The NFL tight end received both nicknames when he was a young basketball player.
In a recent episode of New Heights, the podcast he co-hosts with his brother Jason, Travis Kelce revealed the origins of two of his childhood nicknames and revealed he frequently pays homage to one of them.
The NFL player was in-person recording the podcast with his older brother following the Kansas City Chiefs’ sixth straight victory of the 2024 season when a fan-submitted question initiated the topic of nicknames. The Chiefs tight end was asked to explain the meaning behind the T-Rex emblem on his Nike football gloves by a fan during the “No Dumb Questions” part of the episode, which aired on Wednesday, October 9.
Travis, 35, clarified that the gloves were built to order and that he asked for the emblem to be incorporated into the design as a reference to a childhood nickname he had gotten from his peers.
“You say it best when you say you don’t choose your own nicknames,” Travis told Jason, 36, before diving into the story. The Grotesquerie star then revealed that the teammates he’d played basketball with around age 10 had dubbed him “T-Rex.”
Although the brothers continued to conjecture about Travis’s potential as an NBA player, both went on to have prosperous NFL careers. After 13 seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles, Jason retired earlier this year as a center.
“I think ’T’ for ‘Travis,’ and T-Rex was kind of, like, a mind frame. Like a mindset,” Travis said. “Or it was because I was just, like, fat with short arms.”
Travis then mentioned another nickname that was inspired by his time playing basketball as a kid. “It was that and Traveling Trav,” he said, joking that the second nickname was “Because I was traveling all over the world.” He then clarified that “Traveling Trav” was a nod to the fact that he “did not like to dribble.”
Similar to this, Travis has played for the Chiefs his entire professional career, winning three Super Bowl rings since being selected in the 2013 draft. By the end of the 2024 season, Travis and his teammates hope to make NFL history by being the first team to win three consecutive Super Bowls.
