Hailey is nine and she was sitting at my kitchen table Sunday flipping through a Sports Illustrated I had not asked for, and she pointed at three different men in three different photographs and identified all of them, in order, as “one of Travis’s friends.” That was the entire scouting report. Travis’s friend. Travis’s friend. Travis’s friend. The defending AFC champions, ladies and gentlemen.
I asked her, just to test the bit, who the quarterback was. She thought for a second and said, “the one who dates Travis’s friend.” That is Patrick Mahomes. Two-time MVP. The man has rewritten the position. He is now, in the broader culture, contextual furniture for a relationship arc.
I am told this is good for the league. I am told this by people who use the word “engagement” to mean something other than a thing you announce in the church bulletin.
Coach DiMaggio used to keep a yellow clipboard taped to the wall of his office with every starter’s hometown, his dad’s line of work, and whether the kid had a younger brother coming up behind him. That was the file. That was what you needed. Now I can tell you the name of Travis Kelce’s girlfriend’s cat. I cannot tell you the name of the Chiefs’ starting left guard. I’m not even sure they have one anymore. I think they just have a man who blocks for Travis’s friend.
Ray Kowalczyk called me about it Saturday night. Ray had accidentally watched eleven minutes of some podcast where two grown men in matching cardigans broke down the Eras Tour setlist before mentioning a single football snap. Ray asked me, with real distress, what an era was. I said I thought it was a long unit of geological time. He said that sounded right and hung up on me.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not mad at Kelce. The man can play. He blocks downfield like he means it, he runs an out-route as cleanly as anyone in his weight class, and he caught one in traffic in January that would have made Lynn Swann nod once. But the brand has eaten the man, and I don’t think the man knows yet, and I don’t think the brand is going to tell him.
The league knows. The league knows beautifully. The cameras cut to her box now the way they used to cut to the head coach’s wife on a fourth-and-one — except they cut to her on third-and-eight in the second quarter of a Week 3 game in Cincinnati, because some forty-one-year-old vice president in a quarter-zip got on a Zoom and called it, I am quoting an actual sentence I read, “a generational synergy moment.” I would rather watch a man churn butter.
Hailey asked me if I knew any of Taylor’s songs. I told her the only song I knew by heart was “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” She told me, gently, the way you tell an old man his fly is down, that this was not a song. It was “a chant.” I said it had a melody. She said, and I want this on my headstone, “Granddad, melodies have bridges.”
Petey Corrigan would be apoplectic. Petey thought Monday Night Football going to ESPN was the cultural equivalent of Rome falling, and that was 2006. Petey is dead, God rest him, but if he were here he’d be at the kitchen table right now writing a letter to the commissioner in pencil, and the commissioner would not read it, and Petey would not care, because the writing of the letter was the point.
I asked Hailey if she wanted to come watch the Royals with me Tuesday. She said yes, but only if I told her which one was Travis’s friend.
Denise is bringing meatloaf tonight. She says the recipe is from a TikTok. I did not ask what an era was. I am picking my battles.