Swagger back: Meet the former high school football player behind the meme that inspired Travis

Publish date: 2024-05-16

One day after a 41-14 blowout of the Las Vegas Raiders, there was no shortage of opinions about the Kansas City Chiefs: Patrick Mahomes found his mojo. The defense was stout. And there’s this: As Travis Kelce told the NFL, “I got my swagger back!”

"Somethin' tells me I got my swagger back!" @tkelce after the Chiefs' big win 😂 pic.twitter.com/rWcEkIdI23

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) November 15, 2021

It was, of course, one game. So is it real?

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“Of course!” Jahwuan Nelson says.

Nelson is not exactly Louis Riddick. He’s 23 and last played organized football as a junior in high school. He’s former prep teammates with Chiefs defensive end Mike Danna, but he’s not much of an expert on the Chiefs, either. What Nelson does understand, however, is swagger. Especially the art of getting it back. And as it turns out, he was also the inspiration for Mahomes’ big five-touchdown showing on Sunday Night Football, even if he didn’t know it until he picked up his phone on Monday and saw Kelce impersonating him during a postgame interview on ESPN.

Yes, you see where this is going. Nelson is that guy. Which is how he introduces himself when he returns my text message: “Hey this is Jahwuan Nelson swagger back.”

The basic details of how Nelson came to offer the Chiefs a galvanizing philosophy came to light late Sunday night, after the victory over the Raiders, when Mahomes disclosed that reserve quarterback Shane Buechele had pulled out the clip of Nelson early in the week. That had come after Mahomes had iced a victory over the Packers with a vintage scramble and completion on the run. The words of Nelson struck a chord.

“That was kind of my mantra this week,” Mahomes said.

The story of how Nelson initially came to speak those words on camera is also simple enough — and we’ll get to that in a moment — but the story of what happened after is also worth hearing. Nelson left high school after his junior year, tried to finish a GED program but left that, too, then bounced around for a couple of years, living in New York for a time and Wilmington, Ohio, before eventually settling in Lebanon, Ohio, where he lives near his 4-year-old son while being, in his words, “job to job.” He’s never made a dollar from the millions of YouTube views, Instagram posts or TikTok videos that came out because of his viral moment, which raises all sorts of questions about the folks who see themselves become memes while never benefitting from the content, but Nelson isn’t too worried about that.

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“I’ve been living a normal life,” he says.

His journey into the world of sports meme-dom began in high school, when he transferred schools, moving to De La Salle, an all-boys Jesuit high school in the suburbs of Detroit. The move, Nelson says, was based on football. (De La Salle is a bit of a Michigan powerhouse.) But because of the long commute to the suburbs, he spent part of his junior year staying with teammates. One of those nights was spent watching old home videos, which is when Nelson remembers seeing an old locker room clip of Allen Stritzinger, who would go on to play at Syracuse. It was Stritzinger who first joked about getting his swagger back, echoing a Jay-Z line from “Otis,” the hit single off the rapper’s joint 2011 album “Watch the Throne” with Kanye West. Nelson found it hilarious, so he added it to his high school lexicon.

“I used to say it all the time,” Nelson says.

On the football field, Nelson was a linebacker and halfback who didn’t play much. But he was in uniform on Nov. 28, 2014, when the school faced Muskegon Mona Shores in the Division 2 state championship game at Ford Field. Before the game, the team was waiting in the bowels of the stadium when a local Detroit reporter from Fox 2 arrived, hoping to do a faux-serious package on a high school state title game. The boys from De La Salle played along, so gloriously in fact that Nelson remembers leaving Ford Field after a big win and thinking there was no way they were using any of that. Nelson, after all, had looked into the camera and delivered the money line — “I think I got my swagger back!” — before dancing away from camera.

“The “Ooohhhh” part just came up randomly,” he says.  “I think we ended up saying: ‘There’s no way they’re posting that interview on TV.’ ”

They did, of course, and the next morning, Nelson remembers hearing from a friend. “Bro, this is getting a lot of views.”

From then on, Nelson was a GIF, a piece of sports internet culture to be reposted and repackaged. Kyrie Irving once quoted his line. Nelson remembers Cam Newton saying it, too. That was years ago. Sometimes, just for fun, he opens his GIF keyboard and sends a clip of himself to a friend. It’s not as if Nelson was the first person ever to speak of someone getting their groove back. But man, he nailed the line.

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He didn’t return to De La Salle his senior year. According to him, he fell into too much trouble. He came from a big family and very modest means, too, and transportation to the suburbs was a problem. He tried the GED program, but that didn’t stick. He’s never been fixated on trying to find ways to make money from going viral, but he has pondered ways. In 2021, that’s meant looking into NFTs.

“I don’t know what I need to do,” Nelson says. “I know I need to make an NFT. I know that’s my goal, to make an NFT, and if there’s anyone out there within reach that can help me make an NFT …”

Nelson doesn’t want to pretend this is some big story, of course. He knows the Chiefs did not produce offensive fireworks on Sunday night just because he once said something hilarious on camera. He even exchanged texts with Danna on Monday, and it wasn’t certain that Mahomes or Kelce even knew that one of their teammates was on the team that produced that viral clip. He’s just a former high school football player, living his life and looking for work, hoping to make the best of his situation, but he did have one idea about why the clip has carved out such a niche. It’s the line reading. It’s just so much fun to say.

“The reason why the guy was showing it to him all week,” Nelson says, “was because, hey, when you start winning, you’re gonna want to say, ‘I got my swagger back!’”

(Photo: AP Photo/David Becker)

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