Pregaming With the WAGS of the Kansas City Chiefs

Chariah Gordon isn’t easily rattled. Except when she’s running late.

From the driver’s seat of her custom Mercedes SUV, Gordon taps a manicured finger on the wheel and blasts Future a bit louder from the speakers. “Come on,” she says under her breath, waiting for a gap to materialize in an unusually long line of cars outside her upscale neighborhood in Leawood, Kansas. She takes the pause as a chance to change the color of the car’s interior LED lights to a deep blood red. Chiefs colors. Then, spotting a break in the endless stream, she steps on the gas. She has a game to attend.

A few hours later Gordon emerges triumphant into the club-level suite at Arrowhead Stadium. It was a close call with the traffic, but she made it onto the field just in time to give a pregame hug and kiss to her fiancé, Chiefs star wide receiver Mecole Hardman Jr., and, of course, snap a few photos and videos for her nearly 250,000 followers on Instagram. Crisis averted. Now she can relax.

Dressed in wide-leg gray light-wash jeans from Casablanca, a matching cropped jacket over a white tank, and silver Steve Madden pumps, the 29-year-old Gordon is immediately surrounded by her friends and fellow Chiefs WAGs, such as Sheawna Weathersby, Amina Smith, and Nani Hinton. Since she fell in love with Hardman in 2020 and moved from her hometown of Chicago to Kansas City to be with him, these girls have become like family.

“I think we have made it a safe place for each other to feel comfortable to talk, because we all are in the same situation,” she tells me in an interview. “We’re not from here. We all are first-time mothers, and our guys go through certain things, and we lean into each other.”

The suite, which is filled with not just the WAGs but a host of friends and family who have come to see the game, has a neighborhood-barbeque feel. People flow in and out from the stands, where they will watch the Chiefs go on to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in overtime, to inside the suite, where they make plates of chicken and mac n’ cheese and play music. Weathersby, whom everyone calls She She, immediately announces, not for the first time, that it is “shot o’clock,” and begins pouring Casamigos into little plastic cups.

Gordon’s makeup artist and friend Joshua Minger rushes to her side and spends the game periodically giving her lip touch-ups for the inevitable photos. Not just the Instagram snaps she and the rest of her friends will take—the photos of Gordon that will be blasted all over the world that night as she sits next to her newest WAG bestie, Taylor Swift. During the game Gordon bounces back and forth between this suite, which belongs to Weathersby and her partner, defensive tackle Chris Jones, and the suite where Swift watches the game with the family and friends of her boyfriend, tight end Travis Kelce.