The Other Football Player in Taylor Swift’s Life
Scott Swift, her father, played a single season at the University of Hawaii before starting work in finance. His teammates from those days are only now discovering who he’s related to.
By Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson
Wall Street Journal
Feb. 6, 2024
Long before his daughter Taylor became a pop star, or started dating a certain player on the Kansas City Chiefs—in fact, long before Taylor was even born—Scott Swift went on his own journey of football discovery.
Instead of landing him at the Super Bowl, this one took a teenage Scott Swift to Mānoa, Hawaii, where he played a single season of college football.
Stephen Adzima roomed with Scott Swift that year in 1970, and he remembers his former teammate as studious and someone he begged not to sing. Their main experiences together included honing their football skills in games against local semi-pro teams and sneaking into a local bar. Over the decades that followed, Adzima became a big fan of Taylor Swift’s music and even noticed when she started showing up at games cheering on her beau, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who will play in this weekend’s Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers.
There was one thing Adzima had no clue about until he received a call about it last week: The same Scott Swift he shared a room with was actually Taylor’s father.
“I hadn’t the slightest idea,” Adzima says.
Even the school’s play-by-play man in those days could hardly believe the connection. He happened to be an up-and-coming broadcaster named Al Michaels. Now one of the most famous voices in America (behind Taylor Swift), Michaels can recall long-forgotten details about Hawaii’s coach, Hawaii’s stadium, and Hawaii’s 1970 season, but he only found out about the Swift connection a few weeks ago—from fellow announcer Jim Nantz.
“I wish I could tell you I remembered Taylor’s father,” Michaels says, “but I’d be lying through my teeth.”
Some members of that 1970 team went on to become CEOs or play in the NFL. One, Jeris White, even won a Super Bowl with Washington, while Adzima spent time in preseason camps with the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants. Only one player, though, went on to have a daughter who has won 14 Grammy Awards, launched a record-breaking concert tour, and taken over American pop culture. They called that player Scotty.
Scott Swift’s collegiate football career was brief. The lanky teenager from Pennsylvania transferred to a school closer to home after one season and attended the University of Delaware before becoming a successful wealth manager. But his year playing in Hawaii is evidence that there were close ties between football and the Swifts decades before America’s buzziest romance.
Scott Swift couldn’t be reached for comment.
For the kids who moved across the country and the Pacific to play for the Rainbows, 1970 was a complicated time to be thousands of miles from their families. So players like Swift and Adzima, two of the rare freshmen to end up in Mānoa from east of the Mississippi River, leaned on each other to stave off homesickness and place their brief, weekly collect calls to their parents.
Adzima, who also transferred away after his freshman year, remembers a few particular details about his former roommate. Swift was a better student, and Adzima is still thankful to this day that Swift helped him pass calculus. On Saturday nights after games, they were able into sneak into one local bar because Adzima was dating the bartender. That’s when he learned that this Swift also liked to sing. No recordings of those performances survive.
“I used to tell him to shut up,” Adzima says.
At the time, playing on this college football team wasn’t particularly glamorous. On the islands, Michaels says high-school football was king and the college game was often an afterthought. Michaels would know: He was also the announcer for high school action. He’d arrived in 1968 to cover minor-league baseball, and soon became the voice of football there, too.
Playing in what he called “a ramshackle stadium” known to locals as the Termite Palace, high schools would schedule two games on a Friday and two more on a Saturday. Only then, once the surface had taken on the texture of scrambled eggs, could the Hawaii Rainbows get to work.
“You can imagine what that field looked like,” Michaels says. “And if it rained, good luck.”
Despite the University of Hawaii’s status playing second football fiddle, the team went 9-2 in 1970, its most victories since going undefeated in 1925. Not that guys like Scott Swift had much to do with it, since freshmen at the time hardly played on the varsity squad. They were left to bulk up and sharpen their skills against local talent.
How much they actually learned from taking on teams made up of former high school players and factory workers is a matter of some debate.
“We actually had one team that quit at halftime,” says David Mutter, another one of Swift’s freshman teammates. “We were beating them like 35-0 and they just walked off the field.”
While Swift’s old pals from the freshman team still think of the bright, softly spoken kid they knew then, it wasn’t until much later that they discovered his connection to a pop culture phenomenon. Bill Letz, another former Hawaii player, only recently learned about it when a teammate mentioned the familiar name: “You guys remember a guy named Scotty Swift?”
The teammate went on to explain to Letz and everyone in attendance that he recently received a call from Swift, who told him he’d be in town because his daughter had a concert. Her name, by the way, was Taylor.
Like so much else in the Swift-verse, Scott’s football career has become a small piece of the lore. Even Kelce’s boss, Chiefs coach Andy Reid, is playing into it. Reid spent 14 years as the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, Scott’s hometown team, and recently explained that he didn’t need one of his players to be dating Taylor to have a rapport with her.
“I knew her before, from Philadelphia. Her dad played at Delaware and was a big football fan and good guy,” Reid recently said on Tom Brady’s podcast. “So I had met him there and her.”
There was just one problem with Reid’s scouting report. Swift didn’t play football at Delaware, according to an athletic department spokesman. His football career appears to have ended after that one year at Hawaii.
But his love of the game lived on. Though Taylor has become the most visible Swift presence at Chiefs games, it’s possible no one is more excited to be there than Scott. Before kickoff, he’s taken to dropping into the CBS booth to chop it up with Nantz and former Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo.
It was during one of those visits that Scott Swift told Nantz about his own playing days and boasted about his first brush with fame in Hawaii, when Michaels was calling the games.
Nantz just had to tell Michaels about it. And even someone who believes in miracles was blown away.
“That’s crazy,” Michaels says.
