LITTLE TRAITOR - Joe Burrow
Descriptions: A football player’s worst nightmare? His son cheering for the other team.
MASTERLIST!
It started on one of those slow, sleepy Sunday afternoons where the whole house seemed wrapped in a soft hush—blankets scattered across the couch, the scent of warm popcorn in the air, sunlight slipping through the curtains in long golden streaks, and the sound of the game humming from the television like a steady heartbeat in the background, and Joe was exactly where he wanted to be, stretched out in his favorite corner of the sectional, legs crossed, hoodie sleeves rolled to his elbows, one hand behind his head, the other gently resting on the little body tucked close beside him, where his three-year-old son Hugo sat with his knees up and his feet bare and his entire tiny frame wrapped in a too-big Bengals hoodie that swallowed his arms and bunched around his neck, the kind of sweatshirt he’d refused to take off all weekend because “it’s like Daddy’s,” even though it kept sliding off his shoulders, and for the first part of the game Hugo was quiet, eyes wide and darting, head tilted like he was trying to unlock the rules just by watching, only occasionally reaching into the popcorn bowl and chewing slowly like he had to concentrate to keep up, until midway through the first quarter, when a receiver sprinted down the sideline and the crowd on the broadcast roared, Hugo suddenly sat up straight, tugged on Joe’s sleeve with his small hand, and asked, “Where’s the red team?”
Joe turned his head, confused but patient, and looked back at the screen, saying, “You mean the other team?” but Hugo frowned and shook his head, puffing out his cheeks a little like he did when he was frustrated and said, “Nooo, Daddy. The red team. The one that goes super fast. With Travis. He do the spins. He’s so fun.”
And that was the moment it clicked, like a light flickering on in Joe’s head a second too late—Hugo wasn’t just talking about any red team, he meant the red team, the Kansas City Chiefs, and not only that, he meant Travis Kelce, which meant somewhere between Joe’s last road game and Hugo’s unsupervised screen time, their three-year-old son had picked a favorite player, a favorite team, and that team… wasn’t Joe’s.
Joe leaned back into the couch with a hand on his face, half groaning and half laughing, muttering, “Oh no. Not you too,” and from the kitchen, his wife raised her eyebrows like she’d been expecting it and said, “You left your iPad out last week. He found a whole YouTube rabbit hole of Travis Kelce touchdown dances,” and Joe looked back at Hugo, who was now clapping at a commercial on TV like it had something to do with the Chiefs and said softly, “This is betrayal. Tiny, adorable betrayal.”
But it didn’t stop there—it turned into a full-blown era. Hugo insisted on wearing red socks every day, ran around the house yelling “Go Chiefs!” at the cat, demanded bedtime stories about “Travis and his zoom shoes,” and once, during a FaceTime with his grandparents, climbed onto the table just to shout, “The red team is the best team EVER!” as Joe watched in horror and mild amusement from across the room. At one point, Joe found Hugo building a Lego stadium on the living room rug with one lone red player standing in the middle and when Joe asked, half-hoping, “Is that me?” Hugo looked up, blinked, and said without hesitation, “No, Daddy. That’s Travis’s house. You’re in the other part.”
The internet got wind of it after Joe mentioned it in an interview, trying to play it cool but clearly losing the household rivalry, saying, “Yeah, my son’s been rooting for the Chiefs lately. We’re in a complicated phase,” and a clip of the interview went viral within hours, and days later, Travis Kelce responded on his podcast with a wide grin and a laugh in his voice, saying, “Hugo, I got you, buddy—welcome to the Kingdom,” and from that point on, Hugo acted like it was official, like he had been drafted.
At the same time, something else was quietly becoming a Very Big Deal in Hugo’s world—his first loose tooth, which started wiggling a little after Thanksgiving when he bit too hard into a caramel apple and froze mid-chew, gasping, “Mommy! My tooth is wobbly! It’s gonna fall out forever!” and ever since then, it became his daily obsession, something he checked every morning in the mirror with his mouth stretched open, something he told every barista and grocery clerk about, something he whispered about at bedtime like it was a secret mission, holding his tiny clear tooth container like it was solid gold, repeating over and over, “When it comes out, the fairy’s gonna come with sparkle money,” and he started saying things like, “If I scream really loud, maybe my tooth will pop,” and once during dinner, he stopped chewing mid-bite and said, “I think it’s thinking about falling out,” which made Joe almost spit out his drink from trying not to laugh too hard.
Then came Sunday again—the Chiefs were playing, Hugo had been talking about it all week, even picked out his red hoodie three days early, asked Joe five times that morning if they could watch it together, and Joe had promised, had cleared his afternoon just for this, but sometimes life has a way of messing with perfect plans, and a last-minute team call pulled Joe away right before kickoff, and when he kissed Hugo’s head and said, “I’ll be back soon, buddy,” Hugo didn’t say anything, just curled up on the couch and looked at the TV like maybe if he watched hard enough, the game would wait for him, and when Joe came back that night, the living room was quiet, the popcorn bowl mostly full, and Hugo was asleep under a blanket with his foam finger drooping beside him and his tooth container unopened on the table, and Joe just stood there for a second, heart soft and heavy at once, before kneeling beside him and whispering to his wife, “Let’s fix this.”
The next morning, they didn’t tell Hugo where they were going until they were halfway there, bundled in jackets, snack bag in the backseat, Joe smiling in the mirror and saying, “Want to see the red team in real life?” and Hugo gasped so big he choked on his apple slice and shouted, “WE’RE GOING TO CHIEFSLAND?! TODAY?! RIGHT NOW?!” and then, holding up his tooth container, added with all the seriousness in the world, “I gotta show Travis my wiggly tooth before it pops out!”
Arrowhead was bigger than anything Hugo had imagined, and when they walked up the stadium steps and he saw the sea of red, the loud music, the fans dancing in rows, he clutched Joe’s hand and said, “This is the best place in the universe,” and Joe, trying not to cry-laugh, just nodded and said, “Yeah, it kind of is.” They found their seats and Hugo stood the entire time, foam finger in one hand and juice box in the other, yelling “Go Travis, go Travis, gooooo!” even when the play wasn’t for him, and in the third quarter, when Travis caught a touchdown and pointed toward the crowd, Hugo jumped so high he nearly launched himself off the seat, screamed with all the force in his tiny lungs—and just like that, it happened.
He stopped suddenly, touched his mouth, turned to Joe and his mom with eyes as big as planets and said, “My tooth… it’s gone,” and they searched everywhere—under the seat, in his jacket, in the snack bag—but the tooth had vanished, lost to the loudest scream in Hugo’s life, and when they finally gave up, Hugo curled into Joe’s lap with a trembling lip and said quietly, “Now the fairy won’t come. She won’t know I did it brave.”
The next morning, at the Chiefs training facility, Joe knelt beside Hugo in a hallway that echoed with every footstep, the lights bright overhead and the walls lined with red and gold, and Hugo’s red beanie sat crooked over his curls as he clutched his empty tooth container in both hands like it was still filled with possibility, and when Travis Kelce finally walked in—tall and grinning, hoodie sleeves pushed to his elbows like he wasn’t about to make a three-year-old’s whole year—Hugo went quiet with awe, his small fingers curling tighter around Joe’s hand as he whispered, “Daddy… he’s even bigger than the TV.”
Travis crouched with the ease of someone who’d done this before, who knew how to speak to kids without making them feel small, and said, “Hey, little man. I heard you lost something important yesterday,” and Hugo nodded seriously, holding out his empty tooth container and saying, “I screamed when you did the big spin and the touchdown and then—boop—it was gone, and now the fairy’s gonna be sad ‘cause she doesn’t know where to fly.”
Travis made a big show of thinking, then reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out a shiny gold Chiefs coin, holding it like it was rare treasure and saying, “Good thing she left this with me. Said it’s for the loudest, bravest, most awesome Chiefs fan in the whole stadium.”
Hugo gasped—audibly, like he’d been holding his breath since kickoff the day before—and looked down at the coin like it was glowing from the inside, then looked up at Joe and whispered, “She really knew I was loud?” and Joe just nodded and said, “She definitely knew.”
They left the facility an hour later, Hugo practically floating out the door, coin in hand, hood up over his curls, asking Joe things like “Do you think Travis eats cereal?” and “Is ketchup still allowed if we’re Bengals again today?” and Joe just smiled, giving his wife a look that said we might be raising a Chiefs fan, but she only raised an eyebrow and said, “Maybe we’re raising both.”
That night, after dinner and bath and one story turned into two, Joe sat beside Hugo’s bed, the room dim and soft with the glow of the nightlight shaped like a football helmet, and Hugo, already blinking slow with sleep, rolled onto his side and whispered, “Daddy…?”
Joe looked up from folding his hoodie on the chair. “Yeah, bud?”
Hugo rubbed at his nose, then said, so small and certain it made Joe’s heart catch, “I still like the red team, but when I grow up, I think I wanna play with you.”
Joe moved closer, brushing Hugo’s damp curls back from his forehead, his chest full and his throat tight, because there it was—not shouted in a stadium, not posted online, but spoken in the quiet of his little boy’s room, that innocent, gentle truth that no matter how many players Hugo admired or jerseys he wore, he still wanted to be like his dad.
“You already do, buddy,” Joe said, voice low and steady. “More than you know.”
And as Hugo drifted to sleep with his gold coin under his pillow and the empty tooth container beside it, Joe sat there a little longer, watching his son’s chest rise and fall, and he didn’t care which team Hugo rooted for next Sunday or the Sunday after that, because in this house full of football and foam fingers and fleeting moments, he knew this one would stay—this small, perfect moment where his son, in his own quiet way, had chosen him.
