Travis Kelce on His Upcoming Season, Post-NFL Ambitions, and Life with Taylor Swift

Now, sitting with him in the golf club lounge, its windows streaked with rain, I remind him of this story and ask how he and Swift—also two very career-oriented people with unrelenting schedules—manage to keep their romance from waning.

“Whenever I’m with her, it feels like we’re just regular people,” he says, not exactly answering the question. It might not need answering yet; they are only two years in. But he goes on: “When there is not a camera on us, we’re just two people that are in love. It can be perceived as something else because of how much it is talked about and how much we are tracked whenever we do go out, but I would say that it’s as normal of…. It happened very organically even though from a media standpoint it was being tracked. It still happened very organically.”

“Nothing I’ve ever done has been a controlled, organized process. When I say it was so organic, we fell in love just based off the people we were sitting in a room together with. We are two fun-loving people who have the morals to appreciate everyone for who they are. We share all those values. It kind of just took the fuck off.”

Talking about Swift, Kelce brings up the question of his legacy. Early in his career, he says, he was motivated by the stats and records that would be attached to his name but, “nowadays, I just want to be respected and loved by the people that I’m surrounded by in my work. I want to leave it better than where it was when I started. And I see her having those same values.”

While Kelce does not discuss the timing or terms of his NFL exit, he says he has been thinking about what his life looks like when he’s done playing. He’s now in the last year of his contract, but, unlike many who have been in his position, he does not necessarily need to take a team-friendly deal or grind it out in a new city. He has built his own media enterprise, one that benefits from the fascination with his relationship with Swift but is in no way dependent on it. Whatever he does next, he will begin from the starting point of, roughly speaking, the largest pop cultural platform in modern American history. What will it be?

Kelce describes a process not of relentlessly upward ambition, but of a curious searching, an improvisational trial and error similar to how he mastered route running. “I know to stay away from a few things that I dabbled in early,” he says. There are still a couple years on the New Heights agreement. He’s got an investment in some Missouri car washes, family businesses that invest in their local communities. “The whole ‘teaming up’ aspect is something that I’ll always kind of desire,” he says. He’s enjoyed acting, and finds developing his on-camera skills satisfying. “I don’t necessarily know if I’ll take it and run with it when I’m done playing,” he says, “but I know that I want to stay around the football world as a profession and then dabble in other areas as well.” When he looks around at his fellow former players, he admires people like ESPN’s Pat McAfee, who are “making it fun.”