‘I Punched Him in the Face’

Jason opened up about how their brotherly rivalry got out of control during an appearance on Shaquille O’Neal’s The Big Podcast, where he shared that it wasn’t even football that came between the brothers, who’ve enjoyed parallel success in the NFL.

“I was a junior in high school, Trav was a freshman,” Jason recalled. “He had just gotten to be taller than me. He was always more athletic, but I was ahead of him. He had just hit puberty.”

As it turned out, with that puberty burst came a burst of confidence, and prowess on the basketball court, as Jason was quickly finding out in their one-on-one matchup in their yard. “He’s feeling himself and I’m getting pissed off that he’s feeling himself,” he said of his growing frustration.

He admitted that as Travis started making a series of tough shots back-to-back-to-back, he started fouling his little brother to knock him off his stride.

“He says, ‘That’s bulls—t, that’s a foul,'” Jason shared. “I’m like, ‘I don’t see any refs out here. I don’t see anybody calling it.’”

Well, that didn’t sit well with the freshman. “He picks the ball up, throws it at me and goes in the house,” Jason said. And that certainly didn’t sit well with the junior. “I’m like, ‘This motherf—ker just threw the ball at me?'”

Jason, of course, followed his brother into the house to continue, and ultimately, escalate the fight. “Go in there, I grab him on the shoulder and I punch him,” Jason said.

He said it was only the second time he’d ever punched his brother. “I don’t know how it got that heated,” he admitted. “I punched him in the face.”

Unfortunately for Jason, as he’d already said, puberty had hit and Travis was now bigger than him. While he said Travis usually wound up in tears during previous fights, this time it was different.

“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 tracks,” he said. From there, it was a “full-on fist fight” until their father Ed intervened and pulled them apart.

Unfortunately, the brothers were so “heated,” it didn’t stop immediately, with Jason saying Travis shoved him on top of Ed. “The only thing that stopped the fight was my Dad screaming, ‘Ow, my ribs!’ We thought that we had hurt him, so we snapped out of it.”

As it turns out, as out of control as that situation was, it also proved to be a fortuitous turn of events as “that was the last time we ever got in a fight.”

Instead, they save their energy and aggression for the NFL, which at times can prove somewhat controversial. Travis, in particular, was called out for a photo that went viral where he appeared to be screaming in the face of his head coach, Andy Reid.

While Reid quickly dismissed the outrage as the passion of his athlete in the biggest game of his life, Kelce said that he “immediately wished I took it back” during the post-game episode of his and Jason’s podcast, New Heights.

“You crossed a line,” Jason agreed on the podcast. “I think we can both agree on that.”

“I can’t get that fired up to the point where I’m bumping coach and it’s getting him off balance and stuff,” Travis said. “When he stumbled, I was just like, ‘Oh, s–t,’ in my head.”

“Let’s be honest, the yelling in his face, too, is over the top,” Jason countered. “I think there’s better ways to handle this, retrospectively.”

After a frustrating first half for the Kansas City Chiefs that left them heading into the locker room behind the San Francisco ’49ers 10-3, the team and Kelce rallied to clinch a tense 25-22 overtime victory.