Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce—who at this point is as much America’s Sweetheart as his new girlfriend, Taylor Swift—served the Swifties well on Monday with a revealing Wall Street Journal cover story (and an accompanying, super suave photo shoot).
Unlike past Swift boyfriends, Kelce was anything but reticent about his budding relationship with the pop star, sharing juicy details about how he and Swift got together and gushing about his deep admiration for her. How Kelce pursued Swift is already the stuff of legend: This past summer, he casually revealed on New Heights—the podcast he shares with his brother Jason Kelce—that he’d made a friendship bracelet with his phone number on it to give to Swift at the Kansas City leg of her Eras Tour, and was disappointed that he hadn’t gotten to give it to her.
Long story short: The friendship bracelet bit ended up working out.
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“There were definitely people she knew that knew who I was, in her corner [who said]: Yo! Did you know he was coming? I had somebody playing Cupid,” Kelce told WSJ, adding that he was gobsmacked when a text came through from Swift letting him know that his gambit had paid off. “She told me exactly what was going on and how I got lucky enough to get her to reach out.”
“When I met her in New York, we had already kind of been talking, so I knew we could have a nice dinner and, like, a conversation, and what goes from there will go from there,” he continued.
Kelce told the Journal that he was both confident about the way he pursued Swift, and intentional to not make a wrong move at a “delicate” stage. “That was the biggest thing to me: make sure I don’t say anything that would push Taylor away,” he said.
Things seem to be working out for him. The internet recently exploded when, after an Eras Tour performance in Argentina, Swift ran to Kelce, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him in front of an entire stadium of screaming, cheering fans.
His new girlfriend is “hilarious” and “a genius,” Kelce told the Journal. “Everybody knows I’m a family guy,” he said. “Her team is her family. Her family does a lot of stuff in terms of the tour, the marketing, being around, so I think she has a lot of those values as well, which is right up my alley.”
But wait, there’s more!
“I’ve never been a man of words,” Kelce said. “Being around her, seeing how smart Taylor is, has been f—ing mind-blowing. I’m learning every day.”
He continued: “Obviously I’ve never dated anyone with that kind of aura about them…. I’ve never dealt with it. But at the same time, I’m not running away from any of it…. The scrutiny she gets, how much she has a magnifying glass on her, every single day, paparazzi outside her house, outside every restaurant she goes to, after every flight she gets off, and she’s just living, enjoying life. When she acts like that, I better not be the one acting all strange.”
