Philly’s Best Power Couple Are Doubling Down on the City They Fell in Love With

Kylie + Jason ♥ Philly / Photo-illustration by C.J. Burton

It’s the first day of June, a brightly sunny afternoon, the cornflower-blue sky speckled with a few cotton-ball clouds, no rain, no wind. In other words, a perfect day for golf. As I walk into the historic century-old Rolling Green Golf Club in Springfield, things seem pretty normal. At 3 p.m., the clubhouse is hushed and empty save for a few folks wiping tabletops and polishing glassware. Outside, golf carts wind through the pristine grounds, rolling up and down elegantly sloping swaths of impeccably manicured grass. Staffers quietly arrange furniture on the large patio that overlooks the course. A few birds chirp politely.

And then comes the shouting: lots of it, a steady string of curse words torpedoed into the private club’s otherwise rarefied air. The ruckus is coming from the 10th hole, where a ragtag gang of well-known Philly sports superfans — you know, characters like Santa Rick and the mustachioed Jim McMahon look-alike — have been posted up since 10 a.m., drinking beer and heckling the golfers. They’d settled in to a lull waiting for groups to make their way around the course, but now their favorite player, the man of the hour, is lining up at the ninth green.

“You gotta make this putt, jackass!” bellows a large, shirtless man whose broad body is covered in Philly-themed tattoos. The snout of the Phillie Phanatic circles his belly button, and a rendering of the iconic Eagles logo spreads over his chest, the bird clutching the I-95 shield instead of a football. (His name is Rob Dunphy; he and his tattoos went viral at an Eagles game back in 2019.)

A guy wearing a striped referee shirt and giant shoulder pads crested with massive eagle heads and feathered wings joins him: “C’mon, asshole, what are you doing?”

Jason Kelce looks up and good-naturedly shouts something back before climbing into his golf cart and heading their way. He’s not at all surprised by their behavior. In fact, he’s the one who invited the crew in the first place, issuing them clear instructions to relentlessly heckle the 96 players who have paid thousands of dollars to be here, playing alongside prominent Philly athletes and sports figures (Brent Celek, Scott Hartnell, Sean Couturier, Jay Wright, Fran Dunphy) at the third annual Underdog Golf Outing, hosted by Jason and his wife, Kylie.

“I’ve experienced the passion of the Philly fans — the good and the bad side of it,” Jason tells me later. “I thought it would be fun to make a hole where everyone gets a chance to feel what it’s like running onto the field or getting back to the bench after a bad series and hearing from three or four bros behind you how much you suck.”

But the antics aren’t all R-rated; the Kelces have also brought in a mariachi band to sing to people at the 14th green, and an Elvis impersonator is roving around on a golf cart.

If the golfing itself is far from serious, the purpose of today’s event isn’t. The money raised here — $553,500 in total, from participants and sponsors — goes to benefit the Kelces’ Be Philly Foundation, the nonprofit they founded in 2022 to help fund existing youth-based programs that offer underserved and underrepresented kids connection, opportunity, mentorship, academic enrichment, and career guidance.

Left: Some of the hecklers at work during June’s Underdog Golf Outing; right: Jason Kelce on the course. / Photographs courtesy of Be Philly Foundation

The Kelces will address the smallish crowd later in the evening; other than the hecklers, no spectators are allowed. They’ll thank the participants and event sponsors, and then Jason will talk briefly about Be Philly’s mission. He’ll reiterate the importance of supporting and empowering our city’s youth, and he’ll recount the depressing statistics that underscore it all, like the facts that Philadelphia ranks the lowest of all major cities in the economic mobility of its citizens, and that Philly kids are on track to earn less than the generation before them. But this is fixable, of course, and that’s what the couple aim to do — to help make life better for those kids. For the next generation of Philadelphians.

This speech is pretty much the only reason I’m here. True, the Kelces’ considerable star power has thrust them into a spotlight that now shines bigger and brighter than ever before, and the story behind that is obviously compelling. You know: the big 2018 Super Bowl win and Jason’s legendary, profanity-laden speech on the Art Museum steps; the hit 2023 documentary, Kelce, that chronicled his final season with the Eagles, gave the world a peek into his family’s refreshingly down-to-earth life, and launched a once-camera-shy Kylie into the public eye (disclosure: Larry Platt, CEO of Philly Mag parent company CMG, is one of the film’s producers); the unpretentious public personas that clearly resonate with America (Kylie broadcasting at the Olympics! Jason on SNL!); an avalanche of sponsorships and appearances; two separate chart-topping podcasts; and a family connection to a certain very famous superstar. But they don’t want to talk about any of that. Or really about themselves at all — not their fame, their status, the whirlwind of their past few years. All they really care to talk about (with me, anyway) is the kids of Philadelphia, and their plans to help make a better future for them.

But before the Kelces can get to that part of their day — the kids, the plans, the talking about it all — they have to finish their golf round. Kylie is being serenaded by the mariachi band at the 14th green; she dances and cheers when they finish. Meanwhile, Jason has joined the gang of sweaty superfans at the 10th hole; they’ve greeted him with a beer, which he immediately chugs. They get a group photo, shotgun more beers together, yell the Eagles chant, shoot the shit. As Jason tees up, someone starts blasting Creed on the speaker, and everyone sings as Jason swings.

Somehow, despite their over-the-top Eagles fan gear — shoulder pads and Santa hats and “Dallas sucks” chains and tattoos — the hecklers feel less like the Kelces’ starstruck superfans and more like their … friends. And I suppose that’s the other reason I’m here. Because writing a story about Philly’s favorite couple means seeing them surrounded by their inner circle — and the magic of the Kelces is that they’ve made everyone in Philly feel like we’re a part of it.

A week after the golf outing, I find myself sitting by a towering stack of purple Pull-Ups boxes in the unassuming house where Kylie records episodes of her popular podcast, Not Gonna Lie, which debuted at the end of 2024. The show — in which she talks frankly about her personal life and shares her unfiltered takes on motherhood, pop culture, gossip, and sports — was a breakout success, instantly skyrocketing to the top of the charts, where it made headlines for toppling the podcast of Joe Rogan, the voice of the machismo manosphere. This past May, she won a Webby award for Podcast of the Year, which she accepted with a speech befitting the event’s famous five-word limit: “Women supporting women. Go Birds.”

This house is also where she films some of her spots for brands like Toyota, Old Navy, CVS, Dove, and, yes, Pull-Ups. “They wanted to have them stacked as tall as me,” she says as she points to the boxes. (If you watch her Instagram ad, you’ll see she got pretty close.) It’s just after 9 a.m., and Kylie has just come from the Delco home where the couple live with their four daughters, ages six, five, three, and one, and their two dogs. She’s characteristically casual in workout shorts and a T-shirt, with a sweatshirt half on, just covering her arms. A few weeks ago, while school was in session, they were still in the thick of things — Kylie packing lunches, Jason driving the kids there — but it’s summer now, so their mornings can start slowly, maybe even peacefully.

Or not.

“It’s kind of nice right now that we’re not pressed to get out of our PJs,” she says. “But yeah, it’s ­really just sheer chaos at all times.” She explains that Jason is running behind; he had a late night, another golf outing. When he does roll in a few minutes later, he’s got a Starbucks cup in hand, the green drink stirrer in his mouth like a toothpick, and flip-flops on his feet.

As I sit across from the Kelces, it’s a bit hard to imagine them as superstars, hard to imagine them hobnobbing with A-listers on red carpets (even though they do). It’s hard to imagine them anywhere, really, other than this normal house, wearing normal clothes, saying normal stuff, doing normal things. This, of course, is part of the charm that’s so endeared them to their fan base, to their city.

The team behind Kelce at the documentary’s premiere / Photograph by Laura Swartz

“All that glitz and glory, it doesn’t ­really mean anything to us,” Sean Holden, the couple’s shoulder-pad-wearing superfan, noted to me at the golf outing. “They’re just real people. They’re family people, and that resonates with us.”

It must be hard, I say to the Kelces, to keep being so normal when the life you live seems anything but.

“I don’t think so,” Kylie says. “I honestly feel like it’s easy to continue being who you are.” She glances down at Jason’s flip-flops. “Like, it takes a lot to get him out of those. Unless he’s walking a long distance or going to a legitimately fancy event, he’s wearing flip-flops. He’s not trying to impress anyone by being like, ‘I’m here, and I’m fancy now.’” Plus, she says, if they weren’t still so normal, “My dad would be very disappointed.”

Her dad, Ed McDevitt, was initially appalled when Kylie told him she was dating Jason, whom she’d met on Tinder in 2014 while she was still in college at Cabrini University — a star player on the Division III field hockey team. Ed was the protective dad of two girls, raising them in Narberth with his wife, Lisa, and he worried that Kylie’s linking up with a pro athlete would change people’s perceptions of his smart, ambitious, athletic daughter. But Ed, a die-hard Eagles fan, was also worried that his daughter’s budding relationship could change his own perception of Jason: “Do not ruin this for me,” he told her. Of course, Jason won him over immediately; the couple got engaged on her parents’ front lawn in 2017 and married a year later — just two months after the Eagles’ Super Bowl win — at The Logan Hotel in Center City.

Anyway, Jason has a slightly different take on keeping things real. “It’s not normal to try and be normal. So I don’t walk around thinking about keeping normalcy,” he says. Sure, Jason still always wears flip-flops and T-shirts, but he’s also profoundly aware that he’s a public figure, and that the city that adores him — that crowds around him with stuff to autograph and selfies to take and beers to chug — is the city that gave him the chance to be a player and a personality in the first place.

“Everything that I’ve had in my career and everything I’m having post-career was built because of this city and the people who have supported me and our team,” he says. “And this city celebrates and takes care of former players and athletes like few cities do.”

Jason’s agent told him as much when he first signed with the Eagles, in 2011. “He said, ‘Dude, you are going to love Philadelphia,’” he remembers. For starters, it was a city that appreciated its offensive linemen. But it was also a city with no-bullshit working-class roots, similar to where Jason grew up — in Cleveland, in a relatively modest house with his parents, Ed and Donna Kelce, and his younger brother, Travis. As kids, the boys played all sports — hockey, basketball, soccer, and, mostly, football — and by the time Jason was a senior in high school, he was convinced he’d get a scholarship to play at a Division I school. But the scholarship never came, and he ended up as a walk-on linebacker for the University of Cincinnati Bearcats in 2006. When he entered the NFL draft in 2011 as a comparatively small offensive lineman, he was the 191st overall pick, selected by the Eagles in the sixth round.

“Kelce feels like he’s always been an underdog,” says Connor Barwin, the former Eagles outside linebacker who was Kelce’s teammate at Cincinnati and is one of his best friends. (Disclosure: Barwin is a founding donor of CMG, Philly Mag’s parent company.) “Jason was a walk-on college football player and a sixth-round draft pick, but he drew power and strength from that. He’s a future Hall of Famer, but he still embodies that underdog mindset. People in Philadelphia embrace that. I think Philly is so great, but so many people think of Philly as an underdog city.”

He has a point. Philly has, for better or worse, always seen itself as ­lingering in the shadows, a blue-collar town sandwiched between the global super­powers of D.C. and New York. So when Jason delivered his impassioned Super Bowl speech on the steps of the Art Museum, it wasn’t just a quippy tagline. It was a siren song, a battle cry to a city that could relate: “You know what an underdog is? It’s a hungry dog. Hungry dogs run faster!”

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

“It’s really not that hard to be beloved in Philadelphia as an athlete,” Jason says back at the house, chewing the drink stirrer and running a hand over his bushy beard. “It’s a blue-collar town born off of hardworking people. And if you go out there and you play with everything you have, even if you suck, they may want you cut, but they’ll still respect you.”

He’s right about that, though plenty have fallen short. Just ask, say, the Sixers’ Ben Simmons, a guy as talented as he was despised by Philly for his lack of fight. We’re a city that booed Mike Schmidt, the best Phillie of all time, because we didn’t care for his cool exterior; we chucked batteries at J.D. Drew, a Cardinal who snubbed the Phils after they drafted him in the second round, and watched Lance Parrish crumble under the weight of fan opprobrium.

On the flip side, to Jason’s point, there was Allen Iverson, the fiery, fearless hoops phenom who barely scraped six feet, and Bobby Clarke, the undersize diabetic hockey kid who came from a small mining town and bullied his way into our hearts. Jason himself points ­to Hank Fraley.

“There’s an underswelling of people who will remember ‘Honey Buns,’ people who loved this short, fat guy running down the field,” he says. Fraley started out as a reserve center for the Eagles in 2000 and didn’t get off the bench. But after starter Bubba Miller was injured during the final preseason game in 2001, Fraley stepped in, showed his worth, and played for the rest of the year, earning a permanent spot on the team for the next four seasons — and our respect. “The city loves people who go out there and work hard, who wear their heart on their sleeve. I don’t know why I would ever go anywhere else.”

The Kelces could go anywhere else, of course. “They could buy a goddamn island,” says Mike McVeigh, one of the hecklers at the golf outing. He’s known Kelce since 2011, when he sent a Twitter message asking the rookie to partner with his struggling car dealership in Newtown Square. (Kelce’s response: “Fuck, yeah!”) “But at the end of the day, they decided that this is where they want to be.”

McVeigh says this with pride. Yes, the Kelces could be anywhere, hanging with anyone, but they’re choosing to stay here and hang with us.

“There’s not a celebrity couple in the world that is more humble and down-to-earth than the Kelces,” says PJ Dolan, another heckler, who proudly, boldly claimed at the golf outing that his Ridley Park bar, Dolan’s, is the country’s number one seller of Garage Beer, the brand from an Ohio-based brewing company that’s been majority-owned by the Kelce brothers since 2024. “They’re one of us. We’re all under the same umbrella.”

But these guys are only getting at the half of it. It’s not just that the Kelces have decided to plant their roots with us. It’s that they’ve planted these roots deep — that they’re stretching them to all corners of the city, so they can help nurture and uplift the folks around them. Their goal is to help fund and promote proven organizations that are already doing the work of giving our kids the bright, opportunity-filled futures they deserve, programs like Coded by and Heights Philadelphia, the first two nonprofits to receive grants from the Kelces’ Be Philly Foundation, which launched in October of 2022 — a year before he announced his retirement.

“I had been thinking of starting a foundation for a long time. Where I grew up in Cleveland, there was a lot of wealth disparity, and I think a lot of kids struggled because they didn’t have opportunities and resources,” Jason says. He saw the same here — a lot of under-resourced kids, a lot of untapped talent. “I think if there’s anything that people should agree on, it’s how can we give resources to kids and tap into their potential.”

Jason Kelce shows off his Underdog apparel at a launch event on November 6, 2022. / Photograph by Laura Swartz

At the time, grant-making funds came primarily from sales of Jason’s apparel brand, Underdog, an American-made line of hats, sweatshirts, and tees designed in Philly. Four months later, Be Philly got a significant boost — in both donations and visibility — in the wake of the Eagles’ devastating 2023 Super Bowl loss. Fans of the winning team, the Kansas City Chiefs, launched a grassroots campaign to thank “their strongest connection to the Eagles” — Jason, the lovable brother of their tight end, Travis — by giving to his fledgling foundation. The suggested donation floated on social media: $14.90, a combination of the brothers’ numbers ($6.20 plus $8.70). As of the day of the Super Bowl, Be Philly had raised exactly $9,961 — far short of its initial online goal of $100,000. Five days later, donations topped $133,000.

That Jason would start a foundation only a year or so before he left the game wasn’t poor timing on his part, though it could have seemed that way. Plenty of public figures — especially athletes — dive immediately into philanthropic ventures. But unlike most charities drummed up at the first flush of fame, Jason’s wasn’t going to be a one-off, something he’d start and then let somebody else run. He was going to be all in.

“It was a deliberate decision for Jason to start it toward the end of his career, and I think there’s something really commendable about that,” Kylie says. “He wasn’t just starting a foundation as fast as possible for goodwill. He got to a point where he was like, ‘I love this city. I think there are still deficits within the programs that are impacting the youth of this city, and I want to make sure that I can leverage my network, my platform, and be able to give back in a way that is very intentional.’”

We love Philadelphia. It has a tremendous spirit, a toughness, a level of grit that I want my kids to have, that I like being a part of.” — Jason Kelce

As with the foundation, this current chapter of Jason’s life has also been years in the making. He laid the framework for his post-football transition by launching a podcast, New Heights, with his brother in 2022; it’s now one of the most popular podcasts in the world. (One recent guest was Prince William.) A month after he announced his retirement in an emotional 41-minute speech, Kylie — in jeans, sneakers, and an Eagles Autism Foundation T-shirt — perched on a stool on the set of the Today show and revealed to Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb that her husband had actually been wrestling with this farewell ever since they first started dating.

“I think he understood the impact of what football has been to his life and wanted to make sure he accurately conveyed that to everyone else. And it’s a moment to give thanks to everyone who helped him along the way,” she said on the show. “He really wanted to make sure it was correct.”

Meanwhile, Kylie had been quietly drafting her own next chapter. She’d finally given up any hope of staying on the sidelines and out of the spotlight. Sure, she still drives a green minivan, still coaches high school field hockey at her alma mater, Lower Merion High School, still is charmingly, authentically normal — but despite her best intentions, she’s also famous. So she started speaking more, and more loudly, about issues that matter to her, like the Eagles Autism Foundation, women and girls in sports, body confidence, the expectations of motherhood, reproductive rights, female empowerment.

“You can definitely see the impact that women feel that Kylie has made, how much they appreciate her voice and advocacy,” Jason says. “I can’t tell you how often I get when I’m out, ‘I love you, but I really love your wife.’”

Kylie smiles, her arms still burrowed in her sweatshirt. “I don’t necessarily love being in a public-facing position. But I want to give an example to our girls that if you are given a platform, you use it in a very positive way and make as big an impact as you possibly can.”

In other words, people are going to talk about her family, and write stories like this one. Might as well give them something meaningful, something true, to say. Something good.

As we walk out of the house, past the Pull-Ups tower, Jason sees a little pyramid of boxes on a bench — new golf clubs that have just been delivered. He can’t help himself; he immediately unboxes one, like a kid on Christmas morning. I ask him if golf is his new sport.

“Well, it’s kind of the only sport I can do now,” he says half-jokingly, his voice sounding like it always does: gruff and warm, like a hug. He gently swings the club back and forth, getting a feel for it. Kylie heads out; she has to take their new rescue puppy, a German shepherd named Freddie, to the vet. Jason plans to go work out. And then they’ll get back to work, because there’s still a lot of work to be done. Bigger responsibilities, bigger goals. They want to grow Be Philly’s grant-making budget to around half a million dollars annually by 2027 — nearly double what they’re distributing today. Later this year, they’ll be opening a biannual grant cycle (till now, they’ve just run it in the spring), and 2026 marks the first year the foundation will cross $1 million in total funds dispersed.

They’ve got their heftiest portfolio of grantees yet: eight organizations spread across the city, from Safe-Hub’s youth soccer programming in Kensington to Valley Youth House, a Center City–based nonprofit that works with young people experiencing housing instability or homelessness. And they created their first new full-time position at Be Philly — a “director of impact,” someone to operationalize the foundation, measure its impact, uncover more worthy grantees, guide them from the minor league up to the majors.

On one hand, it’s a little hard to understand why the Kelces have chosen this moment to increase the momentum at Be Philly, when everything else in their lives is already moving at warp speed — the podcasts, the business opportunities (the most recent equity investment: Hank Sauce, a hot sauce company based in Sea Isle, where they have a shore house), the other causes they lend their names and support to, like the Eagles Autism Foundation and the Wardrobe, a Philly nonprofit that offers clothing and career guidance to people transitioning back into the workforce. Hell, Kylie still can’t process that her oldest daughter just graduated from kindergarten: “Guys, we literally just started the year. How did we get here? How do we pause time?” she lamented on her podcast.

Kylie and Jason Kelce at a New Heights party in February / Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

But you can’t pause time, and the Kelces are keenly aware that their spotlight will one day dim. (“We certainly have an overwhelming amount of people who are tired of seeing our faces,” says Jason.) While they say it isn’t a conscious move — this harnessing of the moment when, in part thanks to a very notable recent wedding, people all over the world are paying rapt attention to the Kelce family — it does seem like this might be the perfect time to throw themselves into the foundation even more. The moment in their lives and in the life of this city in which they might have maximum impact.

“Jason and Kylie have so much trust in what Philly knows about itself,” says Anisha Sinha, the aforementioned new director of impact at Be Philly. “At one meeting, Jason was like, ‘We don’t need a savior. We don’t need fixing. Philly has a lot of good pieces; we just need to put them together and amplify them.’”

If you ask Danae Mobley, this approach is working. She’s the CEO of Coded by, a nonprofit headquartered in University City that’s been teaching tech and start-up skills to underserved Philly youth since 2014. It’s one of Be Philly’s inaugural and longest-standing grantees. When they first partnered, Coded by was able to work with about 350 young people a year; now it serves more than 1,200.

“That is the yield when you see multi-year philanthropic relationships,” says Mobley. “Not many other athletes or influencers are thinking about how they can make an investment that is truly generational. So many times there are associations that have a direct and immediate impact, but something like this is truly changing the trajectory for the next generation of people in Philadelphia. And the value of that can’t be underestimated.”

Even if it took Jason a little while to drill down into how, exactly, he wanted to approach his philanthropy, the idea of the couple’s work being anything other than a long-term investment in Philly was never in question.

“It’s our back yard,” says Jason. “We love Philadelphia. There’s an aura to the city that is infectious. It has a tremendous spirit, a toughness, a level of grit that I want my kids to have, that I like being a part of, that I enjoy celebrating.”

“It’s our network,” says Kylie. “It’s the place that we love. It’s the city and community that we’re raising our kids in.” It’s where their love story began (specifically, at Buffalo Billiards in Old City, where, Jason has said, “It was love at first sight,” even though he drunkenly fell asleep at the table 45 minutes in). It’s where they’ve had their four girls, where they’ve built their media empire, and where they’ve decided to write the next part of their story: the Be Philly chapter, championing the next generation of Philadelphians so that they, too, might draw power and strength from exceeding people’s expectations.

And it’s just like heckler PJ Dolan said on the beer-splashed golf green: The Kelces are one of us. They make us feel like we’re in the same inner circle, under the same umbrella. No wonder we embraced them.

Driving home from the Kelces’ place, I wonder what they might say if we presented them with this Best of Philly award — our best love story — at a ceremony with a strict five-word limit on acceptance speeches. I wonder if it would take them a while to craft the perfect bon mot, to make sure it was just right. Or if it would just flow naturally, the way they talk — Kylie with her Philly accent, Jason with his warm-hug voice — real, without pretense, so relentlessly, completely, totally … well, normal. Love you too. Go Birds.

>> Click here to return to Best of Philly 2026

Published as “Kylie + Jason ♥ Philly” in the August 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.