The Washington Times confirmed today that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are getting married at Madison Square Garden on July 3, and I, Nick DeLuca, Bergen County native, Hoboken resident, and owner of a dog named Revis, am choosing to be honored by this.
I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve thought about it for a full fourteen minutes and I’m good.
MSG is the most important building in my entire emotional life. The 1994 Rangers. The 1999 Knicks. Every January Jets loss I’ve watched on a bar TV while some drunk from Connecticut reminds me we play in New Jersey. Taylor Swift wore a Stevie Knicks shirt to the NBA Finals at that same building two weeks ago, cheering while the Knicks won the NBA Finals for the first time since 1973. She has earned a relationship with this venue that most of my couch-bound existence has not.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DN04hUKYu6N/
The engagement post said “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” Fourteen million likes in the first hour. The English teacher is getting an old mine elongated cushion-cut engagement ring worth roughly $400,000. The gym teacher is showing up to Tight End University in a blue suit and no additional information, per George Kittle, who told Entertainment Tonight he’s “half expecting there to just be a jumbo jet on a runway.” Kittle is bringing old coins as a gift because apparently Travis Kelce collects old coins and that detail genuinely delights me in a way I cannot fully explain.
The Taylor Swift Travis Kelce wedding MSG situation makes complete sense the moment you stop thinking about it as a celebrity stunt and start thinking about it as infrastructure. MSG has no windows. It has underground parking. It holds 1,200 people for a reception with the kind of acoustic seal that makes civilian surveillance essentially impossible. They’re closing blocks around the building from June 28 through July 4 midday under a “film event” permit, which is the most elaborately polite fiction I’ve ever read in a city permit filing. The mayor of New York went on record saying he is “so excited to welcome the world here” alongside July 4 and America 250. The mayor. On record. Excited.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DT7P8WIEpHB/
Travis Kelce’s NFL training camp starts July 22, which is why we’re doing this on July 3. That’s right: the date of the most talked-about wedding in a decade is determined by when Chiefs players have to report to St. Joseph, Missouri. Multiple Chiefs players are already booked at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The greatest tight end in NFL history is scheduling his wedding around OTAs. My dad texted me about this at 8 AM and I am ignoring him.
https://twitter.com/SwiftNYC/status/2066592509745098839
What actually happened here is that sports and entertainment finished merging and nobody got a memo. Travis Kelce isn’t attending MSG for a game. He IS the game now. Taylor performed “Love Story” at Tight End University the night before this was announced, which is a sentence I could not have predicted writing when I dropped out of Rutgers to run a sports blog. The venue that watched the ‘94 Rangers lift the Cup, that watched Ewing limp off the floor in ‘99, that spent fifty years being the backdrop of New York’s best and worst sports moments, is about to host the thing that turns a tight end into a permanent American institution.
MSG has hosted bigger crowds. It has never hosted a guest list this expensive.
I’m fine. Revis is fine. We’re honored.
