On the Eras tour, Taylor Swift knows where each camera is positioned in the stadiums she took over this year. Her image is projected onto LED video walls the size of a building so that when she flexes her muscles during “The Man” or flinging plates off the table during “Tolerate It,” she’s reaching even the most distant row. But when she enters those same stadiums to support her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, she has no desire to orchestrate the show.
“I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in. There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when the camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once,” Swift told Time, who has crowned her Person of the Year, in a recent interview. “I’m just there to support Travis. I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”
When Swift first attended a game at Arrowhead Stadium back in September, the stakes seemed higher than they actually were — at least from a public perspective. At that point, dating rumors had been making their rounds for a few months after Kelce expressed his disappointment in not being able to give Swift the friendship bracelet her made for her when the Eras tour stopped at this home base.
“I threw the ball in her court and, you know, I told her, ‘I’ve seen you rock the stage at Arrowhead, and you might have to come see me rock the stage at Arrowhead and see which one is a little more lit,’” Kelce told ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show shortly before Swift’s game day appearance. But it was the athlete’s public pining on his podcast New Heights that nudged the door open for their romance to bloom.
“This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” Swift said. “We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple. I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.”
Being pulled into Swift’s orbit was an adjustment for Kelce. “Obviously I’ve never dated anyone with that kind of aura about them…. I’ve never dealt with it,” he recently told the Wall Street Journal magazine. “But at the same time, I’m not running away from any of it.” With all of the attention placing a spotlight on the two of them, he said, his biggest concern was not being blinded by it — to “make sure I don’t say anything that would push Taylor away.”
Kelce and Swift seem to have fallen into a rhythm with one another. It’s her most high-profile relationship in years, bringing together the fandoms of two of America’s biggest passions: football and her music. “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there, and we don’t care,” Swift added. “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”
