s most famous pop star, is the same intensity that led him to that moment on Sunday night. 

It doesn’t need to be a career ender or a red flag or anything major. 

But maybe we should move past just shrugging it off or excusing it. Maybe we can change how we cover athletes, what traits we celebrate, what kind of behavior is accepted. 

Maybe conversations like this can help us have healthier relationships with sports, athletes, and celebrities.

1.  We’ll leave the racial element out of this, the idea that if someone like Stefon Diggs did this, it would be a much bigger DEAL than a white player like Kelce. Mainly because there’s nothing much to say other than to acknowledge that it’s true and move on. 

2. If you’ve ever referred to your favorite team as “we,” then you too have had a parasocial relationship.