Jason Kelce ended his Eagles career with a speech that was raw and real and completely him
At the only Super Bowl celebration this city has known, Kelce got everyone whooping and cheering with him. Then on Monday, he choked everyone’s breath.
It was humbling to listen to Jason Kelce’s retirement speech Monday and know that he’s a better writer than anyone who covered his career with the Eagles. Of all the accomplishments of Kelce’s 13 years in the NFL — the six first-team All-Pro selections and the seven Pro Bowl selections and the two Super Bowl appearances and the Super Bowl win and the countless victories in beer-chugging contests throughout the Philadelphia region — maybe this one stands above all of them: As of the moment he completed his remarks inside the NovaCare Complex auditorium, he had delivered the two most memorable public addresses in this city’s recent history. No mayor, no president, no government official, no other athlete or celebrity comes close.
No Mummers costume this time, either. All that was needed was all that Kelce and the setting delivered. He showed up in the attire one might see him in after a game or practice — sleeveless T-shirt, sandals, nothing formal, all pretense stripped away. He was going to be what he had been since his arrival here in 2011. He was going to be authentic, however long it took.
So he scrolled through his smartphone for the words he had written and unfurled the best valediction Philadelphia has ever heard from an athlete, as good as these moments get.
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Speaking and listening
The only other sounds in the auditorium were the clicking of photographers’ cameras and the slight sniffles of Kelce’s friends and family members. In and around the city, restaurants and bars stopped and went silent as patrons clustered around television and phone screens to listen and watch and weep. They were mirror images of each other — those taking in the words, the one speaking them.
It took Kelce 45 seconds, after sitting down, just to get the first line out — “There I lay” — and it took him another 39 seconds and several heavy breaths before he could bring himself to repeat the line and share an anecdote about a collision in a practice when he was 12. He spoke of the smell of freshly mowed grass, of the joy of playing football in a blizzard, of the freedom and exhilaration he derived from a sport that demands its competitors hit and be hit in return. It took him more than 35 minutes, out of a 40-minute speech, before he uttered the word “retiring.”
From 25 feet away, you could see tears, fat and hot, falling into his lap. At one point, Allison Waddington of the Eagles’ media relations department hurried toward her co-worker Brett Strohsacker, who was standing near the dais. In her right hand was a pink box of Kleenex. In her left was a beige hand towel. Strohsacker grabbed the towel and tossed it to Kelce. Tissues wouldn’t do. Tissues had no chance.
He joked about Nick Foles’ and Doug Pederson’s … manhoods in calling the Philly Special in Super Bowl LII. He dropped a couple of F-bombs … because he is … was … a professional football player, and professional football players drop F-bombs, and it wasn’t gratuitous when he did it, just a byproduct of the culture he had inhabited for so long. And he did inhabit it. For a long time, it was everything to him. It had to be.
What Kelce’s words and emotions Monday did, or should have done, is remind everyone of the all-consuming nature of professional football. The men who play it give all of themselves to it, for the sport demands that of them: the physical punishment and sacrifice, the mental and emotional strain. The most telling and meaningful portions of Kelce’s remarks — the moments when he let the world know, really understand, why he was finally walking away — came when he acknowledged that he had reached a stage of life “that increasingly brings me more fulfillment off the field than it does on.” He couldn’t think of anything better or more important than being a great husband to his wife and a great father to his three daughters. The scales had shifted for him. It was time.
Can he top this?
The Eagles did not make anyone else available to speak to the media Monday, in large part because no one — not Nick Sirianni, not Howie Roseman, not Jeff Stoutland, not even Travis Kelce or Kylie Kelce or anyone else in the Kelce family — wanted to follow him. What else was there to be said? Who dares to fire off a one-liner after Carlin or Pryor or Seinfeld finishes a set? What band wants to take the stage once the Stones have played “Gimme Shelter?”
Funny, though: Kelce managed to pull off that trick. He managed to top himself. At the only Super Bowl celebration this city has known, he got everyone whooping and cheering with him. Then on Monday, he choked everyone’s breath. “That wasn’t my speech,” he said of that scene of him six years ago, dressed in purple, screaming until he was hoarse. “That was Philadelphia’s.” This one was his, all his. It was a match for the man who delivered it: raw and real to the end. Jason Kelce wouldn’t want him or his career remembered any other way. My God, would anyone?