Travis Kelce life is so booktok & romcom coded, like: A troubled yet bright athlete, striving for greatness, found himself adrift until his elder brother came to his rescue. Despite the success, he sensed an emptiness. So he decided to shoot his shot at the biggest pop princess

The league’s most exciting tight end got where he is by being himself.

Now, with his Chiefs tied with the Eagles for the best record in the NFL, Kansas City fans are pleading, ‘Dear God, please just do your thing and let’s move on.’ Sorry, no chance. Those who know Travis Kelce best are prone to employ his name as an adjective. Cutoff denim, for instance, is very Travis. A cream Gucci suit, splattered with red drawings of a pirate Donald Duck and paired with a Smokey the Bear-style hat (his outfit at a recent charity fashion show)—that was so Travis.

The most Travis thing about Kelce’s Kansas City apartment might be that he employs one of his two bedrooms as a third walk-in closet, depository for various snake-collared shirts and Christian Louboutin kicks. But when I meet Kelce in his apartment building’s lounge, he is clad in an unexpectedly un-Travis outfit: white Nike tee and red gym shorts, white Nike Prestos and a black compression sleeve around his left leg. I toss out an innocuous question about whether he’s lived in this building, in the downtown Power & Light District, for all four of his years as a Chiefs tight end, and he does a fairly Travis thing, letting slip a truth he’d probably rather not tell through a smile that disarms it.

His first two seasons in town he lived down the street. But, he says, “my neighbors didn’t like me.” Kelce missed just about his entire rookie year after having microfracture surgery on his left knee, which made him a 24-year-old with an abundance of money and no shortage of free time. Thus followed raucous nights that began and ended at Kelce’s apartment, which friends loved but which the doctor next door decidedly did not. After a few admonishments from the leasing office, Kelce noted the new luxury building nearby, in which he would be the first tenant of his unit and where he would have floor-to-ceiling windows. “Everything just made sense,” he says. So here he is.

But this is not where he is supposed to be now. Today’s plan was for me to tag along with Kelce on a promotional stunt delivering pizzas for Papa John’s, one of his many sponsors; some lucky local would answer the doorbell, un-scrunch some loose bills from a pocket and look up to see—surprise!—the dancing face of the Chiefs. It would’ve been fun. It would’ve been so Travis.

That face has been popping up in more and more places: on a monstrous video screen in Times Square and in NBC’s Sunday Night Football intro, onstage alongside Carrie Underwood. There was even a short-lived reality dating show on E!, Catching Kelce. Tony Gonzalez, this town’s last megastar tight end, thinks Kelce’s media appeal is obvious: He speaks freely and “doesn’t give a s—.” When I ask Aaron Eanes, Kelce’s manager, why sponsors enjoy working with the 2016 All-Pro, he says, “You can tell Travis gives a s—.” Being Travis, then, means both giving and not giving a s—. So Schrödinger, so Travis.