“In a heated moment, I chose to greet hate with hate,” the athlete said of a recent altercation with a heckler at an Ohio State-Penn State who referred to his brother Travis Kelce using a slur
Over the weekend, Jason Kelce attended the Ohio State-Penn State game in Pennsylvania. Before the retired athlete, who previously played center for the Eagles, could make it inside, he found himself locked in a heated exchange with another attendee who used a homophobic slur while referencing his brother Jason Kelce's relationship with Taylor Swift. It was filmed by the heckler and by those who witnessed Kelce snatch his phone and smash it onto the ground. Kelce has since expressed regret for how he handled the altercation.
“I think everybody has seen on social media everything that took place this week. Listen, I'm not happy with anything that took place. I'm not proud of it,” Kelce said during ESPN's pregame show on Monday night. “In a heated moment, I chose to greet hate with hate. And I just don't think that that's a productive thing, I really don't. I don't think that it leads to discourse and it's the right way to go about things.”
In the viral video of the exchange, which garnered millions of impressions on X (formerly Twitter), a young man can be seen trailing behind Kelce and shouting: “Hey, Kelce. How does it feel your brother's a f-ggot dating Taylor Swift?”
The homophobic verbiage was directed toward the athlete's brother, Travis Kelce, the current tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. In another segment of the video captured by a different attendee, the initial heckler can be heard pleading for his phone after the athlete snatched it and threw it on the ground. “Who's the f-ggot now?” Kelce could be heard saying.
“In that moment, I fell down to a level that I shouldn't have,” Kelce continued on Monday. “The bottom line is I try to live my life by the golden rule that I've always been taught — treat people with common decency and respect. I'm gonna keep doing that moving forward, even though I fell short this week.”
The Kelce brothers co-host the New Heights podcast but have not shared a newly recorded episode since the incident. After expressing his regret about how the situation was handled on EPSN, Kelce noted, “I don't think this is the platform to necessarily go into more detail.”
