The Passion of Jason Kelce

Jason Kelce is normal. Sure, he’s 6-foot-3 and weighs 270 pounds (down from 295) and bound for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Yes, he signed a podcast deal with his younger brother by 23 months, Travis, for nine figures. Perhaps you’ve heard of Travis’ wife, whose fame is so vast it has its own orbit, which has drawn the elder Kelce and his family into the orbit, too. Jason also owns a beer company, an apparel company, a small herd of cows in an organic beef venture and, as of last year, he’s an investor in Sullivan County Golf Club, two hours north of New York City.

But aside from all these things, he’s just like you and me. Case in point, he’s late for his tee time at Sullivan County, a scrappy little nine-holer that was rescued, in part, by golf writer Tom Coyne, who managed to coax Bill Murray and later Kelce into investing. After a redesign, the course’s new greens are still scruffy, the two-man maintenance crew doing the work of a dozen, but the property is rounding into form. The renovations to the restaurant, bar and pro shop, which don’t rely on Mother Nature’s cooperation, have come off splendidly. The white walls with pops of blue and modern furniture make the inside feel almost like a Crate & Barrel showroom.

That golf exists here at all is a testament to the game’s hold on our imaginations. The landscape of the Catskills has always been better suited to outdoor pastimes like hiking, hunting and fishing. Yet, this course has been in continuous operation since 1925. Its fairways carve into mountains that rise high above the greens and tilt with the grade of the hillsides they rest upon. You’ll find no pretense or top-100 aspirations here. This is just golf for those who love it. Jeans and a sweatshirt are just fine. 

Like any other middle-aged man after a car ride—and one extra pop the night before—Kelce steps from the vehicle tentatively, as if crossing a crevasse, his hips and back
knotted from sitting and in need of a good stretch. He could invest in nearly anything and play golf anywhere, but he’s here.

Kelce is only two years removed from his football career. It’s not hard to picture him still wearing his Philadelphia Eagles uniform darkened by sweat, his cheeks pinched by his helmet, the cold air biting at his bare arms, but the brute’s demeanor on the range is docile. He pushes a handful of balls toward me, encouraging me to take a few swings, too. His game is a work in progress, just as it is for the rest of us.

“Every time I get my driver fixed up, then all of a sudden I can’t hit my irons, or I can’t chip. Then I’ll put a bunch of time into chipping, and then I’m terrible off the tee.” Today, he’s fighting the driver so much that he never takes its headcover off, opting instead for his mini-driver, which he can bust about 280 with just a slight tail of fade.

His entourage is five. There’s the head of his family office and business affairs, his security guy, an attaché who is a Mr. Fix-It, his longtime agent Jason Berstein and Alejandro Villanueva, a former player for the Steelers. The group feels less like Kelce, Inc., than a collection of friends who’ve known him for a long time. Before we head out to play, we grab beers from the clubhouse (Garage Beers, of course, Kelce’s company) and tee off as a sixsome.

Kelce quickly sets up a side-game with Bernstein for a hundred bucks, steps to the first tee and booms the mini about a hundred yards short of the green. From far behind, Bernstein puts his approach pin-high just off the putting surface. Kelce fats his. On the cart ride to his third, Kelce laments the strike. Bernstein hits a good chip. When Kelce’s putt to tie Bernstein misses, Kelce lets out a thunderous F-bomb. The sound jolts everyone to attention, and the temperature of the air changes. Kelce’s eyes narrow, and his enormous chest swells somehow bigger. Wry smiles from his crew tell me this is a familiar story. No matter how genial their friend might be, he is a very competitive human being.

When I ask Kelce why he has invested in Sullivan County Golf Club, he says he was drawn to its reclamation story after meeting Coyne as a guest on The Golfer’s Journal podcast. He appreciated what Coyne was trying to do and what public courses like this can mean to the game. As a kid, Kelce and his brother played regularly at Highland Park on the east side of Cleveland, where their father dropped them off with second-hand clubs from Play it Again Sports. (“Most of our sports equipment came from there.”) Kelce is pretty sure his father was using the course as a de facto babysitter. As he has taken up the game anew and played more in retirement, he sees the importance of these venues. “There’s a lot of people that view golf as a rich person’s game, and that is a very true aspect of it. But there’s also this other aspect of what’s happening in golf at courses like this, municipal courses, and courses I grew up on that is not that. The breadth of people and individuals from all walks of life that play the game is great. Whenever you have something that unites people from all different walks of life, that’s kind of where I like to be.” 

Kelce’s post-football career was supposed to be quieter. While he was always going to be involved in investments and business deals—he wasn’t going to spend his days in a rocking chair—the calculus of it all changed when Kelce became mega famous the year before he retired. The Amazon documentary “Kelce” about the brothers probably raised his profile enough to put Monday Night Football commentating in the offing. Then a month before he and Travis inked the “New Heights” podcast with Amazon’s Wondery audio network, Travis and Taylor Swift went public that they were dating.

The other seminal moment that made Kelce a household name was the week after the Eagles were eliminated from the NFL playoffs in 2024. Jason traveled to Buffalo with his wife, Kylie, who has her own popular podcast, “Not Gonna Lie With Kylie Kelce,” to watch Travis in the playoffs with Swift in tow. The broadcast that winter day was repeatedly drawn to a shirtless Jason Kelce, ripping beers and screaming in ecstasy. At one point, he left the open window of the suite to fetch a young girl with a Swift sign to the box. Kylie’s voice could be heard over and over imploring him to return. A very public everyman and pitchman was born.

Between then and now, Kelce has become perhaps the most famous offensive lineman of all time, a position often relegated to anonymity. He has hosted a late-night show on ESPN and pitched dozens of products outside of his own companies. For a time, he was seemingly everywhere. Not quite Swiftian but similarly, almost everything he does is a news event. Just before we played golf, there was a dustup over comments he made regarding the NFL having too many games that weren’t played on Sundays. When I ask him how it feels to make news every time he speaks and about those comments specifically, he says, “I thought it was a pretty soft comment. I was just saying they might want to be careful because Sunday is an important day in football.” Regarding his fame he is sanguine, understanding how it can be utilized. “The whole goal of the comment is to create a conversation around it. Our family has had a heightened awareness on that, and a lot of that’s because of the fan base that has been built, obviously, in my own career, Travis’s career, and who Travis is about to marry, right?”

If there is a price to pay for such exposure, it’s the inevitable moments of backlash. That came harshest for Jason Kelce after his appearance at the 2026 Masters Par 3 Contest, where much of the online chatter was critical of his presence. When I bring it up, Kelce cuts me off, shouting in mock enthusiasm, “Shrink the game, baby!”  He believes many misunderstood the purpose of his presence there, which was to be jovial and celebrate golf and the way the game is evolving.

Asked to be at the event by his employers at ESPN as well as the green jackets of Augusta National Golf Club, Kelce says he was very mindful of the stage he was walking onto. “A lot of people don’t want to see the tradition of Augusta and what it has meant changed. I don’t think we really did anything that drastically different, but I do understand the pushback because I think the game of golf is so rooted in tradition and history,” Kelce says, though he is also quick to assert that golf is different now, and can recite some of the hard supporting data. For example, the National Golf Foundation reports that golf participation is up 41 percent over the past six years and is approaching 50 million golfers. More anecdotally, the number of hats at premier golf resorts missing vowels or with backward printing point to new entrants with new attitudes.

“Golf is probably changing more now than it ever has,” Kelce says, “It’s growing, which causes a lot of that change, and I think it’s very natural when there’s so much growth and change happening, especially if it’s something you’ve loved and done your whole life, to want to keep that thing the way it is.” 

About that tee shot he hit during the Par 3, Kelce first says, “Being respectful was my main goal.” When the opportunity to do so was first presented, he didn’t know if he would take the shot, but the desire was there. When he ultimately did take the shot, he says he was so nervous his back was shaking. “I’ve felt my knees shake. I’ve felt my ankles shake. I didn’t know your midsection could shake.”

Leif Edgar, who works with Kelce’s family office and has known him since their college days at the University of Cincinnati, says the better memory of the 2026 Masters was when a high school volunteer came up to Kelce near Amen Corner to tell him he was a fan and that he was an offensive lineman, too. “Five minutes later, Jason is down in a three-point stance and showing this kid how to come off the line and get leverage over his opponent.” 

Kelce loves to have a great time. He’ll drink beers shirtless at a winter playoff game or beat Neal Shipley in a chugging contest (by a good five seconds) during a TGL match, but away from the cameras, he slows down and is thoughtful and considerate. Several of his college friends I spoke with say the duality of his personality was always there, that deep conversations are as much a part of what he lives for as relaxing with a few beers. In high school, he attended an outdoors camp near Shaker Lakes and was often content to just sit beside a tree, drawing or writing in a journal. His business investments are driven by his interests. Profit isn’t the primary motivation in any, just a bonus. His apparel company, Underdog, takes its name from his speech after the Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2018 in which he declared “Underdogs are hungry dogs.” The clothing is manufactured in the United States and, Kelce says, is about honoring the diligence and dignity of work. “We obviously want to grow and make money, but we also want to do things that have a sense of purpose and meaning.” 

During the photoshoot for this story, as Kelce poured Garage Beers from the tap, a new keg offered nothing but pints of foam. When I kidded him later that if all of America could see his pour technique, he’d lose a lot of credibility. He played along, aghast. “What was that?!” At turns jocular and reflective, Kelce comes across as self-aware and doesn’t take himself or his image too seriously.

Various employees came up to introduce themselves to him, and with each Kelce was gracious, thanking them for their work and their time. He did the same with a few golfers who wandered over after their rounds to also thank him for his investment. That Kelce feels he is investing in people really is what makes Sullivan County fit into his portfolio, a word he wouldn’t use. “A big reason I invested here is this relationship I have with Tom, and I think that the story here and what he was doing individually caused that investment to happen.”

He and Travis have a theory that your personality will determine your playing position. Travis, as more of an artist, drifted toward receiving and has a sense of improvisation when he plays. Jason is much more analytical, which suits the position of center. “I think it’s no coincidence that we ended up playing the positions we did. At center you have to be very prepared and think about all the possible outcomes that can happen leading up to the game. What will this call do? How will that affect the attack? Will this happen? How does that affect the running back or the quarterback? No surprise I ended up on the offensive line.”

When asked how that impacts his golf, Jason concedes, “Thinking is not always better with this game.” At Rolling Green Golf Club in Springfield, Pa., where he holds an annual charity event, he once shot 100 with a 13 on one hole. “I went from bunker to bunker to bunker.” This past summer in Tahoe, at the American Century Celebrity Championship, Jason bet and lost to Travis over who would dress as a member of the Blue Man Group on their podcast.

For all Jason’s everyman bona fides, his love of a good time and being one of the guys, on the golf course he also comes across as someone who approaches every facet of life with a goal in mind. When he addresses the ball, a field of concentration envelops him, reminding us he wasn’t just a professional athlete but one of the best, someone who worked incredibly hard at his position and sport. Before each strike, Kelce disappears into his own world. After playing golf only sporadically during his football career, he has now gone down Reddit rabbit holes related to golf, asking strangers to fix his swing. He even had a driver made to Bryson DeChambeau’s specs, thinking it would help him, but admits, “I can’t hit that thing. It’s atrocious.” As for the lucrative podcast, which features a fair amount of golf talk, he rewatches and analyzes episodes the way he used to watch game film, too.

As for the match between Kelce and Bernstein, crisp shots punctuated by birdies is not the rule of the day. But it has been back and forth.

As we come to the ninth tee, Kelce is down one. It is a longish par 4 up a slight hill. Kelce puts a drive on the right side of the fairway, giving him an opening by an old stonewall. He executes a perfect 54-degree wedge to 10 feet. Bernstein, a hundred pounds lighter and five inches shorter, has repeatedly stormed back each time Kelce has pushed an advantage. It’s highly apparent how much he wants to beat the big man. Bernstein also finds the green. The putters will decide. 

The greens are as slow as a shag carpet. No one has run one past all day. Predictably, Bernstein leaves it short. Before the round, Bernstein, Kelce’s agent for his entire career, told me that what has always made Jason special is not just his intellect and ability to work, but his focus.

“In what people would consider pressure moments, he’s focused and calm, and that extends beyond sports competition,” Bernstein says. “When he’s in front of an audience doing a live show or speaking, he is just locked in and performs his best.”

Of course, Kelce steps up and drains it. We clap as if he’s won the U.S. Open.

A debate about settling the tie with a chipping contest or a putting contest ensues, and I think, surely, they want to get on with it because of the event Kelce needs to attend at home in Philadelphia in the evening. But then I also remember Kelce has his own plane waiting at the local airstrip, something that is decidedly not like the rest of us.

Kelce declares they must play one more hole, so off to the first we go. Kelce is left with his usual 100 yards out. Bernstein hits his approach well short and fears it has plunged into a hidden creek short of the green.

Bernstein is peering into the water. Kelce is on his knees, wedge in hand, sliding the club’s face under the ball, steady as a bomb technician, fishing it out and placing it on dry land. He stands, mildly triumphant. Affording the ball isn’t the point, of course; it’s savoring the challenge. Bernstein’s drop and chip fail to make magic. Kelce chips on and has a five-footer for par to win. He fist-pumps as the ball disappears into the hole and makes an assured stride to retrieve the ball. He is a man used to victory, especially these days, but it still feels good, no matter how small, no matter where it takes place.