HOW TRAVIS KELCE SPENT HIS SUMMER VACATION

After a grueling Super Bowl loss—and amid speculation that he would retire—Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce vowed to come back stronger than ever. And now he has. At Kelce's under the radar training base in Florida, he answers all our questions about the upcoming season, life after football, and what it's like to be Mr. Americana.

- Sean Manning

IN a dimly lit dining room in Miami, a waiter places a course of hamachi crudo in front of Travis Kelce. "We don't get fresh fish like this in Kansas City," Kelce says. We are sitting in a horseshoe-shaped booth, and Kelce's voice can just be heard over that of the young woman on the restaurant's stage, covering Sade's "The Sweetest Taboo" and other quiet storm standards. Kelce did not encounter fish like this—raw, finely sliced, opalescent—growing up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, either. "Red Lobster was the nice spot for us to go to as a kid. We used to go there, see the lobsters in the tank like we were at an aquarium. We put on pants for that shit."

Kelce is here, in the swank, lean-protein-and-rich-people capital of the world, not just because it is a comfortable off-season home for a 35-year-old multimillionaire. Kelce is here in South Florida to get back to his roots, to reunite with Fort Lauderdale-based speed-and-agility coach Tony Villani. Villani trained Kelce for his NFL combine more than a decade ago and has worked with Kelce during the summers for most of his professional career. Kelce took a hiatus from Villani a few years ago, when the Kansas City Chiefs tight end moved his off-season operations to Los Angeles, near his burgeoning second career in film and television. Now, though, Kelce has come back east to regroup from last season's lopsided defeat in the Super Bowl.