The Kansas City Chiefs have landed in Brazil for their season opener. Coach Andy Reid led Thursday’s walkthrough, while Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce were seen arriving ahead of Friday night’s matchup against the Los Angeles Chargers. The Chiefs kick off the 2025 NFL season at 7 p.m. Central in São Paulo. By Vahe Gregorian
The clock nudged five minutes past a morning hour, and then 10, and then long enough that people stopped wondering when Travis Kelce would arrive, but rather if he would show at all.
Some coaches at Chiefs practice had already been grumbling about the priorities of their third-round draft pick. Even if they considered his unannounced absence fitting, his whereabouts soon became the talk of a fall 2014 walk-through.
“They don’t know where the hell he is,” said Anthony Fasano, a tight end on that 2014 Kansas City team. “And I’m thinking, if you’re on social media, you would’ve known he wasn’t going to be here on time today.”
A flyer had circulated through Kansas City over the previous couple of days, something akin to a college fraternity promoting a weekend kegger. A local nightclub wanted to get the word out about its late-night guest DJ — the man who just so happened to be missing from practice a day later, less than 24 hours before a game.
“He was a two-sided ticking time bomb,” Fasano said. “He was either going to blow up and turn into a first-ballot (Hall of Fame) guy ...
“Or he was going to blow up and soon be out of football.”
‘The knucklehead days’
It was 90-some degrees in St. Joseph, Missouri one day last month, and the Chiefs had concluded all but one drill over a two-plus hour training camp.
The final segment, reserved for special teams, gave much of the roster a breather, helmets off and tucked in hands. But then a 35-year-old tight end trotted to an empty neighboring field. All by his lonesome, he ran through routes at near game speed, over and over again.
“It’s probably my favorite thing to watch,” Chiefs assistant general manager Mike Bradway said.
Bradway mentioned that routine ahead of the Super Bowl. This was training camp. You couldn’t tell the difference, though, and that’s the point.
One of the best tight ends in NFL history loses himself every day in the details. His teammates marvel at it, their explanation for how a soon-to-be 36-year-old is still playing a game occupied primarily by athletes in their early 20s.
Second-year Chiefs tight end Jared Wiley says he can ask Kelce about a play from three drives ago in a preseason game in which Kelce isn’t even playing — and Kelce will not only remember the play, “but he knows exactly what the defense was doing, and he can tell me what he would’ve tried to do.”
That attention to detail — the belief that no detail is too insignificant — is responsible for the career of the most famous man in football.
But first, he nearly derailed it.
Once, twice, too many times to count.
“When he was young,” Chiefs head coach Andy Reid said, contemplating the nicest way possible to finish the sentence, “he would get distracted.”
There are few athletes whose spotlight shines brighter than the one chased by paparazzi bulbs. Kelce, not three-time Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes, drew the most attention upon the Chiefs’ arrival in Brazil for their season opener Friday against the Chargers.
This, therefore, is not an introduction to Travis Kelce.
These are the early years. The before-you-really-knew him years.
The years before he really knew himself.
His journey from Cleveland Heights, Ohio to eventually Canton, Ohio — from obscurity to international fame and a romance forever woven into American culture — came thisclose to never happening. And if you know him deeply as only a select few do, you aren’t quite sure which story that’s referencing.
Kelce calls his teenage years and early 20s his “knucklehead days,” a description that he uses with a healthy dose of contrition but also a twinge of affection. He was good-hearted, good-natured and looking for a good time.
Fasano, the veteran tight end, had arrived in KC on a free-agent deal a month before the Chiefs drafted Kelce in 2013. Entering his eighth season in the NFL, Fasano initially tried to lead by example, same as Jason Witten had done for him. He stayed after practice to watch film, even organizing days and times for the tight ends to watch together.
“He’d always try to dip out,” Fasano said of Kelce. “I had to become a little more vocal on it to really let him know — ‘This isn’t really an ask. This is something you need to do.’”
Kelce treated recovery days, the days after games, as inconsequential. He’d skipped Tuesdays at the facility altogether. The start time for practice meetings, he considered more suggestion than requirement.
Reid operated with only a few rules — he’s still that way — but punctuality has always been a firm one. Kelce broke it, habitually.
“I knew it would be a tough (transition) for him,” Reid said. “He’s unique that way. He’ll do it, but you gotta paint the picture for him. It’s gotta be clear — back then, not a lot of gray area.”
That picture?
“Make sure you’re there on time,” Reid replied. And then, in the most Andy Reid of tones, he added:
“Or I’m going to come get ya.”
The shortest of NFL debuts
This is about the beginnings.
So, let’s talk about the very beginning of the NFL journey — but the on-field piece of it. A Hall of Fame career encompassed one snap as a rookie.
One.
Oh, the Chiefs certainly thought they had something, an aspiration confirmed when Kelce out-ran the entire Cincinnati Bengals defensive secondary for a touchdown in a preseason game.
“Woah,” Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy recalled thinking. “A tight end? I’m not sure we’ve seen that before.”
But Kelce injured his knee during that preseason, an ailment initially diagnosed as a bone bruise. It would be a month before tests showed something far more serious. During that month, a couple of teammates began to call the MRI machine “The Kelce.”
Because of the reputation he’d started to develop, if not earned, there was more than a hint of seriousness to the joke. There were murmurs in the organization about whether the pain in his knee was not the result of injury, but rather disinterest.
“People were questioning whether he was hurt or not hurt,” Reid said, “And I’m going, ‘I think I know what this kid is. He’s not going to sit there and tell you something that’s not true.’”
That story, which Reid had not previously shared, appears out of place, like a description of a different person. That’s the thing, though. Kelce is a different person. For the last decade, he has made a living out of playing through pain. He all but refuses to talk about injuries, even when asked.
But at age 23, Kelce seemed to enjoy the title of NFL football player more than job itself. And it had some wondering if he was just plain faking it.
In reality, the knee limited his availability in the initial two weeks of his rookie season, but he did get on the field for one debut snap in Week 2 against the visiting Dallas Cowboys. It wasn’t a passing play or even an offensive snap.
He trotted onto the field for a field-goal attempt to close out the first half.
It was intended that Kelce would line up on the left side and protect the edge rush there, but he figured the right side would be a little easier on his left knee. So he asked fellow tight end Sean McGrath to swap assignments as they went onto the field. The Dallas rush turned the corner on McGrath and blocked the field goal.
“That’s an awful job by the tight end,” Tim Ryan said from the broadcast booth.
Little did he know.
“When I heard that double-thump,” Kelce said, “man, it was pure panic.”
He could hardly hobble after the loose ball. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that imaging provided an answer, all the while putting his career in question: He had played through a micro-fracture in his knee, an injury that has ruined some careers.
It was a revelation of a different sort.
His career wasn’t guaranteed.
“One hundred percent, those thoughts go through your head,” he said. “I stayed on top of the rehab, but you never really know until you get back out there whether you’re going to get back out there.”
It wasn’t the first time football was stripped from him — back when he could actually stay under the radar.
‘Tough love’
Travis Kelce got kicked off his college team once and was indefinitely suspended in a separate instance.
A failed marijuana test famously cost him an entire season and a scholarship. But Cincinnati coach Butch Jones revealed to The Star two years ago that he much more quietly suspended Kelce again in an ensuing offseason, informing him that he could only earn his way back if he received a 3.0 grade-point average the next semester.
Kelce responded that he’d never gotten a 3.0 in his life. Jones thinks Kelce was joking.
But he was serious enough that between summer league baseball games, Kelce picked up a job at a local call center. He would cold-call residents in three states, trying to sell them on a new product: Obamacare.
At one point, older brother Jason, an NFL player himself by then, called Jones and begged him to give Kelce another chance.
“I never, ever once thought of giving up on him. You now, Travis is a very truthful person. I knew his heart and I knew his character. I loved Travis Kelce,” Jones told The Star. “But sometimes you have to give someone some tough love.”
Tough love.
Turns out, Andy Reid wasn’t the first to try it.
But neither was Butch Jones.
In 2018, Kelce and older brother Jason were inducted into the Cleveland Heights High School’s Alumni Hall of Fame in the same class. Wearing a letterman’s jacket, Travis stopped to collect his emotions several times throughout a 7-minute speech. “My brother made me a crybaby when I was little,” he excused himself.
As he scanned the crowd, Kelce spotted a familiar face and felt suddenly compelled to interrupt his own speech.
“Mr. Sack, I apologize,” he said. “I see it now. I see it now. That’s all I gotta say.”
Deep into an auditorium of hundreds, perhaps more, a then-60 year old high school social studies teacher, sitting alone, could feel eyes throughout the room suddenly glaring in his direction.
Among his many thoughts:
Crap.
‘I see it now’
The truth is Mark Sack did not use the word “crap,” but he politely requested we omit the word he did use.
He was stunned Kelce acknowledged his attendance that night in 2018, and even more surprised by the apology. He and Kelce clashed in class, or at least the times Kelce “chose to come to class” — a phrase Sack used intentionally not once but twice over the course of a recent conversation.
He knew Kelce was a three-sport star at Cleveland Heights, scholarship offers and recruitment calls flowing, but Sack wasn’t exactly the kind of teacher to express favoritism.
“When you walk into my class,” said Sack, who retired from teaching this year after 36 years, “I ask you to think a little bit. I ask you to write a little bit. Let’s do it. So we bumped heads.”
Sack didn’t follow Kelce’s career too closely in its infancy, receiving most of his updates from his youngest son, Ben, who met Travis at a youth basketball camp that Sack oversaw. Maybe it qualifies as irony, but Travis and Ben hit it off at that camp.
Sack didn’t plan on attending the Cleveland Heights Hall of Fame induction ceremony, but the coordinator for the event sent him an email shortly beforehand, along with a message:
Mark, you have to read this.
As part of the application, the inductees had been asked to write the name of a teacher at Cleveland Heights who had inspired them.
Kelce’s submission: Mark Sack.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “All this time, was listening to me.”
That was the first time Sack used the word, uh, crap, but there’s more to the story.
His wife had Stage 4 cancer, so he rarely wanted to spend a minute elsewhere. When he received the email, he figured, “Crap, now I gotta go to the induction ceremony.”
And when Kelce then mentioned him again during the ceremony, he thought, “Now I gotta go the reception.”
The apology struck the audience. But it was the ensuing sentence, which Kelce uttered twice, that revealed more.
I see it now.
What, in fact, was it?
“If you’re going to do something, you need to do something with all your heart and ability,” Sack said. “You have to have discipline. You have to have focus.”
When Sack returned home that night, he eagerly shared the speech with his wife and son, Ben.
“It meant a lot to me. I’ll put it that way,” Sack said. “I was away from my wife a lot with my job, teaching and the youth basketball, even if she was very supportive.
“His words did elevate, if you will, that all these years of commitment and sacrifices were worth it. I was able to share that with my son and my wife when I got home. It was a good thing for the family in a challenging time.”
The words left an immediate imprint on Sack.
The impact came far more gradually for the player who shared them.
The Kelce Story
Just a few months after Cleveland Heights inducted Kelce and his brother into its Hall of Fame, Mark Sack walked into the school’s lunch room and stumbled upon two first-year teachers, frustrated and broken, as he put it, after just two weeks on the job.
“Guys,” Sack said, “I have to tell you this story.”
He’d been there, frustrated and broken, and the ensuing tale was about one of the students who had frustrated him most.
The Kelce Story, he calls it.
“Now we’re, what, seven years later?” Sack said. “And those are two of the best teachers the school has.
“I’d like to think there’s a connection.”
Sack’s wife died at the start of that same school year. His son was a senior at Ohio State, and then off to his first job in Huntsville, Alabama, which might as well have been a foreign country.
Shortly after he arrived in Alabama, Ben received a Super Bowl football. It came with Kelce’s signature and a personal message.
A prized possession.
There are more like it sprinkled throughout the country.
Jones, the Cincinnati coach who suspended Kelce, keeps a signed Chiefs jersey with an inscription on it: “Coach Jones, it’s been one hell of a journey. From giving me a second chance in life to pushing me every day to be great. I love you like a father.”
These are the messages Kelce reserves for the adults who were hardest on him.
Isn’t that the real takeaway?
If this is the final season for Kelce, and he again Thursday dodged that question in Brazil, his legacy is not solely about the lessons he’s picked up along the way.
It’s about the lessons he’s left behind.
The lesson he left a teacher who pounded his head against the desk trying to get through to him — and who then flipped that wisdom into a lesson for two of the best teachers in a major city’s high school.
The lesson he’s left major college coaches to share with their freshmen players — a former Cincinnati assistant opened every fall camp with the narrative of how Kelce stuck through his suspension, “the hardest year of my life,” and came out better for it.
The lesson he’s provided his teammates on the importance of the details, the importance of professionalism, because he’s lived both sides of it.
But now they feel it.
Individually, the knucklehead days are a compilation of frustrations, some regret, even some failure. They are reminders of how thin the line is between fame and anonymity.
But together, they compile something different altogether. They provide the foundation for a success story.
Over the summer, Kelce bumped into Fasano at the golf course. They stopped for lunch. Fasano’s 9-year-old daughter hoped to parlay it into a FaceTime call with certain pop singer.
That didn’t come up.
The journey before the engagement did.
“I saw it from afar, but just how mature and stable he is, it stands out,” Fasano said. “He’s his authentic self. He’s just in a really good spot.
“I think he got some of those demons out.”