Travis Kelce, Tyson Fury and the gentle rise of the sporting dad bod

A short while after helping Kansas City to victory at this year’s Super Bowl, Travis Kelce repaired to the Bahamas for a little R & R. While he lapped up the sun and surf with his girlfriend, Taylor Swift, the paps zoomed in on the Chiefs star and snapped away. But the thing that stood out most in those pictures wasn’t one of the most famous women in the world. It was Kelce’s dad bod, either a strike for the body positivity movement or an abomination to sport.

Are we reaching the end of the era of idolizing shirtless photos of Cristiano Ronaldo and other sports pin-ups who might appear perfectly at home inside a Howard Schatz coffee table book? Nowadays, it seems, sports fans are hungry for heroes who look a little more like them. Male fans in particular seem to have a soft spot for average sports figures: athletes who are not all lean muscle. Someone with a softly round torso and sympathy for those who might consider lawn care a valid form of exercise. Someone who, when they achieve the impossible, makes you say, ‘He and I aren’t so different’. Think Roger Federer in 2009, after marriage and twin daughters, continuing to mesmerize while carrying a slight paunch. Or Kelce in the Bahamas, a bit over his 250lbs playing weight.

It’s only since a Clemson University student named Mackenzie Pearson referred to this phenotype as a “dad bod” that the phrase has become shorthand for unpretentious men. “Few things are worse than taking a picture in a bathing suit with a guy who is crazy fit,” Pearson wrote in a 2015 essay titled Why Girls Love the Dad Bod. “We are insecure enough as it is.” At the time she was reckoning with her college friends’ preference for young men with tummies. “Girls tend to picture their future with guys early on,” Pearson continued. “We know what we are getting into when he’s got the exact same body type at the age of 22 that he’s going to have at 45.”

She was backed up by a 2021 Dating.com survey in which 75% of single respondents said they preferred the soft and round male body type to a more toned physique. Further research suggests women don’t find such men physically attractive necessarily, but rather value their “evolutionary” fitness traits. In a recent Psychology Today article, Bucknell University professor Joel Wade reasons “women might find a male they assume to have lower testosterone levels more appealing because he would be assumed to be less aggressive and have characteristics that would make for a better partner – and a better father.” It goes a long way to explain why the pictures that circulated in January of uber-fit San Francisco’s 49ers backfield bros Christian McCaffery and Kyle Juszczyk rehearsing their golf swings on the practice field half-naked came and went without much fuss.

Before Travis’s beach body became sports talk fodder, many female fans were convinced his big brother, Jason, the heavier set former Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman, was the bigger catch. For many, the highlight of Kansas City’s playoff victory at Buffalo last January was a shirtless Jason breaking out of the family’s luxury suite and cheering on his brother in freezing weather. And the kicker was Jason going full Barrel Man on an evening when he and his wife were meeting Swift for the first time. Her impression? “She absolutely loved you,” Travis told Jason on their New Heights podcast. The moment was more validation for the dad bod, the final form that wins the day.

Then there’s the appeal to the athletes themselves. Hard body physiques like those of NFL star receiver Odell Beckham Jr or even the Rock may seem appealing in the pages of a magazine. But in practice, they require ridiculous amounts of upkeep. Last year the comedian Eric André decided to get shredded as a stunt for his Adult Swim chatshow, working out with three trainers to whittle him down to a ripped 173lbs. The process nearly killed him. “If you see any middle aged person with abs, know that they’re either psychotic or unemployed,” he told Men’s Health, recalling the blissful day he reverted to dad bod type. “I went to Portugal and I drank my weight in wine. When I got back, I stepped on the scale and I undid all six months of work.”

Reportedly, LeBron James spends more than $1.5m a year to keep his body in top shape. No one doubts the money is well spent on the Los Angeles Lakers great, still a world beater at the age of 39. But it’s harder to justify when the NBA’s reigning MVP, Nikola Jokić, whom no one would describe as chiseled, dominates the league. Luka Dončić, a similarly well padded NBA figure and a perennial All-Star, is obsessive about his “recovery beer.” For the truly transcendent sportsman, the dad bod is the ultimate trophy; it says they’re having their cake and eating it too.

For the two decades, the Manning brothers, Tom Brady and Drew Brees were the dad bod quarterbacks who set the NFL standard. After the Chiefs clinched victory in last year’s AFC championship to punch their Super Bowl ticket, social media rubberneckers pointed out that the team’s quarterback Patrick Mahomes, one of the greatest players of all time, had a beer gut. In baseball, New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, whose nickname is The Polar Bear, holds the line for a round and proud standard that traces back to rounded Hall of Famers like Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson. DJ Burns, NC State’s large and in charge pivot man, was the breakout star of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

On the links, Spain’s Jon Rahm harks to the days before Tiger Woods forced everyone into the gym, back when the average touring pro had a body like Colin Montgomerie’s. And Tyson Fury became the heavyweight champion of the world while admitting he was far from chiseled. “I have been training for well over 20 years and I still haven’t got a good body,” he told the Daily Mail last year. “I’ve been in a training camp, living like a monk, for the past 12 weeks and I still don’t have a good body … Although I don’t look a man who can do long distance or run for 20 miles, I am a man who can do that.” (Fury raises a good point: Even when these athletes look out of shape, they’re way more in-shape than most of us ever will be).

But even as dad bods have become more prominent in sport, you’d be hard pressed to say they’re fully embraced. A not-insignificant share of the posts about Travis Kelce’s dad bod were not kind. For some, it was yet more proof of an unequal beauty standard that allows men to get away with not obsessing over their physiques while vilifying women for doing the same (note how often female athletes are abused on social media for not having bodies deemed acceptable by legions of trolls). For others, it was a sin against sports. An athlete’s body type supposedly informs their stamina and durability. The NFL, just as likely to reward a player for achieving his fitness goals as kick them to the curb for falling short, appraises male body types more harshly than any other sport.

Many take an athlete’s fitness as a gauge of their dedication level. Media and fans don’t hesitate to chime in with their readings. (“Nature penalizes those that do not strive for optimum,” argues one rebuttal to Pearson’s essay from a male fitness outlet called Power Athlete. “Do we really want to give people an excuse to be out of shape and strive for mediocrity?) Longitudinal analyses find that the average male Olympian is 6ft and weighs 175lbs.

The net effect is that people are comfortable with assessing athletes’ bodies – to the point of mocking physiques that deviate from the “norm” in ways that would be frowned on in another arena. Not even Kelce, arguably the best to play his position in NFL history, is immune to body shaming; all the while the goalposts for the masculine ideal keep moving even as Kelce, for all the dad bod jabs, remains a ridiculously fit human specimen. “It can often be underestimated how hurtful and harmful this is for men,” the psychologist Carly Sober told news.com.au.

Unsurprisingly, Kelce is taking the right path – concentrating more on having fun than worrying about what people are saying about him. “It’s March!” he told his brother on their podcast earlier in the year when asked about his weight. No doubt he’s back in shape as the new NFL season approaches, especially because he’s paid $17m a year to do so. Whether he’ll be able to escape the dad bod label remains to be seen. Regardless, he sets a fine example by not caring whether the label sticks at all.