In a generation, when kids in red and gold go to a Chiefs game in Kansas, they’ll walk by a statue. They’ll ask their parents about the big guy in No. 87, passionate and well-groomed, the one emblazoned in bronze with the golden hands.
While it remains uncertain, there’s a good chance Travis Kelce will be playing his final home game on Christmas night at Arrowhead Stadium. The last of 113 contests in that building (regular season and playoffs).
For NFL fans, Kelce’s potential retirement will represent the end of an era. The same way it did when Jerry Rice walked away. The same as it was when Lawrence Taylor bid adieu.
For Chiefs fans, it’ll be far more emotional. It’ll be a goodbye to someone who went through the rough years and came out shining on the other side. Just like them.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact Kelce has had in his 13 seasons with the Chiefs. While Patrick Mahomes is the face of Kansas City’s dynasty, it’s impossible to think of the run without immediately going to Kelce. For all of Mahomes’s greatness, Kelce is the bridge. He was the guy who was there in the dark ages of a 22-year playoff-win drought. The guy who helped end the 50-year drought which mattered most.
Kelce’s career reads like a fairy tale.
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From a football perspective, he was a third-round pick from Cincinnati who saw a Missouri area code light up his phone on draft night and felt his heart sink, thinking it was the St. Louis Rams. As a rookie in 2013, he injured his knee in the preseason and missed all but one game due to microfracture surgery.
By 2015, Kelce was a Pro Bowler. He’s been one every year since, even this season at age 36.
In 2018, Kelce was joined in the starting lineup by Mahomes. The two have become one of the greatest duos in NFL history, connecting on 748 receptions for 8,883 yards and 59 touchdowns in the regular season. Yet the playoffs is where the two became legendary, with Kelce putting forth an argument to be the greatest non-QB postseason performer in NFL history.
In 25 games, Kelce has a league-record 178 catches. His 2,078 yards and 20 touchdowns trail only Rice. In one 14-game stretch from the 2020 season through last year’s wild-card round, Kelce produced 120 receptions on 143 targets with 1,388 yards and 14 touchdowns. In that span, he reached 70 yards in every game and had at least one touchdown in 11 of them.
Of course, their shared success is what makes both so unforgettable. With Mahomes and Kelce’s almost telepathic connection at the heart of their dominance, the Chiefs won three Super Bowls and reached five in six years. They hosted six AFC championship games and went to seven straight, all while winning nine consecutive AFC West titles.
Mind you, this from a franchise that hadn’t seen a Super Bowl in a half century. A team with just six division titles since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger and only one conference title game appearance since then (coming on the road) before this jaunt through history.
The Chiefs have had many great players. They’ve had a slew of top-tier Hall of Famers, including Bobby Bell, Buck Buchanan, Willie Lanier, Len Dawson, Derrick Thomas, Tony Gonzalez, Will Shields and others. They’ll have plenty from the past decade to join them.
None of them turned a franchise around like Mahomes and Kelce. Two men who are, and will always be, impossible to separate.
Then there’s the personal side of Kelce’s career, which is somehow even more unfathomable.
Kelce had an ill-fated 2016 reality dating show, Catching Kelce, before finding endless success in many other media avenues. In ’22, he began recording the New Heights podcast with his brother, Jason, another future Hall of Famer. In the show’s first season, the two found themselves squaring off in Super Bowl LVII. That night, Travis scored a touchdown and got the best of Jason’s Eagles, 38–35, bringing him his second Super Bowl title.
In the months that followed, Kelce hosted Saturday Night Live, drawing rave reviews. By the start of the 2023 season, he was dating Taylor Swift. By season’s end, Swift had followed his and the Chiefs’ playoff run from Buffalo to Baltimore and finally Las Vegas, as Kansas City authored what may prove the final championship chapter of its dynasty.
Swift, the artist who has become part of the fabric of America’s—if not the world’s—society, watched as the red and gold confetti fluttered down on the Allegiant Stadium turf. As it rained, Kelce and Swift kissed on the field, a moment too corny for anything but reality.
Now, Kelce is likely at the end of his career. A place every athlete faces, though none wants to.
For Kelce, it’s been a race well-run. It’s time for a moment for reflection as he goes into One Arrowhead Drive with the lights shimmering one more time as 80,000 strong wait to greet him with a thunderous ovation in a lost year, with the team 6–9 and eliminated from the playoffs.
Mahomes won’t be playing on Christmas night, as he rehabs his torn ACL. Future trivia question Chris Oladokun will replace him in the huddle. The Chiefs, for the first time in Kelce’s career, are irrelevant. Yet his presence alone will serve as a siren song to so many who already miss him making one more big catch in one more big spot.
There will be fans with tears in their eyes. Fans with hearts full of emotion, so thankful for the man wearing No. 87 who embodies everything the Chiefs have been over the better part of a decade.
Fans who will remember what they saw. Fans who can’t wait to tell the story about the man in bronze.
The man with the golden hands.
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