Jason Kelce and Philadelphia, center and city, a perfect fit entering a new era
The man is a phantom now, a blurry memory of beard and brawn barely visible after sleep deprivation, two beers and the passage of eight months mostly banished him to the subconscious.
I only remember his name was Dan.
The bar is more memorable since it’s now a personal staple. Open doors. Wood panel walls. Barstools beside an “Attack From Mars” pinball machine and a shelf of vintage figurines like E.T. and the Pillsbury Doughboy. The sort of people who host karaoke on a bartender’s birthday and will heat up a frozen pizza for you after the kitchen closes if you ask nicely.
Fishtown, some might say. Port Richmond, others. Another neighborhood tavern on another street corner of endless row houses and precariously parked cars. Phillies flags still flew though the local nine had fallen just days before Halloween. Parents later cracked beers on nearby stoops and mourned the lost season while little ghosts and skeletons held out their sacks.
Dan was hurting, too. Sure, the Eagles won. But their second-half comeback against the lowly Commanders still warranted a steady stream of suds. Dan clutched his beer and swiveled to educate the out-of-towner.
The mental health of a good chunk of the city quite literally depends on the fortunes of the Eagles and Phillies (and the Sixers and Flyers, Dan allowed). Dr. Lisa Corbin, a local therapist and director of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine’s counseling program, later told me some of her clients “become a bit more depressed, a bit more irritated and aggravated” when the teams aren’t doing well.
“What I’ve begun to do is try to instill that positivity,” she’d say. “But not too much. Because sometimes if I do too much people are going to be like, ‘Yeah, stop with that. Too much happiness.’”
And there’s that bite, that don’t-feed-me-any-of-that-bullsh– reflex that’s rooted in the city’s thirst for authenticity. Give it to me straight, Doc. Gimme pure, unadulterated Jim Beam with that PBR, and I better get change back from this five. That’s called a Citywide. That’s the mentality. You either won or you lost. If you gotta drink, I’ll drink with you. If you gotta climb that light pole, here’s my shoulders.
Well … Dan and I were drinking. “Give it to me straight, then,” I told him, still bleary-eyed from my road trip out of Houston. “What do I need to know about this place?”
Above the bar mirror, the TV flickered Eagles highlights on a postgame show. A bearded center cut down two defenders on a tricky end-around touchdown, a wrinkle to the offense’s infamous “Brotherly Shove.” In my memory, in similar trickery, the man on the screen and the man on the barstool look one and the same.
“If you want to get to know Philadelphia,” Dan answered. “Get to know Jason Kelce.”
Here we all are months later, a horde of cameras and microphones and tape recorders, all trying to capture something from a graying giant who hadn’t yet crafted the words to describe what it’s like to clean out a locker after 13 years.
So to be clear, the giant says, there will be no answers about retirement plans yet. And watch your step. The Great FedEx Wall of fan-mail packages have comically cleft Jordan Mailata from the rest of the room. Yes, such signs of finality are everywhere. But, look, let’s just talk about the season, OK?
… Fine. One story. April 30, 2011. Sixth round, 191st pick. NFL agent Jason Bernstein calls his client, a Clevelander, son to a seller of steel products and a self-starter in banking, a walk-on linebacker at Cincinnati whose exhaustive weight-room sessions yielded a respectable yet undersized offensive lineman. You have no idea how perfect this is. You’re gonna fit in great in Philadelphia.
Just try and think of anyone else atop the steps of the Museum of Art nearly seven years later, glistening in that green Mummer’s garb during the Super Bowl LII parade. There was the visage of vindication for a city of underdogs. To hell with Rocky. There, after 57 years of football misery, was a symbol of how Philadelphians saw themselves.
How strong is that sense of identity once that symbol must at long last go? Dr. Corbin herself had two clients talk about the former center unsolicited during their own sessions. So many are still sorting out their sense of ownership over a stranger.
Some can’t even imagine a world in which Kelce would deny them. On Memorial Day weekend, in Margate City, New Jersey, a woman berated Kelce’s wife, Kylie, after the couple reportedly declined to take a picture with her while on a date night. The woman later shared a statement that said “I should have recognized and respected their right to privacy from the onset.”
No, Kelce hasn’t vanished. He still has his podcast and made his broadcasting debut Thursday night. He still attends charity events. He still frequents the NovaCare Complex. But he’ll no longer play for the Eagles. It’s a new era. At the organization’s annual Eagles Autism Challenge, after other players had their moment to mingle before the charity bike ride began, Kelce quietly wove to the starting line just as the countdown commenced. “Was that Kelce?” a kid asked from atop her father’s shoulders. She wasn’t the only one leaning for one last look as Kelce pedaled around the bend.
But have I told you about Dan? And what he once told me? The inverse is also true.
If you want to get to know Jason Kelce, get to know Philadelphia.
Kelce’s speech at the Super Bowl LII victory parade has become legend. (Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images, Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
Above him is the first sunny sky in weeks. Around him is the disorder of Dickinson Square: parents pushing kids in strollers, dog owners pushing pets in strollers, the thrumming speakers of a blue-mullet bohemian whose toes wiggle on a yoga mat. A foam football slams into the turf hill like a mortar. The boy stands. On the back of his green tee is A.J. Brown’s name and number.
Nine other kids commence a pickup game of constant interruption. A boy wearing a long-sleeve “Jurassic World” shirt spreads his hands out wide, a pterodactyl annihilating the flow of any action. He squawks, “Incoming!”, as the jingle of a nearby Mister Softee truck adds a soundtrack of terror. A kid alerts his mother. “It’s an ice cream truck!” Where? “There!” She leans from the park bench, hands her son a bill and tells him he can’t spend more than $5.
This is Sarah Robbins. Indifferent to the Eagles but an admirer of Kelce’s family. See, when you’re 34, when you once moved to rural Ohio for a year with an ex-boyfriend, only to move back — “Incoming!” — because you missed the frankness of Philadelphians, you value support and always knowing where you stand. It’s not niceness for the sake of niceness; it’s never having to waste time guessing.
Friendly or not, people look out for each other. Isn’t that what niceness is? Nine years ago, just after nightfall, Robbins exited her Point Breeze place and saw a guy getting robbed. Help! She called the police, and, heartbeats later, found herself in the backseat of a squad car consoling the guy as they swerved through South Philly until the robbers were detained. They were strangers. They were neighbors. They never saw each other again.
Robbins still keeps her eyes open. She doesn’t walk with headphones. She thinks twice about where her keys are. She wears a belt bag, not a purse. But these are also a mother’s precautions. She likes how Pennsport opens her son’s eyes in other ways. See all those kids playing ball? They all arrived an hour ago — “Incoming!” — and none of them had known each other. Didn’t Kelce say in his retirement speech that the NFL represents the “melting pot” of America?
Robbins’ son struts back gripping a waffle cone topped with a mountainous swirl of vanilla ice cream. He hands her two dollar bills. The game is still going. A kid in khakis hurls a pass to another who’s wearing a surgical mask like a chinstrap. A small boy with a “Fightin’ Phils” shirt whacks another kid with a Croc he’d removed from his left foot. Robbins’ son turns to his mother.
“I’m going to ask if I can go play.”
Under the trundling roar of an elevated train, the bouncer stamps my hand. The vestibule door opens like a crypt, releasing the howl of amplifiers. The four-piece band beckons with a dozen strong guitar strokes, all the same chord. Another dozen. Ghoulish figurines stare down from an antique bar mirror: an Easter bunny, a snowman, a hatching bird. A painted portrait of an old bearded man who looks like Daniel Day-Lewis features a cut-out dialogue bubble that reads “IT HURTS TO ROCK.”
The only nondescript part of a venue called Kung Fu Necktie was the man I was meeting. Pete Long leaned against the back wall in a black Eagles hoodie and baseball cap. The bandleader of a pop-punk indie group called My Cousin’s Girlfriend’s House, Long was born in Bethlehem, Pa., on a day the Eagles beat the Cowboys (Dec. 10, 1995). His father was infamously glued to the game when Long exited his mother’s womb.
Behold, the birth of another Philly fanatic. Another training camp visitor at Lehigh University. Look, Dad! There’s Jason Kelce! They watched his entire career from their season tickets in Section 229. When the Eagles hosted the 2022 NFC Championship Game, Long pushed his bandmates to drive their rented Toyota Sienna through the night from Corbin, Ky., the last leg of a three-town tour, and arrived at the Linc in time for kickoff.
Oh, it hurts to rock. You’ve gotta have a little masochism in you to hit the road for experience and exposure knowing the trip won’t snag a cent. This band has slept in a venue owner’s living room and ate his chili for breakfast. They saved up $50 and slept in a Days Inn, all four of them in a single room. (Two beds. No A/C. Long slept on the floor.) They slept in that Sienna, driving in three-hour shifts. They slept in a festivalgoer’s house that had a stripper pole near the door. (Bandmate Brian Quirk: “I regret to inform you, no one tried it out.”) They’ve slept nearly everywhere.
“It’s the most fun thing in the world,” Long says. “You’re fortunate to be in a band.”
But Kung Fu Necktie’s $4 mystery beers don’t buy themselves. Long strung together miserable jobs until he moved back to Philly a few years ago to recapture some normalcy. “What is normal?” he says now. “You just do whatever.” He slammed the car door on all that anxiety. He finds peace in solo rides, in a simple Point A and Point B. Reaching gigs, he positions himself stage left, where he can hide behind Quirk, the frenetic frontman.
On NFL Sundays, Long stays indoors and never changes out of the clothes he woke up wearing. That boundary inspired him to pen the lyric, “Sunday’s sacred only in the fall when we’re bleeding green.” He wore a Kelce jersey in the music video for “All For Love & All For Nothing,” a single from MCGH’s upcoming EP, in which every bandmate is tied to a red rope that yanks them to their daily responsibilities while they try to play on a ramshackle stage:
Stretched in every direction
Candle lit both sides at once
Running weary, running thin
Burning ashes, scarring skin
Long heard Kelce say in his retirement speech that life “can challenge yourself to points of self-doubt, and that is a dangerous place to be.” He heard Kelce say “one of the greatest things a human being can give another is belief.” Last August, as Long was leaving a Mt. Joy concert at The Mann, the band welcomed Kelce onstage during their encore. Long heard Kelce lead the crowd in singing, “Fly, Eagles, Fly.”
“He gives you a big speech,” Long says, “and you’re like, ‘I’m ready to run through a wall.’”
On her right forearm is tattooed, “Better the pain than…”
On her left, “… to remain the same.”
On her phone, in her shaking palms, is a video of herself touring a model home.
On June 28, Kali Lamb closed on her own house. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a backyard in Brewerytown using a $75,000 soft loan from a city-funded program. She stared up into spacious closets, a five-foot survivor who once sought shelter in Septa stairwells. Sober after years of substance use, Lamb smiles as her case manager, Brad Meck, marvels at her transformation.
“Who the f— am I?” Lamb laughs. “Like, it’s insane.”
She’s a 36-year-old paralegal at a non-profit law firm who relishes the leverage her letterhead affords when writing employers to inform them it’s unlawful to deny her clients jobs because of their criminal records. She’s a felon, too. Three cases, plus two misdemeanors. She’s never forgotten the dehumanization of her arrests, of being forced to shake out her lice-ridden hair in search of hidden weapons but, please, dear god, don’t take off her socks.
She’s still constantly apologizing for things. She says she’s “still in trauma” — sorry, Freudian slip — “therapy” to silence that voice in the background that says, “You’re not good enough.” That voice hasn’t shut up for 18 years. Drugs only drowned it out.
She’s got an eighth-note tattooed on her right wrist, which matches her guitar-playing father’s. He bailed her out for a DUI when she was 20, then proudly bought her a whisky at an Outback Steakhouse. “Jeez,” she says, “he had no idea.” She’d been arrested six times before.
Lamb started injecting drugs at 16. She left home in North Carolina and drifted north. She worked at a Philly bar for five years. She met her dealer in Kensington. By early 2020, she noticed cuts on her fingers that wouldn’t heal. She fell asleep at work. Someone said they’d found a needle in the bathroom. In what she now calls an insane response to losing her job, she called her landlord. She moved out.
There are three ways people survive on the streets long-term, Lamb says: 1) “sell yourself,” 2) “sell drugs,” or 3) “steal sh– and sell it.” She fell into the third category. Theft was communal. She’d see other unhoused people in the same types of stores, selling to the same types of buyers. Ten of them formed a protective tribe. They slept in the transportation authority stairwell near City Hall, which Lamb thought was a safer stay than Kensington although it was covered in urine. They talked about their families. They talked about what they’d do once they got sober. They’d revive each other with Narcan if anyone overdosed in the night.
Lamb hid her substance use for so long. Meeting others opened the door to sobriety, she says, “because I had to accept the fact that I was living with this before I could make a change with it.” Compassion became gravitational. When Lamb caught Hepatitis C, she received treatment from Prevention Point, a nonprofit organization that occupies an old church on Kensington Ave.
Prevention Point was one of two dozen charities that received portions of the $1.25 million raised from “A Philly Special Christmas,” the holiday album recorded in 2023 by Kelce, Mailata and Lane Johnson. Kelce, in his retirement speech, said learning former Eagles coach Andy Reid’s son, Garrett, had died from an accidental heroin overdose during training camp in 2012 was “the most intense moment I’ve ever shared with a group of men.” Kelce said “the outpouring of support and love for my friend and the Reid family at the funeral soon after… was truly remarkable.”
One day, Lamb suddenly couldn’t breathe. She had a friend call an ambulance. She spent a month in the hospital treating a kidney abscess, a tube attached to her chest draining pus and fluid from her lungs. Her father didn’t take her calls; her mother had died while Lamb was unhoused. She found out her certified recovery specialist had once lived on the streets, too. “Are you happy?” she asked him. I can’t tell you all my days are good, the specialist said. But it’s a totally different existence today. Lamb never returned to the stairwell.
“You need someone outside of yourself when you are at your lowest to tell you that you are worth it,” Lamb says. “And I can’t tell you enough how important that is. Like, having someone like Brad and people like Prevention Point. Because I feel that about myself now. I love myself. But there was a time, like, I didn’t care. Because when you’ve been living a life that hasn’t had success, to make this idea of success, you don’t even know what it looks like.”
It looks like Jason Kelce is on every TV screen. He’s sleeveless. He’s sobbing. His image flickers above the barstool where he met his wife.
It’s March 4. Kelce has been retired for only two hours. The barstool is empty. Jake Collins, the manager, leans against the counter from the other side. This spot inside Buffalo Billiards is now part historical marker, part pick-up line. Did you know this is where…
Philly’s version of a meet-cute has become folklore: a 27-year-old Kelce, hammered after the Eagles’ 2014 Christmas party, messaged Kylie on Tinder to meet him at the bar only to slump asleep in the stool less than an hour after she arrived. “Not the best first impression from me,” the former center smirked in the Amazon Prime documentary “Kelce.” Kylie gave him another chance. They’ve been married six years and have three kids.
Collins was working security at the door that night. He grabbed Kelce’s arms, former Eagles nose tackle Beau Allen grabbed Kelce’s legs, and they laughed and cursed and tossed Kelce into the back of the bar manager’s car. They drove two blocks to Kelce’s apartment in Old City, dropped him in the doorway and returned to the bar.
“He was the heaviest couch I ever lifted,” Collins says.
The story fits in Philadelphia, it belongs to Buffalo Billiards, right next to the hole former Flyer Scott Hartnell kicked into the wall under the dart board. Would the same story be as endearing in any other city? Would it be as amusing involving any other player? Kelce’s televised voice seemed to answer for the city that would love you “if you show effort, aggression, desire, the will to fight,” if “you love it the way you love your brother.”
But it’s more than that, Collins says. Philadelphians — infamous for their tough outer shell — saw in Kelce someone who was comfortable being vulnerable, comfortable sharing publicly the full range of feelings they harbor inside, reserved for only their most intimate relationships, or sometimes no one at all.
“That leaves an impact on people,” Collins says. “I think his ability to show emotion and his ability to be himself and really show how he feels about things — anger, sadness — dude just cried through a 55-minute speech today. When’s the last time you’ve seen that?”
Collins fills another glass. I look toward the window, a TV along its wall. There was Kelce. There was the city.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Eric Baradat, Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)
