Former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton issued a tweet congratulating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce on his team’s Super Bowl victory on Sunday by calling him “Taylor’s boyfriend,” a reference to pop star Taylor Swift.
“Congratulations to Taylor’s boyfriend—and the entire Kansas City Chiefs community!” Clinton tweeted.
Congratulations to Taylor's boyfriend—and the entire Kansas City Chiefs community! 💕🏈
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 12, 2024
Clinton, who grew up in Chicago and said she was a Chicago Cubs fan, cemented her sports fan legacy in 1999, days after her announcement she was forming an exploratory committee for a possible New York senatorial run, when she donned a New York Yankees cap Yankees manager Joe Torre gave her when the team visited the White House.
“She went to the Yankees so that she could run for senator from New York,” MSNBC host Chris Matthews said in 2007. “It’s so obvious. Why is she — doesn’t she know she looks like a fraud?”
RT CNNPolitics: Hillary Clinton and the Chicago Cubs: It's complicated https://t.co/NSPXbDFs2a pic.twitter.com/QMgpyyFEUW
— Jake Cornwall (@JakeM_1998) October 23, 2016
In her memoir “Living History,” Clinton wrote, “In our neighborhood, it was nearly sacrilegious to cheer for the rival White Sox of the American League, so I adopted the Yankees as my AL team, in part because I loved Mickey Mantle. My explanations of Chicago sports rivalries fell on deaf ears during my Senate campaign years later, when skeptical New Yorkers were incredulous that a Chicago native could claim youthful allegiance to a team from the Bronx.”
But in 2014, two years before the Cubs ended a 108-year drought and won the World Series, Clinton told the Economic Club of Chicago of her switch to the Yankees:
I couldn’t stay hitched with a losing team … I had to search for a team that would counterbalance the experience of losing every single year, so – I hate to say this, and I know you’ll boo me – I became a Yankees fan. I alternated my affections because it was just too hard being a Cubs fan, only being a Cubs fan.
When the Cubs clinched a trip to the World Series in 2016, Clinton was photographed this way:
That look when you cap off a day on the trail by watching the @Cubs cement their trip to the #WorldSeries. #FlyTheW pic.twitter.com/94KMWpKHwe
— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) October 23, 2016
Clinton has weighed into sports debates and controversies in the past. In October 2017, when asked how to “resist” the Trump White House, Clinton spoke of the NFL players kneeling for the national anthem, saying, “That’s what black athletes kneeling was all about. That’s not against our anthem or our flag. Actually, kneeling is a reverent position. It was to demonstrate in a peaceful way against racism and injustice in our criminal system.”