‘Brother’s keeper’: On the poignant stuff beyond the hype surrounding the ‘Kelce Bowl’
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Travis Kelce
After helping lead the Kansas City Chiefs to their second Super Bowl win in four years, record-breaking tight end Travis Kelce is making waves — on the field and off.
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When Travis Kelce’s phone lit up with a Missouri area code during the 2013 NFL Draft, he figured it was the sputtering St. Louis Rams and hesitated to answer. But it turned out to be Chiefs coach Andy Reid, who had become revered in the family after drafting his brother Jason for the Eagles two years before.
So Kelce was elated.
Momentarily, anyway.
Because no sooner had they exchanged greetings than Reid was preemptively chastising him for past behavior that had made him appear a volatile prospect.
To hear Kelce tell it, Reid practically began by saying, “ ‘Are you going to screw this up? I need a mature guy. I don’t need a guy who’s going to come in and be silly and not be focused on the task at hand.’ ”
After a startled Kelce managed to blurt out something about working to become the best tight end Reid ever had, Reid asked him to hand the phone to the Philadelphia center and older brother by two years.
“Jason convinced me that he was going to be OK,” Reid said, smiling. “And if he wasn’t, he was going to beat him up.”
Even if such details likely have been jazzed up, and even if it had been a while since the older brother knew he could take the younger, a short time later the reassured Chiefs made Kelce the 63rd overall pick.
First brothers to play in Super Bowl
That set in motion Travis Kelce’s jaw-dropping career, surely on trajectory to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the collision course toward the unprecedented:
Ten years after the Brothers Harbaugh were the first to face each other as head coaches in a Super Bowl, the Kelces on Sunday will become the first brothers to play on opposing teams in a Super Bowl.
That might be intriguing even if the two were bland reserves.
But they’re anchors of teams seeking second Super Bowl triumphs, each indebted to Reid and possessed of charismatic personalities displayed in their championship celebrations and on their New Heights podcast.
So the dynamic — enhanced by their omnipresent and effervescent mother, Donna, “glowing in all that light,” as Travis put it — is irresistibly compelling.
Even on a global scale, as you could see on Monday at Super Bowl LVII Opening Night when the Kelces were a prime focus of international media … and, stunner, quite up for the showmanship.
Case in point: Approached by a Japanese TV station and asked to greet the audience at home, Jason turned to the camera and said, “Everyone watching in Japan, I can’t thank you guys enough for supporting and enjoying American football. And I hope you guys all root for the Eagles. It’s imperative that you all root for the Eagles. … Send all the bad juju you can towards Travis Kelce, number 87 with the Chiefs … (Do) everything possible to get him to play terrible.”
Meanwhile …
“Paris, what’s going on!?” Travis said on cue. “You guys better be rooting for the Chiefs, baby.”
More seriously, they’ve been sharing the sheer humanity of the strange range of emotions and even certain aspects of ambivalence they’re encountering in real time.
“Somebody’s going to win. Somebody’s going to lose,” Jason said. “And as a brother you’re always your brother’s keeper. … In some ways it’s been my job my whole life. … This one time it might not be the case.”
So one moment it’s been sentimentality, the next it’s profound insight. Then it’s humor with an occasional splash of bluster over this unfathomable meeting — one that was beyond their childhood scope if it wasn’t going to be, you know, playing as teammates for their hometown Cleveland Browns or with the Madden video game.
“To say that we envisioned this would be a far-fetched lie,” Jason said, later adding that he’d read the odds were so long “you probably had a better shot at hitting the lottery than playing your brother in the Super Bowl.”
It’s all in the family
So no wonder it’s as if they still are sorting out what their fierce brotherly love is going to feel like before, during and maybe especially after the game.
And, yes, they know it’s a game primarily about something much different and more than their story — including the theater surrounding the man so vital to each of their careers coaching against his former team.
They get that the day ultimately will be remembered not so much for their kinship, including the parents they cherish and figure can’t lose, as for the exploits of the adoptive families with which they play.
Besides, since they’re each offensive players it’s not like they’ll specifically line up against each other.
“At least not yet,” Jason joked. “I don’t know if they have anything planned.”
Just the same, this comes with complications.
Like … what are they supposed to say when they see each other Sunday?
“‘I love you,’ I guess?” Travis said. “I don’t know. Who knows? Who knows if I’ll even be able to see him, man.”
It’s hard to know if they even will swap jerseys afterward, like they did in 2017, when the Chiefs beat the Eagles 27-20 in a game punctuated by Travis planting a postgame kiss on a flinching Jason … but also marked by Reid’s ire over Travis’ immaturity with a taunting penalty and for later celebrating a touchdown by flapping his arms in ridicule of the Eagles’ “Fly Eagles Fly” celebration.
“You know, I don’t know,” Jason said. “Because I feel like whoever wins the game is going to want to keep that jersey. But it would be a pretty iconic moment to swap jerseys with your brother in a Super Bowl. … Maybe that might be a spur of the moment decision.”
Related: How much do you celebrate, and how much do you console in the immediate aftermath when they see this as the ultimate bragging rights between them?
“I don’t want to say what I’m going to say to him (if the Eagles win) because I want it to be authentic,” Jason said. “But I have something in my head that I think I’m going to say to him. I won’t rub it in right away.”
Jason and his wife expect baby soon
As if this weren’t enough family drama, Jason’s wife, Kylie, is 38 weeks pregnant and due any time with their third daughter. But she’s here with her OB-GYN in the event she arrives before the game … or during.
If that happens, Jason said, “We’ve got to name her ‘Super,’ I feel like; I don’t know what else you go with.”
Jason also figures this: Travis has had plenty of everything.
Until Jason and his wife had children, anyway, the baby brother was his mother’s favorite. And Travis is first-ballot Hall of Fame-bound, he noted, is better looking and a better dancer.
Never mind that Jason seems to have it pretty good, too: He plays multiple instruments and released a Christmas album — “A Philly Special Christmas” — for charity and is a remarkable father in the image of their own dad, Ed, in Travis’ estimation.
“Give me one thing, Trav,” Jason said. “Let me have more Super Bowls.”
Travis may not want to pay him back that way, exactly.
But he is the first to tell you he owes Jason, who taught him about everything from the fire needed to truly compete to understanding defensive schemes to the mind games sometimes required to beat somebody better than you.
Part of that included standing up to his big brother, who may or may not still be able to take him but evidently hasn’t tried for years.
For all the broken furniture and shattered windows and holes in the wall and black eyes the rambunctious duo inflicted on each other grappling through a childhood in Cleveland Heights that might as well have been set to a WWE soundtrack the way they describe it …
For all the football, basketball, hockey, martial arts, remote control, chess, Madden and racing-for-shotgun-in-the-car competitions …
A growth spurt for Travis Kelce
it’s been a long time since they clashed that way.
Because around their early teens, Travis hit a growth spurt.
And when Jason could not stop “this stupid hookshot” that Travis kept making on their backyard basket, he simply resorted to fouling him every time.
That soon became a scuffle with Jason punching him in the face. Next thing you know, Travis picked him up, slammed him on the kitchen floor and knocked the stove off its hinges … and almost injured their dad.
“Since then, it’s been, ‘alright, we’re too big to do this any more,’ ” Jason said.
So, no, Reid wasn’t so much asking Jason to play enforcer that night 10 years ago as asking him to keep looking out for and steering his brother the way he had been for years — especially during Travis’ reckless times at the University of Cincinnati.
When Travis was dismissed from the team and had his scholarship revoked in 2010 after testing positive for marijuana, when he thought that could be the end of his football career, Jason, his Bearcats teammate, was his rock.
Simply put, he took him in to keep an eye on him, model more disciplined behavior and work to help him get reinstated.
“I’m forever in debt for what he was doing …” said Travis, later adding, “I wouldn’t be here without my brother.”
And neither would be in this extraordinary position without Reid, who after the matchup was set said he considered himself part of their family.
When I asked Jason about that sentiment amid all the buzz and pomp on Monday, he quietly and earnestly said, “Yeah, so do I.”
Then he noted how personal Reid was as a coach and his ability to convey his thoughts just by looking at you.
And the way he and his family “have played such an incredible part of me and my brother being able to play at this level.”
The night he got drafted, Travis immediately asked Jason what he was getting into with Reid. Jason told him he was getting one of the best coaches in the NFL because of his ability to relate to his players and to challenge men.
Indeed, that was something Reid did from the start with Travis … and through some growing pains/tantrums in the NFL as he blossomed into one of its best players and a charitable force in Kansas City.
Nurtured and coaxed by Reid and his staff, he has come a vast way from that time at Cincinnati and even his first years in the NFL. And, jarring first call notwithstanding, no one is a bigger fan of the man he likes to call Big Red.
“He can take 53 guys and get a fire burning in their chest to go out and accomplish anything,” he said. “And that’s why we love the big guy.”
And part of why he wants to win for him against another man who enabled him to have this opportunity.
“You always want the best for your brother,” Jason said.
Except for … sometimes.
“It’s going to be a little awkward for one of us,” Travis said, smiling. “Hopefully, it isn’t me.”
This story was originally published February 9, 2023 at 10:22 AM.
