Jason Kelce Recalls Violent Fight Where He Punched Brother Travis Kelce in the Face
Bad blood between brothers has been a well-known phenomenon since the dawn of time. Jason and Travis Kelce, for example, are both NFL stars with storied careers in the league and a popular podcast together today, but that doesn't mean they haven't butted heads, especially when they were growing up.
Jason, who retired from the Philadelphia Eagles earlier this year, told the story of the last physical fight he and Travis had in an appearance on Shaquille O'Neal's The Big Podcast. It was when he realized that although Travis was younger, he was more capable of taking him down.
"I was a junior in high school, Trav was a freshman and he had just gotten to be taller than me," Jason recounted. "He was always more athletic but I was ahead of him [in age]."
Shaq quipped that Travis started "feeling himself" once he hit puberty, which Jason confirmed.
"He's feeling himself, and I'm getting pissed off that he's feeling himself," he said. He described how they were in their backyard playing basketball and Travis was sinking baskets one after the other. "I can't do anything to stop it, so of course I resort to fouling him—the only way I know how to stop it—and he says, 'That's bulls--t. That's a foul.' And I'm like, 'I don't see any refs out here. I don't see anybody calling it.'"
"He picks the ball up, throws it at me, [and] goes in the house," Jason remembered, which instantly set him off.
"I go in there, I grab him on the shoulder, and I punch him," he continued. "Listen, we would fight all the time. This is only the second time I'd ever punched him. I don't know how it got that heated. Punched him in the face. And every time before that, he would cry or whatever."
What happened next took Jason by surprise, to say the least. "He took this punch, scooped me up off my feet, and slammed me on the kitchen floor so hard the oven got knocked off the rack it was sitting on," he said. "I get up, [and] we're in a full-on fistfight. Dad comes behind me to break it up, grabs me, Trav pushes me back on top of my dad, and the only thing to stop the fight was my dad screaming 'Ow, my ribs!' and we thought that we had hurt him, so we snapped out of it."
"That's the last time we've ever gotten in a fight," he concluded.
Clearly, those years of juvenile fights are way behind the two brothers, as they've supported each other publicly in their NFL careers and currently host the popular weekly podcast New Heights.