We Can All Agree On One Thing About Travis Kelce — And It’s Very Weird
As the dads of America, we felt it was our duty to watch Catching Kelce. Here’s what we learned.
We here at Fatherly feel a responsibility towards our audience. We’re here to empower men to be the best dads they can. We try our damnedest to offer the tools to be empathetic but firm, patient, and kind, and to look out for the best of their kids without trying to live their lives for them. We do this mostly for parents of little kids — because it’s one of the more trying times when parents sincerely need support. We’re there for you. But one day, if you’re lucky, your kid will go on dates. Your daughter, if you have one, will choose a partner and once again you’ll be tested. There’s no guidebook. So, what do you do?
Look to Taylor Swift, of course.
The world’s investment in Taylor Swift’s love life is hilariously unhealthy. Many Swifties want to believe Travis Kelce is the one, while football fans are really hoping he is, that way all these couples who are (kinda?) bonding over football and can keep doing so, we guess, assuming that’s even a real thing. So, is Kelce good enough for Taylor, assuming we, the dads of America even have a say? We certainly don’t. But, if we were gonna grill this guy, the best thing to do is to watch his horribly trashy and embarrassing reality TV show from 2016 — Chasing Kelce. Or at least, that’s the best we could come up with in terms of measuring his character off the field.
The fact that Travis Kelce would even star in a reality show in which fifty women from fifty states compete to win his heart says a lot about the man. More specifically it says that Kelce must be a true romantic who is very sincerely looking for the woman he could spend the rest of his life with, because only things you do in public, reality shows prove your true intentions in life. Only someone with a genuine interest in finding someone to settle down with would agree to star in a show devoted to finding “the one” although I guess I could see how being paid to go on dream dates with beautiful women all fighting for your favor might be appealing even for someone as preposterously accomplished as Kelce.
Travis Kelce in 2023.
Early in Catching Kelce, the star tells a contestant that when it comes to relationships he hates drama. In that respect, he’s like everyone who has ever appeared on an excessively dramatic reality show. That bodes well for Kelce’s relationship with Swift because if there’s anyone who is NOT known for her dramatic love life it’s Swift.
As his ill-fated foray into reality television’s title punningly suggests Kelce is in fact one hell of a catch. He’s a world-class athlete destined for the Hall of Fame. He’s rich. He’s famous. To put things in Zoolander terms he is ridiculously good-looking. But he’s also charismatic, funny, and fun, a man who literally has everything a man could ever want, including Taylor Swift as a girlfriend.
I am a married heterosexual cisgender man and I developed a bit of a man crush on Kelce over the course of a show that he understandably regrets making. Chasing Kelce is a skeleton in Kelce’s closet that, unfortunately for him, happens to be streaming all over the place.
The Tight end doesn’t take himself or Chasing Kelce seriously. He knows damn well that it’s just goofy entertainment for the masses and not a matter of finding someone to grow old with.
Kelce comes off about as well as anyone could in a ridiculous context like a dating reality competition. Kelce might actually come off too well in that he seems better than nonsense like this because he was better than this salacious garbage when Chasing Kelce was made and he entered a whole new stratosphere of fame when he started dating Taylor.
One of the Chasing Kelce episodes takes place at the Party Rock Mansion, the home base of pop-rap doofus RedFoo and LMFAO. If Kelce could engineer a collaboration between Taylor Swift and LMFAO the result could be a seminal anthem that bring people together and unite seemingly disparate musical worlds in a manner not unlike Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana when they collaborated on “Smooth.”
Kelce is never more appealing than he is when he is bantering with the woman representing New Mexico. When she tells the NFL superstar that she’s never been out of Albuquerque Kelce tells the woman that he knows of Albuquerque through the “Weird Al” Yankovic song of the same name.
It speaks well of Kelce that he doesn’t just know “Weird Al” Yankovic’s hits; he’s also familiar with album cuts and fan favorites like “Albuquerque”; an eleven and a half minute long tribute to The Rugburns’ "Dick's Automotive” that is the final track of Al’s 1999 album Running With Scissors. Incidentally, I am not just writing that because I am the co-author of Weird Al: The Book (with Al Yankovic) and the world’s preeminent expert on “Weird Al” Yankovic.
I would have been even more impressed if Kelce told a losing contestant about how Yankovic improvises and ad-libs when performing the song in concert, really stretching everything out in a way that fans love . Unfortunately the woman Kelce is talking to does not seem to know who Yankovic even is so additional information on his riveting live performances would have been wasted on her.
Thankfully the same is not true of Swift. Swift gave Yankovic permission to parody her early hit “You Belong With Me” as “TMZ” at the start of her career so there is a chance that if these crazy kids end up getting married Al will be invited. He may even be asked to perform!
That alone is enough to make us dads of the world root for Swift to end up with her handsome football hero beau. He’s not a sophisticated, brilliant undercover genius. But in a world of squares, we suspect that perhaps Kelce is something dads do like. Deep down this guy might be a goofball.
You can watch all of Catching Kelce on Peacock.
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