Culture
A Taylor Swift love story: How pop icon is bringing a new, young audience to the NFL
Arrie Flathouse took her first steps to Taylor Swift’s hit song “Tim McGraw.”
The pop icon was a constant part of the now 16-year-old Arrie’s childhood as she grew up in the Houston area with two older sisters who adored Swift. Arrie came to love Swift, too, dressing up as her for Halloween and listening to her albums.
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Arrie never got much into football, though, despite having a mom, Kara, who spent her weekends tuned into college and NFL games. That included games played by the Chiefs since Kara, like Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes, is a Texas Tech alum. Despite Kara’s attempts to get her daughters interested, football never clicked with Arrie, so Kara usually spent those weekend afternoons watching games alone.
But that changed last summer after Arrie saw clips of the “New Heights” podcast, on which one of the hosts, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, described his attempts to give Swift his number via a friendship bracelet.
Anyone know how to get a bracelet to @taylorswift13? … asking for a friend 😅 @BWWings
New episode premieres NOW!
Tap in: https://t.co/lmQ8fLH1IO pic.twitter.com/4yYr8HSb0m
— New Heights (@newheightshow) July 26, 2023
The little exchange had quite an impact on Arrie.
Already a devoted listener to the podcast, Kara got so excited when her daughter started talking about the Kelce clips. Over the following months, social media worked its magic, and by the time Swift showed up to her first Chiefs game in late September, Arrie was tuned in.
“This is crazy,” Arrie said. “This isn’t Swifties’ theories. This is for real. So that’s when I started watching football because I was like, ‘If she’s gonna be at the games, I’ve got to see her.’”
Arrie has since tuned into pretty much every Chiefs game, embracing not only the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance but the entire Kelce family. She’s watched Amazon Prime’s documentary about his brother, Eagles center Jason Kelce, became a devoted listener of the Kelce brothers’ “New Heights” podcast and even started watching Eagles games.
“Even if Taylor is not there, I think I enjoy (the game) a lot more,” said Arrie, whose parents promised to buy her a Travis Kelce jersey soon.
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Kara smiles listening to her daughter describe her newfound interest in a sport she bonded over with her own dad. Kara doesn’t want to push too hard, but she loves it when she sees Arrie’s head pop over the stair banister if she hears football on the TV. Much to Kara’s delight, that tends to lead to quality time together watching games with her daughter. It’s also led to questions about the sport itself.
“It’s been really fun for me,” said Kara, who posted a viral video in the fall about her glee that Swift finally converted her daughter to a football fan. “I love it.”
The Flathouse family isn’t an anomaly. Far from it. Swift’s arrival on the football stage has led to countless stories of football-loving parents bonding with their Swiftie kids. Even Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt is hearing them.
“I frequently have dads come up to me and say, ‘My 10- and 12-year-old daughters never used to watch football, but they now tell me anytime the Kansas City Chiefs are playing to tell them so they can watch,” Hunt said this week in Las Vegas, where the Chiefs are preparing to face the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII. “I was at a function a little over a week ago and I had a woman, probably in her mid-20s, who came up to me, introduced herself as a Swiftie and told me her entire family is Dallas Cowboys fans and that she used to not follow football at all, but now she’s all-in on the Kansas City Chiefs. I think there are a lot of examples like that out there.”
One story just like that belongs to Todd Kale, a Cowboys fan who posted a now-viral video of his 11-year-old daughter Briley reciting football facts from the couch.
The Kale family lives near Houston. They’re Cowboys season-ticket holders and their five daughters love going to games. They know the big-name Dallas players but never really watched the game with their dad, instead embracing the atmosphere of a game day or just enjoying eating hot wings, their Sunday ritual, rather than engaging much with the actual football.
But Briley, the middle child of the family, grew up a Swift fan thanks to her older sisters and has passed the love for Swift onto her younger siblings. Todd wasn’t sure how Briley first learned of Swift’s connection to Kelce, but a few months back, he was watching a Sunday night game with his wife and realized Briley was in the living room. She started asking questions: What’s a safety? What’s a cornerback? How many points is a touchdown worth?
It didn’t take long for Todd to realize where this was coming from.
“It definitely intrigued her that somebody she really likes is now involved in something I really like,” Todd said.
Briley has since watched more Chiefs games and has picked up knowledge about the sport itself, absorbing it all.
“It’s every dad’s dream. … She liked football before, but I think she just liked the experience of it,” Todd said. “Now she’s learning more about the game.”
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Swift has been a storyline all season — with Kansas City winning nine of the 12 games she has attended — and the Chiefs’ Super Bowl run has only ratcheted that up a higher level.
“There’s no doubt her being a fan has put a more intense focus on the team than we would’ve had otherwise,” Hunt said. “It has opened up the fan base to a whole new demographic that we really didn’t have in young women. You’ve seen that in a lot of ways, specifically our TV ratings. They are much higher because of Taylor Swift being a part of the team, as Kelce says.”
Hunt’s not wrong about the TV ratings. Not only did the average number of viewers tuning into Chiefs regular-season prime-time games increase this season from the previous two (a 39.4 percent jump compared to last year alone), but so did the percentage of female viewers (up 3 percent), according to Nielsen. And that viewership jump has carried over to the postseason. The Chiefs’ divisional-round win over Buffalo averaged 50.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched divisional-round or wild-card game ever. The Chiefs’ victory over the Ravens was the most-watched AFC Championship Game ever, with an average of 55.47 million viewers tuning in.
Taylor Swift has generated an equivalent brand value of $331.5 million for the Chiefs and the NFL, Apex Marketing Group tells FOS.
The figure includes print, digital, radio, TV, highlights, and social media going back to Swift’s first game in September.https://t.co/xUzMDsqIgE pic.twitter.com/Ruj5FM7g81
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) January 28, 2024
The league’s social media team has played a big role in ushering in new audiences, as well. The team embraced Swift’s first game in September, trying to be conscious of all of the new eyeballs on their feeds while not going overboard, said Ian Trombetta, NFL SVP of social and influencer marketing.
That theme has remained consistent throughout the season, though the strategy varies depending on the platform, Trombetta said. With some of those that skew younger, like TikTok and Snapchat, there’s more reason to embrace Swifties with their posts.
“We’re also thinking about this in the sense of not just what we’re posting on social media, but also how our partners are covering it,” Trombetta said. “So that could be a broadcast partner. That could be a sponsor, etc. And when you take all that into totality, it can get pretty, pretty hot just in terms of the amount of coverage. And, so for us, I think it really was a reminder for us to take a broader view of all the coverage and understand our role in it.”
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Swift’s emergence onto the NFL scene has helped lead to record-setting engagement, with triple-digit growth in consumption across various platforms, per Trombetta. Their audience continues to skew younger and diversify in male/female split as well, he said.
Swift’s Super Bowl attendance is up in the air thanks to her Eras Tour stop in Tokyo, If Swift is there to watch Kelce’s Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers, the league social team will devote some time to her arrival and reactions, but with so much happening around the Super Bowl between the football and the spectacle, it won’t just be the Taylor Swift social feed.
“I think we’ve gotten to the point now though, that by and large, it’s been a very celebratory thing,” Trombetta said. “And certainly a positive for the league, a positive for the Chiefs, a positive for the Kelce family, and obviously with Travis, and I think it’s been a positive for Taylor as well. So we’ll continue to lean into it in different ways, but also be respectful of their relationship. So not invading any privacy and looking to take cues where some of the lines might be on the amount of coverage and also keep the game front and center. That’s really important for us.”
Still, there’s no doubt the league has brought in new fans thanks to Swift, as the Flathouse and Kale families can attest.
The Flathouse family on Sunday will be hosting an “I’m in My Super Bowl Era” themed party in honor of the Chiefs-Swift crossover.
There will be a giant friendship bracelet garland along with appropriately themed food and drink, including an “electric” mocktail, in honor of a word Kelce likes to use a lot.
But what about next season when the Swift magic may have run its course? It doesn’t matter for Arrie, who plans on still tuning into NFL games.
“I feel like I’m hooked now,” Arrie said.
— The Athletic’s Nate Taylor contributed to this report.
(Photo illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic;
Photos: Jamie Squire, Patrick Smith and Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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