CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — The winds off Lake Erie were gusting at 5 below zero. Snow dusted everything. Joe D’Amato, the athletic director at Cleveland Heights High, bundled into his coat and walked from the school’s east exit through biting air to the football field not 70 feet away.
“This,” D’Amato said, standing at the 50-yard-line aside the black and gold Tiger Nation logo, “is where they played.”
Of course, he is talking about Travis and Jason Kelce, arguably the most decorated pair of graduates to ever stride the halls of Heights High, class of 2008 and 2006, both previous Super Bowl champions headed there again. On Sunday, when they meet in Arizona for Super LVII, they will make National Football League history as the first brothers to face each other in the big game — dubbed by some “The Kelce Bowl.”
They will wear uniforms representing their hopeful cities — Travis, 33, an eight-time Pro Bowl tight end, a likely shoo-in for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in Kansas City Chiefs red; Jason, 35, a center, with Hall of Fame bona fides of his own, in Philadelphia Eagles green. But what the people in Cleveland Heights know is the Kelces also will be representing them.
“The Heights, baby!” as Travis says. A suburb set in rabid Cleveland Browns country. Their hometown, which the Kelces openly acknowledge, with gratitude, helped forge who they became more than any single place.
“They love The Heights, because they loved their lives growing up,” Ed Kelce, 71, the boys’ father, told The Star by phone this week. “It was a riot. They have tons of friends that they grew up with who feel the same way.”
All this week, the town has been showing how it feels by celebrating, well, not the Chiefs or Eagles — Jim Brown, forbid! No such sacrilege would happen in Browns territory — but the Kelce brothers themselves, with a series of “Light Up the Heights” festivities: pep rallies, T-shirts bearing both Travis’ jersey No. 87 and Jason’s 62, a call for residents to display red and green or unifying Tiger gold lights on Super Bowl Sunday.
At night, Heights High School and its white clock tower are lit like a tabernacle at Christmas: Chiefs red on the west side, Eagles green on the east.
It’s no matter that the Kelces no longer live in town. Travis in KC: “Right now,” his dad said, “he doesn’t see himself living anyplace else.” He said Travis told him, in fact, that if he were ever traded, he’d probably quit the NFL.
Jason, married and with a third child due any day, feels the same way about Philly and the Eagles, his dad said. Ed Kelce now lives a short distance from Jason. He and Donna Kelce, the boys’ mom, divorced about a dozen years ago, and they remain friends. She lives in Orlando, Florida, and has already appeared with her sons at Super Bowl events this week in Arizona.
Evidence of just how much the town means to the sons can easily be found in their podcast of brotherly banter, “New Heights With Jason and Travis Kelce.” The show, with nearly a half million YouTube channel followers, ranks as the No. 1 most popular sports podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Or listen to Travis Kelce during games on TV. Most players say their names and alma maters. But he doesn’t say “Travis Kelce, University of Cincinnati,” as his brother does. He says simply, “Travis Kelce, from Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”
The Hall of Fame
But the most powerful evidence might be Travis’ own words, a 2018 speech in which he choked with emotion, telling himself he wouldn’t cry, when he and Jason were inducted into the Cleveland Heights High School Hall of Fame. Travis, who played quarterback at Heights High, had already begun wiping tears as his brother — a tight end and linebacker in high school — spoke about getting married, moving into a new home, looking for a place as diverse, accepting and supportive as his hometown.
“I can’t find it,” Jason said. “There’s no place like The Heights. There really isn’t.”
Then Travis took to the lectern. His emotions mounted.
“I’m sorry, I’m a little passionate about The Heights,” Travis began, thumping his chest with his palm to still the emotions. “My brother made me a crybaby when I was little,” he’d joke.
Soon, he was asking his father to hand him a handkerchief from the audience, giving one of the reasons why he says he’s from Cleveland Heights on TV as opposed to his college.
“And it’s not because I don’t appreciate the time I had at the University of Cincinnati,” Travis said. “Because I do. I cherish it dearly. But there was a time when I was at Cincinnati that it wasn’t easy for me. It was tough.”
Kelce in 2010 had his athletic scholarship revoked after he, admittedly, did “a lot of dumb things,” such as breaking the team rule against using marijuana. He sat out a season and would rejoin the team in 2011.
“I was at my lowest point I’d ever been in my life,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was going to be able to go to school still because it was my scholarship. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to keep playing sports.”
It was his friends, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates from The Heights who sustained him. As every beleaguered Browns fan knows, loyalty matters.
“Every single thing that I do,” Travis said in his speech, “is for this city. I know it sounds cliche, but I promise you: every single thing I do out there. When you see me dancing in the end zone, that’s Cleveland Heights for you, right there.”
Suburban Cleveland
There are many “heights” among the suburbs east of Cleveland: University Heights and Maple Heights. There’s Richmond Heights and Broadview Heights, Highland Heights, Mayfield Heights and Heights High School’s arch rival to the south, Shaker Heights.
Whereas some will argue that “The Heights,” refers to them all lumped together, others insist, “no.”
“There’s only one Heights,” said James Settle, Travis’ pal since high school, a tight end when Travis was quarterback, and who now works in finance in Columbus. “If you say The Heights anywhere around Cleveland or northeast Ohio, everyone knows what it is. That’s not Shaker Heights or University Heights or Broadview Heights. It’s The Heights.”
Drive eight miles east from downtown Cleveland and you find the town, a suburb of 45,000 people, officially incorporated in 1903, and where solid homes from the teens and ’20s sit shaded by old oaks and maples — from apartment buildings to Tudors, from American four squares to the $1 million-plus mansions that line Fairmount Boulevard and Coventry Road.
In the 1960s, Black people made up less than 1% of The Heights because of racist real estate covenants.
By 1994, when Ed Kelce, a manufacturer’s rep for the steel industry, and Donna, who earned her master’s degree and worked in banking, moved into their five-bedroom house on Coleridge Road (Jason was 6, Travis 4 ) The Heights had become one of the most diverse communities in Ohio: 50% white, 41% black, 5% Asian and more than 3% identifying as mixed race.
The new owner of the Kelces’ boyhood home is a die-hard Denver Broncos fan.
“Travis has caused us a lot of heartache over the past decade,” Levi Heacock said. He’s rooting for the Eagles. And yet this week, he and his wife hung both Chiefs and Eagles flags outside the house.
Ed Kelce said the family moved from the west side of Cleveland to the east mostly for a better house and commute for Donna.
“In Cleveland Heights, you could be downtown in 10 minutes,” he said.
They would get more than they paid for. The Heights would end up being their kind of town, one that reaffirmed lasting values: perseverance, loyalty, acceptance, open-mindedness and the confident ability to relate to anyone — rich, poor, Black, white, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim — because those were their friends, classmates, teammates.
“I think that’s the thing I would take away,” said Patrick Bacon, who first met Travis during first grade soccer tryouts and remains a close friend. He’ll be attending the Super Bowl. “When you meet somebody from The Heights, you know that they’re going to be able to get along with people from all different walks of life.”
100% Heights
At the Wine Spot on Lee Road, owner Adam Fleischer, who worked for Cerner Corp. for a decade prior to opening his business, pointed to the brothers’ signatures high on a pillar, penned after the high school Hall of Fame induction.
His shop is an official pickup spot for the yellow lights. “I will tell you, Fleischer said, “if you know Travis, he’s 100% Heights personality. Just the way he acts. Drinks a beer or two. He’s a nice guy, down-to-earth, approachable. He is what he is.”
Genuine, Fleischer said.
“And Jason is the same way.”
But a Heights pedigree, some ventured, also comes with an edge, a kind of defensiveness, a defiant swagger born of the knowledge that, for years, nearby Cleveland was a punchline for uncool Midwest mediocrity or worse: “The Mistake on the Lake.”
When, in 1969, an oil slick on the polluted Cuyahoga River erupted into flames, Cleveland became the sad poster child for environmental calamity. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was founded one year later.
What binds many Clevanders, in The Heights and elsewhere, said Lauren Reali Sorrell, 31, a sales coordinator at Quintana’s Barber & Dream Spa, and who remembers Travis from high school house parties, is the certainty that the rest of the world has gotten it wrong.
“We are cool,” Sorrell said. “I think, you know, it sometimes feels like Cleveland against the world.”
If people choose to overlook the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Cleveland Guardians, the area’s beauty, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Cleveland Orchestra, ranked as one of the best in the world, that’s on them.
“Something we all share,” Sorrell said, “no matter what our backgrounds are, everyone of us grew up being told to be proud of where we’re from.”
Travis Kelce, with his flash, seems to embody that cool. Jason shoulders that pride.
My brother
Inside Quintana’s, Donna Quintana flips through dozens of photos of the Kelces kept on her husband’s cellphone: Travis and Jason in the shop, Travis in 2013 just after he signed with the Chiefs, the Quintana kids draped in his jersey, Alex Quintana in 2017 with Jason, Travis and more than dozen other friends from The Heights outside Arrowhead Stadium on the day the Chiefs beat the Eagles.
A Chiefs flag flies at the front of the shop. Both Kelce jerseys are framed inside. Alex Quintana got to know Jason and Travis when the boys were in middle school. His brother, Felipe, was their lacrosse coach. He began cutting the boys’ hair soon after. They all grew close. In fact, upstairs from the shop, the Quintanas run a speakeasy, a fancy bar accessed by way of a button that opens a moving bookcase.
There the Kelce family gathered after a memorial for their grandmother. Never, the Quintanas said, have the brothers ever been anything other than gracious.
“I mean, they’re both extremely kind, generous, very well-mannered,” Dawn Quintana said. “Jason is a little more reserved, definitely a big brother. Travis is a little more outgoing, with the clothing and all. Definitely the big brother/younger brother dynamic.”
It has been the Quintanas, together with Heights High athletic director D’Amato, who initiated the “Light Up the Heights” idea.
Upstairs in the speakeasy, Stephen Settle, 34, and his wife, Shanice — he, a former Heights football player; she, a former cheerleader — took a seat. His brother, James Settle, and Travis were in the same grade. So were Stephen and Jason. They all played sports.
Calling them lasting friends, Settle said, may not go far enough.
“If you hear Travis or you hear Jason a lot, you’ll hear them refer to their friends as, ‘my brother,’” Settle said. “A lot of times we say hi to each other, ‘What’s up, brother?’ We really embrace it. We really do feel like that’s our brother.”
Both Kelces already have Super Bowl rings: Travis from the Chiefs’ defeat of the San Francisco 49ers in 2020. Jason from 2018, when Philadelphia beat the New England Patriots. Football success has done nothing, Settle said, to change who the brothers are. In high school, as they are now, Settle said, both Jason and Travis were utterly kind and funny off the field. On it? Fierce.
Travis was a star in hockey, baseball, basketball and football. Jason in hockey, football and lacrosse, plus playing baritone saxophone in the school jazz ensemble. (His Christmas album released late last year raised more than $1 million for charity.)
“He was different,” Settle said of Jason on the field. “He just had that ‘it’ factor inside of him. He was focused. He was no-nonsense. … It wasn’t like some guys, you hear they have temper tantrums. It wasn’t that type of rage. It was more like, ‘I want to be great. And if you don’t want to be great, get out of my face, because I’m on a mission.”
Back at Heights High, Mike Jones, 57, who coached Jason for four years and Travis for three, spoke of the brothers’ contrasts.
“Travis was the better athlete,” Jones said, a natural talent, gregarious, ”the most popular guy in class.” But one who could struggle in school. Jason, meantime, “was the harder worker.”
Although neither Jones nor D’Amato are picking sides, both said they wouldn’t be disappointed if Jason, at 35 and closer to the end of his career, got a second ring.
They figure that Travis, win or not, will be back.
