He spent hours wearing a headset, asking the people of Cincinnati how they felt about President Obama’s health insurance legislation. He didn’t just share Jason’s apartment - he shared his room. With his scholarship gone, Kelce and his parents footed the bill for his tuition. He relented when he learned that Travis was moving in with his older brother Jason, the Bearcats’ starting center and a fast favorite of Jones and his staff. The first day, when he found out, that was a long phone call, keeping him calm.” Jones not only wanted Kelce out of the program, but off campus. “It could have been very depressing,” Ed Kelce, Travis’s father, says. Kelce was among the casualties, kicked out of the program for violating team rules. “When you’re a new coach, that’s the time when you want to break ties with the bad guys,” says Kerry Coombs, who served as the Bearcats’ special teams coach under Kelly and Jones. Part of Jones’s effort to put his stamp on the program was purging the team of its rotten characters. Less than a week later, Central Michigan coach Butch Jones was tapped as his replacement. “I was down there celebrating, thinking I was invincible.” He wasn’t.Ībout three weeks before the Sugar Bowl loss, Cincinnati’s head coach, Brian Kelly, accepted the same job at Notre Dame. “It was something I thought I could get away with for a weekend down in New Orleans,” he says. Players are often told that they’ll be drug tested before bowl games. Days before playing Florida, Kelce smoked pot while out in New Orleans. Nearly all of his snaps that season - and there weren’t many - came as a Wildcat QB. When the 12-1 Bearcats went to the Sugar Bowl in early 2010, Kelce was a 20-year-old redshirt freshman quarterback. He remembers because it’s the day he was kicked off the team at the University of Cincinnati. “It was frustrating seeing all those guys and how it affected them, because you’re sitting there thinking, I haven’t even gotten my foot in the door.” In the low moments of his rehab, Kelce went back to an old text message from his father. “You look at all the people who declined as athletes,” Kelce says. As Kelce, who played basketball in high school and was recruited to play in college, rattled off the names of previous patients, late-career Tracy McGrady limped into his mind. “Microfracture” wasn’t a new term for him. When he returned this preseason, it took just one series to fulfill his orders from Charles, when Kelce took a Chase Daniel slant 69 yards for his first NFL touchdown. But Kelce missed most of training camp with a bone bruise in his knee the pain and discomfort lingered, and in October of last year, after playing in just a single game, microfracture surgery put him on the shelf for the season. He came to Kansas City as a 2013 third-round pick and instantly lit up practices. The game was Kelce’s first in more than 10 months. “And just said, ‘Aww, yeah? We’ll see, we’ll see.’” “I said, ‘All right, I’ll hit the nae nae,’” Kelce says. If Kelce got into the end zone, Charles told him, he wanted one of the dances he’d seen during training camp. Just before halftime of the Chiefs’ preseason opener against Cincinnati, Jamaal Charles approached Kelce on the sideline. It’s part of how we grew up, how we played the game, and now that I’m in the NFL, why not break it out?” The Nae Nae It started in the backyard, not to necessarily showboat - but to be a showman. “But if you see me at night out on the town, I’m having a good time - I’m always dancing. “You don’t really see tight ends out here doing dances in the end zone,” Kelce says. Suddenly, Kelce is one of the most exciting young players on one of the hottest teams in the NFL. Since the preseason, each of Kelce’s trips to the end zone has come with a memorable celebration - from handing the ball to Mike McGlynn for a lineman-size spike to a menagerie of meme-friendly dances. Along with his cream-colored Gucci beanie, he’s wearing a white, long-sleeve Lululemon shirt and a shiny gold Rolex with a face the size of a child’s palm. It’s early November, and the temperature has just started to drop in Kansas City. Little about Kelce - or his second season with the Chiefs - has been quiet. “They knew me before I was even scoring touchdowns,” he says. In the offseason, he came here every Sunday, and by now, he knows most of the staff. “That’s how the younger crowd sees it, at least.” He doesn’t want to talk too loud. “I don’t know, man, it’s like the older spot,” he whispers, a bit ashamed. His branch of the Florida-based breakfast chain sits on Westport Road in Kansas City, Missouri, just 10 minutes from his downtown apartment. First Watch doesn’t seem like Travis Kelce’s kind of place.
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