How Chiefs star Patrick Mahomes navigates a life nobody has ever lived in Kansas City
He is the most famous person to ever live in Kansas City.
This place has never seen someone like Patrick Mahomes, by now a global icon who has changed how people see our city and the conversations we have when outsiders find out we live here.
What’s even more is the Chiefs quarterback has wrapped himself in this place. We tend to carry a little flyover insecurity here, and some of us will never forget the time a quarterback was traded to the Chiefs and told Sports Illustrated that our best restaurant was worse than the worst restaurant in his old city.
Mahomes is the opposite of that.
He bought a minority share of the Royals, joining a who’s-who of Kansas City business leaders. Then he did the same with Sporting Kansas City, buying into the pro soccer team owned by Cliff Illig, who co-founded a healthcare technology company that is now the area’s largest private employer. Mahomes’ fiancee owns part of the KC NWSL women’s soccer club (also locally controlled), and he also has a piece of the 30 Whataburger stores that will soon be slinging that fancy ketchup all over the metro.
Mahomes has, in other words, entwined himself with Kansas City in a way that nobody with anywhere close to his level of fame has done before.
Here’s the rub: He also must navigate our city at an arm’s length, always aware of the inevitable chaos that showing up literally anywhere here will create.
“I haven’t gone to the grocery store in a while,” he said. “I did my first two years in the league. Recently, other people go. Brittany will go, or my assistant, people like that. Maybe my chef.”
It all happened so quickly. Three summers ago, he was double-fisting domestics at a Sporting game, politely declining an invitation to lead the pre-game cheer because he hadn’t accomplished anything yet (friend and teammate Gehrig Dieter volunteered).
Now he must decide whether dinner out is worth the hassle, and if it is, call ahead of time to plan the most discreet paths in and out of the restaurant because he’s learned that’s when fans are most likely to stop him.
Even when he goes out, he often has people around him to serve as a buffer, and even on vacation his days are planned to the minute.
“You have to pick and choose your spots,” he said. “When you’re tired you don’t want to go out because you know you’re going to be stopped a lot of times. There’s times where I’ll still go out to eat and go to dinners and I’m perfectly fine taking pictures with people and stuff like that. You just have to know what you’re getting into whenever you’re doing stuff like that.”
When he entered the league, his plan was to get an apartment, then eventually a condo downtown, then buy a house and eventually build something new. But like everything else in his life, he skipped a step, moving straight from an apartment near the Plaza to a house not far from there.
A local TV station aired the address, which led to so much traffic on the otherwise quiet street that he installed gates. Now, he’s in the process of building a house with more privacy — gates and guards and acreage where he wants a turf football field and maybe his own golf hole.
“With his success on the field, he hit so much attention so quickly obviously he’s not just a normal guy anymore,” said Coleman Patterson, a longtime friend and high school teammate. “It’s a bit more difficult for him to break away and get out nowadays.”
Let us be clear: This is not a sympathy story. This is the life Mahomes chose and worked to achieve. He is unfailingly polite in public and complimentary to his fellow Kansas Citians. It should not be ignored that the fame came in a rush, in his early 20s with cellphone cameras everywhere, and he has navigated it all without incident.
This isn’t even about Kansas City not being home to this level of star power before — he’s been swarmed in L.A., chased in New York and has to deploy the same level of planning to go out in Dallas.
The point is this unique existence — the same fame that helps him lift Kansas City also requires him to keep much of it at a distance. Mahomes also keeps a home in Texas, and in the offseason he travels a lot. So his time here is mostly during football season, which he keeps focused on football.
George Brett tells a story of sitting with Mahomes after a round of golf shortly before the Chiefs began training camp. Brett told him of a regular group he plays with and offered Mahomes a spot.
“I won’t pick up a golf club until the season’s over,” Brett remembered Mahomes saying.
OK, well, I know you’re off on Tuesdays so maybe we can grab a beer …
“I won’t have a drop of alcohol until the season’s over,” Mahomes said.
This is where Brett pauses the story for the punchline.
“So I said, ‘Welp, looks like I’ll see you when the season’s over,’” Brett said.
Mahomes is making Kansas City his, and in his own way. His daughter — he mentions he and Brittany plan to have more children, too — will go to school here.
Bobby Stroupe, Mahomes’ trainer since he was in grade school, recently moved to the area from Texas (though Stroupe works with other high-profile clients here, too). Chris Cabott, Mahomes’ agent, relocated from Los Angeles (though he continues to travel “more than anyone I’ve ever known,” Mahomes said).
Stroupe was here so often anyway that it made sense to have his family here, too. Cabott was here a lot, as well, so among other things the relocation puts him in the middle of the country for travel and allows him better access to help with some of Mahomes’ community projects.
Mahomes and his team have come to repeat a phrase: Dominate on the field and transcend the sport off it.
The idea is to always put football first — diligent and intentional work to tweak his physical abilities in the offseason coupled with obsessive study and an almost delusional push to improve.
But Mahomes also knows that football — and playing quarterback, specifically — gives him a platform that should not be wasted. That’s why he started his 15 and the Mahomies foundation which, among other things, promotes literacy and health for children. It’s also why he bought into the Royals and Sporting and continues to invest so heavily in our city.
He has lived here only four years, but by now he’s our most visible resident.
He just has to choose a very specific form of visibility. He’s outgrown normal life, here and wherever he goes.