In a culture of faux ‘authenticity,’ Eagles’ Jason Kelce shows what the real thing looks like

When it was released earlier this month, Kelce — the immersive documentary about Jason Kelce, his 2022 season, and the prospect of his retirement — shot to the top of Amazon Prime’s viewing rankings.

Its immediate popularity wasn’t surprising and shouldn’t have been. Kelce has had most Eagles fans eating out of his hand for years now, and the film featured particular aspects and storylines that distinguished it from the whitewashed hagiographies — on Steph Curry, on Johnny Manziel, on the Florida football program — that pass for sports “documentaries” these days.

Kelce isn’t about just one Kelce, and that’s a major reason it works. The film focuses, too, on Kylie Kelce, Jason’s wife, and the daily strains and stresses she experiences as the spouse of an NFL player (and, throughout the movie, a pregnant spouse at that). And it has a terrific foil in Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, the naughty younger brother who needed Jason’s guidance and support, who helped ruin Jason’s chances of winning a second Super Bowl, and who now may or may not be dating one of the biggest pop stars in the world.

But there’s one moment that truly sets Kelce apart: a scene in which Jason admits that he is concerned about the damage that he is doing to his body and his brain by playing pro football. Will he contract chronic traumatic encephalopathy? Or dementia? Or Alzheimer’s disease? He doesn’t utter these terms out loud, but it’s obvious they are on his mind.

“There have been little things that are not big things yet but are going to turn into big things the longer I play,” he says during the documentary. “Not to address the elephant in the NFL room, but I am fearful about what the impacts of playing football are going to mean long-term.

“I have no idea what’s going to happen with that. … It might come back to bite me.”

It was not a sure thing that Kelce and the filmmakers — former Eagles linebacker Connor Barwin among them — would include the scene in the final version of the film.

“We thought about whether it should be in or shouldn’t be — at least, I did,” Kelce said Thursday. “We wanted the documentary to be as real as possible and to be as authentic as possible. Ultimately, we felt like including it. We certainly didn’t want it to be a main theme of it, because I don’t think it’s a main theme to players or me.

“It’s something that’s in the background that you’re aware of, and there are things I’m looking forward to in trying to mitigate the eventual ramifications of that. It was important for us in the documentary across the board to be authentic and open and let people in to what was going on — in my head, an NFL player’s head, the family, the team.”

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There’s a word, an important one, that Kelce used more than once in that answer: authentic. Authenticity is the most valuable and sought-after quality among public figures in our culture — the veneer of authenticity, anyway.

It’s the ready-made excuse for athletes who paint themselves as real and raw on social media, for TV heads and talk-show hosts who claim to tell it how it is and speak truth to power, for political leaders who act like cretins and dress like slobs. I’m just being me goes a long way these days, maybe longer than it ever has, provided the part you’re playing appeals to people who are already sympathetic to your cause, who are inclined to support or agree with you, who are happy to close their eyes and plug their ears to anything that might disrupt life inside their silo.

That tunnel-vision appeal drives so much coverage, content creation, and media consumption nowadays — from politics to sports, from the important to the trivial — that it feels as if recognizing certain truths or asking inconvenient questions carries with it a kind of danger: danger of unleashing a social-media mob, of sacrificing access to the institution you’re covering, of upsetting your core audience.

If the price of getting Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow to sit down for interviews is that Aaron Hernandez must not be mentioned, fine. We’ll pretend that Hernandez was never part of Florida’s program and those pesky murders never happened. If glossing over Manziel’s mental-health and addiction problems is what it takes to reaffirm his folk-hero status to Texas A&M fans, so be it. It’s all under the guise of being authentic, when what’s really going on is image-burnishing and agenda-following.

What we’re sacrificing, in small increments, is the ability to see what’s six inches in front of our face, the willingness to deal with the world as it is. Crime is up. The election wasn’t stolen. The planet is warming. The president is doddering. And football punishes its practitioners in ways that no one, not even the practitioners themselves, can ignore.

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Jason Kelce didn’t dwell on the darkness that might blanket him once his NFL career ends. He just acknowledged a reality that is obvious to everyone, even if too many of us don’t want to think about it while we’re cheering and chanting and checking our fantasy league standings. He said this might all come back to bite him. In today’s age, when being genuine usually means just being the right kind of phony, those words felt like a revolutionary act.