Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift, and...Yoko Ono??
Sexism, misogyny, and male arrogance in sports talk media is as bad as it's ever been
If you're reading this...
Congratulations, you're alive.
If that's not something to smile about,
then I don't know what is.
Chad Sugg, Monsters Under Your Head
It seems like everyone has an opinion on the budding relationship between Kansas City Chiefs TE Travis Kelce and pop superstar Taylor Swift, and why not, right? You’ve got two single 34-year-olds at the top of their respective games; both are fabulously talented, wildly successful, charismatic, funny, and enjoying the Hell out of life. Who can’t get behind that, right? Good on them. Even if they weren’t fabulously rich and famous, it would still probably be a good thing.
Of course, some haters out there are either jealous or see Taylor Swift as a distraction from Kelce’s performance on the field. Because all these Neanderthals care about is the Chiefs winning another Super Bowl. They don’t give a damn about Travis Kelce as a human being, nor do they grant him the right to a life outside of football.
The whole thing’s pretty silly. Especially now that Neanderthal sports talk personalities like Skip Bayless are beginning to weigh in on the Chiefs’ struggles this season. Bayless's assessment isn’t a huge surprise; he thinks it’s time to call Taylor Swift a “distraction” to what the Chiefs are trying to accomplish. That makes as much sense as calling the Chiefs a distraction to what Travis Kelce is trying to accomplish.
Like an adult football player can’t maintain a mature romantic off-field relationship AND maintain his focus on the field. Kelce’s an adult human being, not a football-playing robot.
The megawatt coupling of Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce and pop superstar Taylor Swift defined cozy companionship this fall. Swift has supported her new boyfriend at NFL games from New Jersey to Wisconsin, and Kelce has flown thousands of miles to watch her perform around the globe. The pair has been the subject of breathless coverage and sometimes unhinged social media speculation. But something shifted on Christmas Day, after the Chiefs were upset in a key game by the Las Vegas Raiders. Kelce, one of the Chiefs’ most important offensive weapons, failed to score a touchdown for the fifth game in a row.
Of course, Bayless knew precisely where to lay responsibility for the problem.
This is what happens when you view athletes as one-dimensional beings with no existence outside the lines. When they’re single, you can assume that their focus remains between the lines and that they only care about the game they’re fabulously compensated to play.
Then, when a woman comes along, she inevitably saps his strength and diverts his focus. Before long, she becomes an inevitable scapegoat if and when things start to head south. When the team struggles, or his performance isn’t what it has been, pundits need a reason to attribute the downturn.
Ah…it must be the woman’s fault….
But let’s flip that script, shall we? Why can’t the woman function as a support system, helping to prop up a man who’s fragile psyche may be about to let him down? Why can’t the woman be a shoulder to lean on in a world that still has trouble tolerating weakness in its athletic heroes?
Bayless wasn’t the only one who blamed Swift, at least in part, for the loss. Clay Travis, founder of conservative site OutKick and an outspoken Covid-19 conspiracy theorist, launched a dusty comparison to Yoko Ono: “Travis Kelce looks like he should retire. He’s been worthless the last seven or eight weeks. The double worthless Pfizer shots may have caught up with him. Either that or Taylor Swift is the Chiefs Yoko Ono. Maybe both.”
Once upon a time, a woman became a byword for destroying men’s professional lives, and yet here we are, still invoking Yoko Ono as if time and history haven’t shifted our perceptions of both feminism and John Lennon. Avant-garde artist Ono was once blamed for breaking up the Beatles, but people who can read should now understand the myriad factors behind the band’s dissolution, as well as the anti-Asian sentiment that fueled much of the hate.
Besides being facile, this theory doesn’t account for the reality that men have the right to change, grow, and develop new interests. An athlete, like any professional, doesn’t remain static. They’re whole and diverse human beings who maintain interests outside the lines…or someone to unburden themselves to. Some have businesses, some raise families, some have girlfriends, and some pursue passions like music or art.
Clay Travis’ assessment is one of the stupidest things I’ve read from any sentient being in quite some time. It’s barely worth acknowledging as a coherent string of words, much less an opinion, but it’s a prime example of the stupidity and sexism that still exists among sports pundits. Skip Bayless is famous for not being nearly as intellectually gifted and agile as he gives himself credit for. Besides having an ego the size of Chesapeake Bay, he’s as arrogant as the day is long.
Listening to him prattle on about sports is about as much fun as listening to Sean Hannity discoursing on politics. Both are well-paid for playing know-it-all jackasses, a role they both play exceedingly well.
Clay Travis? I don’t know enough about him to draw an informed opinion, but if first impressions mean anything, he’s a charm school dropout.
[B]laming Yoko Ono was never about the facts. It was about trying to tear down women who seemed to have power over men. Women who changed how we saw our heroes and who challenged our ideas of masculinity by making these powerful men seem even slightly vulnerable.
In the 1990s, the same thing happened to Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. The two musicians both had bands before meeting, but she was still dragged through the mud and blamed for Cobain considering changing the trajectory of his musical career — as if men can’t evolve as artists, be inspired, or wish for something different. Some conspiracy theorists even accused her of being responsible for his death, putting an unthinkably cruel twist on the sexist trope.
In this scenario, women can never win. They can only drag men down from the lofty heights they occupy. Women can only sap a man’s power and leave him a hollow shell of his prior self. Women make men less masculine, more vulnerable, and less willing to make the tremendous sacrifices it takes to reach the top of the mountain and achieve ultimate victory.
What a load of overwrought crap, eh? Yet this is the sort of petty bullshit women have had to deal with over the years. Whether it was Meghan Markle ruining Prince Harry or Jessica Simpson hampering Tony Romo’s performance as quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, women are too often blamed for ruining men.
One, men are quite capable of “ruining” themselves, and two, athletes aren’t one-dimensional caricatures who come out to play only on game days. They fabulously talented human beings who play kid’s games and are well-compensated for living out a fantasy for a few short years. But they still have to find their way in life outside the lines.
Before Taylor Swift there was Jessica Simpson, who dated Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo in the early aughts. Bayless had a problem with that relationship too, claiming that he was “very down” on Romo’s performance “because of his tumultuous relationship with Jessica Simpson, which I thought was affecting his ability to focus and dedicate himself to playing quarterback.”
On a Cowboys blog, Simpson was compared to both Ono and Memo Paris from “The Natural” (1984): “Is Jessica Simpson the football version of Memo Paris, the blond bombshell who was kryptonite to Roy Hobbs’ Wonderboy in ‘The Natural’? Everybody’s due a bad day at the office, but if Romo plays like this next week, Jessica Simpson will become the most hated celebrity significant other since Yoko Ono.”
The Ono “curse” has additionally been attached to country star Carrie Underwood (married to hockey star Mike Fisher), actress Olivia Munn (while dating quarterback Aaron Rodgers) and Spice Girls member Victoria Beckham (married to David Beckham).
Athletes aren’t machines. They’re simply talented human beings who’ve made sacrifices and put in long hours to become successful at what they do. And they’ve become successful mainly because of their focus and ability to filter out distractions.
Travis Kelce has said that when he’s on the football field, he’s 100% focused on football. That’s not hard to believe because that’s how he’s always played, but at 34, Father Time may be catching up with him. In a very physical game like football, the hits and injuries eventually catch up with players. That’s the reality of the game, and it has nothing to do with Taylor Swift.
[Athletes] are humans who have good and bad days, feelings, aches and pains, anxiety, and yes, new romantic partners. If the Chiefs had won every game since Swift and Kelce started dating, she would likely be hailed as a good-luck charm — because apparently women are magical objects, not people. Superstitions run rampant in sports culture, but so does sexism. And when emotions are high among sports fans, it’s helpful to find a scapegoat. Even better if that scapegoat is a “dumb blonde.”
Sometimes, crap just happens. “On offense, we struggled,” Chiefs head coach Andy Reid said in a press conference after the Christmas game. “That’s my responsibility to make sure we put the guys in the right position to make plays, and that didn’t happen the way we wanted it to. I take full responsibility for the way we played offensively there.”
Women aren’t magical objects who have a supernatural ability to ruin a man’s ability to perform between the lines. All you have to do is look at Travis’ brother, Jason Kelce, an offensive lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles who’s married with children. No one questions Jason’s performance, even though having a family is a huge time commitment.
All Travis has is a beautiful, high-profile girlfriend with a private jet. That seems like it would require much less energy than a family…yet you never hear people like Skip Bayless or Clay Travis talk about that.
Football is a team game. Teams win and lose, not individuals…and certainly not an individual like Travis Kelce, a Tight End who only has a chance to succeed when QB Patrick Mahomes throws him the ball. If that doesn’t happen, Kelce has a very long and unproductive afternoon.
So, yeah, I get it; the Travis Kelce-Taylor Swift romance makes for good copy, and generates a lot of clicks. But can we lose the sexism and the misogyny? Taylor Swift no more impacts Kelce’s performance than vice versa. They’re both professionals capable of focusing when the lights come up, and that’s all that counts.
Bliterhering idiots like Skip Bayless and Clay Travis can go to Hell for their ignorance, sexism, and misogyny. I'm willing to listen if they have something worthwhile to add to the conversation, but I’m not about to hold my breath on that count. They have little, if anything, useful to contribute to the public discourse, save for generating faux controversy.
And perhaps that’s the problem for never-weres like Bayless and Travis. Both Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have more talent in their thumbnail than those two wannabes possess in toto.
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Well written and supported, as usual. Ever since Bayless ran off Shannon Sharpe, I've not watched "Undefeated." Bayless has always been a horse's ass, he's insufferable. In any case, you're spot on about how women are scapegoated for the failures, real or perceived, of prominent men. It's tiresome, it's cliche, and it's also, at core, hateful. Misogyny is the world's only hatred older than antisemitism, and both are disgustingly still ascendant.