'Kelce' and the twilight of the NFL's renaissance man
The Prime Video film about the Eagles' veteran center is the year's best sports documentary
Last spring, my 13-year-old son participated in the Philadelphia Eagles' annual charity bike ride, where average Joes of all ages who have raised money for the Eagles Autism Foundation get to ride their bikes through the streets of Philadelphia with active Eagles players.
During the race, my son ended up biking, for several blocks, next to Eagles center Jason Kelce. He'd been feeling pretty good about himself, hanging with an elite professional athlete, and he should have. But then again Kelce is 35 years old, weighs nearly 300 pounds, has undergone numerous knee surgeries, and probably doesn't get to bike recreationally as much as my son and his friends do.
I share this story because a lot of people around Philadelphia have Jason Kelce stories of their own. Maybe they ran into him at the bar or the carwash, or they know the guy who made his costume for the Super Bowl parade. Or perhaps they've personally admired one of his large collection of shirts celebrating his favorite movie, The Big Lebowski.
Kelce, the new documentary about a year in the life of the Eagles' lineman, goes right where so many recent sports documentaries have gone wrong. It chose a worthy subject and explored him in a way that didn't feel like a commercial for him. Sure, the filmmakers ran into some luck with just how special the year turned out to be. But they make the most of the opportunity.
Kelce, which is available to watch on Prime Video today, is pretty clearly the best sports documentary of the year. And the key is Jason Kelce himself. He's an everyman in a lot of ways — go to an Eagles game, and you'll see a couple hundred guys who look just like him — but there are a lot more layers to Kelce than you thought there were. To paraphrase a line from the namesake of the bridge near the Eagles' stadium, Jason Kelce is large, and he contains multitudes.
It is fair to say the documentary gods smiled upon Don Argott and Sheena Joyce. The Philadelphia-based filmmaking duo first set out to depict the 2021 season of Kelce, the 13-year NFL veteran who was expecting that season to be his last. As the season began, he found himself weighing a series of post-football options, from a potential media career to coaching to real estate ventures to a cow farm that he owns in Missouri.
But 2021 came and went, and the project continued into 2022. During that year, quite a few very eventful things took place. Kelce and his younger brother Travis, a Kansas City Chiefs tight end, launched a successful podcast, appeared together on Saturday Night Live, and became the first pair of brothers to play on opposing teams in the Super Bowl. Their mother Donna, with her Eagles/Chiefs hybrid jerseys, emerged as a media star during Super Bowl week.
The Eagles re-established themselves as an elite team, with Kelce blocking for emergent superstar quarterback Jalen Hurts, and Kelce's wife Kylie spent the season pregnant with their third daughter, bringing her personal OB-GYN with her to the Super Bowl and having the baby a few days later. The team, led by Kelce and his fellow offensive linemen, even released a Christmas album, "A Philly Special Christmas," although it doesn't appear that singing is among Kelce's viable post-retirement career paths.
The Eagles lost that Super Bowl, but Jason Kelce, despite all that talk of retirement, is once again suiting up for the team this season.
In the film, we see a lot of Kelce at home, with his wife and kids, and in a poker game with a bunch of fellow players, including his college and Eagles teammate Connor Barwin. (Barwin, a retired linebacker who during his Eagles career used to bike around town and go to indie rock shows, is an executive producer of both the Christmas album and the movie.) We also see a great deal of Kelce's mother and father, who are long divorced but appear to have remained on good terms.
The Kelce film is great because it takes one of the NFL's most interesting players and makes him even more fascinating than you thought he was. We see him legitimately torn over whether he can justify putting his body through an NFL season, and also about what the best path forward after he retires (I would imagine he has at least one media job waiting for him, either locally or nationally, the moment he announces his retirement, and he'll hold that job for decades.)
We also see him modeling a specific and positive type of masculinity- he's a big strong guy with a beard who favors t-shirts from brewing companies and Lebowski sweaters. But he also shows a sensitive side, doting on his young daughters and not afraid to show emotion or pain.
Jason Kelce is a rare professional athlete to play his whole career in Philadelphia and remain beloved the entire time. His participation in the team that won Super Bowl LII in 2018 — and his loud, profane speech at the victory rally, delivered in a full Mummer's Parade wizard costume — will forever be legendary in Philadelphia, and very much played a part in transforming the city's sports culture.
The documentary, to its credit, mostly avoids cliches about Philly sports and fandom. No one ever says "You gotta understand- we're a blue-collar town,” and it’s not full of references to snowballs or Santa Claus or tossed batteries. And yes, the film is over-reliant on sports talk radio soundbites, but that's something it has in common with every other documentary about Philadelphia sports that's been produced in the last 25 years.
It hasn't been a great stretch for sports documentaries lately, with lots of quantity but not so much quality. ESPN appears to have mostly lost interest in its 30 for 30 series, while most episodes of Netflix's Untold are unfocused and half-baked. HBO's Hard Knocks used to be an annual highlight, but this year it was just Aaron Rodgers greeting celebrity visitors and ranting like an ass.
Most documentaries about elite athletes, especially basketball players, are stage-managed vanity projects that try to mimic The Last Dance but leave out all of the interesting and revelatory parts. They also tend to be multiple parts and 7-to-10 hours long when two hours would have been enough. Meanwhile, as The Ankler's Entertainment Strategy Guy notes, it doesn't appear that very many people are watching most of these sports docs.
But Kelce is the exception. Even if, much like the subject's favorite movie character, you "hate the fucking Eagles."