This Was the Year of the Sports Himbo

To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.

When his romantic situation became one of the biggest stories in the entire world—imagine telling the 2009 Cincinnati Bearcats that their derpy tight end with the goatee would be paparazzi fodder—Travis Kelce’s old tweets started circulating. Rather than finding problematic hate speech, though, all the internet sleuths found was a bunch of stuff that reminded us how wonderfully simple the athlete brain can be. Exhibit A: this tweet from a University of Cincinnati math class. (Relatedly, “Did Travis Kelce graduate college?” is a fairly popular Google search.)

With each archeological dig through his collegiate thoughts—the one where he declares once and for all that he hates school with a #PASSION is a personal fave—Kelce became the face of a percolating movement across the entire sports landscape. In so many ways, 2023 was the Year of the Sports Himbo. That is, the type of guy who is broad-shouldered and hunky, but more importantly, simple and ultimately non-threatening. Think David Puddy from Seinfeld if he was a tight end. Embodying the “no thoughts, just vibes” mentality is what makes a true himbo so bewitching, and they go a dime a dozen in the male athlete space. (Of course, sports aren’t all about himbos. This was the most exciting year for women’s sports in recent history, and this year also gave us an NFL quarterback who studied rocket science and briefly worked for NASA.) But when the end-of-year sports montages start rolling, they’re going to feature a whole lot of jocks who, like Kelce, were never much for book learning.

The year of the sports himbo began in January, when 25-year-old college quarterback Stetson Bennett won his second national championship with the Georgia Bulldogs. Before lighting up his victory stogie, the kid from Blackshear, Georgia took some time to remind people that this hometown (population: 3,500) is the “greatest place on earth.”

Himboism is not a monolith, and here we have a quaint example of its different flavors. Bennett nicely demonstrated the aww shucks strain that has charmed for centuries. Deflecting adoration with a smile and a twang is a textbook himbo move, and the cherry on top is the way you can’t really tell if him referring to the metropolises of Blackshear and Nahunta as “God’s country” is meant to be sarcastic or not. All we know is that Bennett is a two-time national championship winner, a pillar of one of the most impressive college football runs of all time, and, as we learned after his first title run in 2022, a certified himbo.

There’s also the international himbo. Turn your attention to Jack Grealish, the British footballer who had himself quite the year. After winning the Champions League, Grealish posed with the trophy while making a face described beautifully by our UK colleagues as “nodding in and out of a K-hole.”

That was just the beginning, though. When you win something as monumental as the Champions League—the capper in their dominant three-trophy “treble” season—you have the right to go buckwild. Grealish certainly did that. After the game, the winger ditched his Keira Knightley headband and teensy tiny shin pads to get irresponsibly sauced. When you’re across the pond, what better place to do that than Ibiza? That’s where Grealish, 27, was spotted being physically held up by teammate Kyle Walker as they left the team hotel, too partied out to stand on his own. Reports from the British tabloids mentioned that Grealish was even offered a wheelchair to help him get from the hotel to the bus. Really outstanding stuff—and, refreshingly, the likes of which we don’t really see from top-class professional athletes anymore, who in the age of the smartphone seem to live in constant fear of incidents exactly like this coming to light. Raging all over town, having it documented across various media outlets, and being unapologetic about it is rare territory for the modern superstar athlete! Not Jack Grealish, though. Party boy himbo with a healthy splash of Euro trash, there’s room for you here as well.

Around the same time that Man City completed its ascent to the top of the soccer world, a stateside himbo was taking his team on a similar yet markedly different run. Whereas Grealish’s team winning hardware is sort of a foregone conclusion, Jimmy Butler and his Miami Heat squad were anything but. Butler is a more left-of-center himbo, an objectively good-looking person uninterested in playing by the rules of the rich and famous. This is not meant in a disparaging way, but more to acknowledge that Butler isn’t just marching to the beat of his down drum, he’s stomping all over himbo conventionality. Everything he does seems to be a wink to the camera, whether subtle—revealing in a mostly forgotten clip that he bumps the Spice Girls before games—or extremely visible, like showing up in a convincing emo kid costume when he resurfaced for the Heat’s end-of-summer media day. We’ve got this picture, and we’re coming with you. Dear Jimmy Butler, count us in.

Before we get to the obvious winner for Most Himbo Team, we must acknowledge some other sportsmen for whom the himbo crown fits nice and snug. How about Brooks Koepka? The Florida Man golfer with the blindingly white teeth and eff-you attitude won his fifth major tournament at the 2023 PGA Championship. His first move immediately afterward? Asking one of his vanquished opponents if he was buying drinks for everybody. Hell yeah, brother. There was Tyler Glasnow, the Tampa Bay Rays’ pitcher who bears a striking resemblance to Cillian Murphy, and told us that Oppenheimer was “sick.” You know what? He’s right! Last but not least, we have to shout out Jordan Poole, a muse for careless hoopers everywhere. Less than 20 games into the NBA season, Poole—who remains handsome and charismatic despite being a Washington Wizard—has already been meme’d several times over. Whether it was for throwing an alley oop off the backboard down by 20 points, shooting a behind-the-back, off-the-dribble three while not even really looking at the hoop, or failing to understand the rules of the sport he’s presumably played for his entire life, Poole has seamlessly picked up where himbo god J.R. Smith left off.

But as any serious himbo head knows, the trophy for Achievement in Group Sports Himboism this year could only go to the Philadelphia Phillies, a baseball team comprised of 26 men from the Zoolander extended universe. The Phils may have fallen short of their World Series dreams, but perhaps the real World Series is playing ball with your boys and showing a little skin while you do it. I’d argue that, with Kelce having been slightly corrupted by the show biz machine, these Phillies possess the purest current form of sports himboism. A true himbo doesn’t know what Amiri is. What a true himbo does know is how to crush some freaking beers. Led by total sweetie pies Nick Castellanos, Garrett Stubbs, and Alec Bohm, the Phillies deleted a whole lot of Budweiser after both of their series-clinching wins in the playoffs. That brings us to Bryce Harper, the responsible himbo. Harper—unquestionably the Phillies’ best player—does not drink. That doesn’t disqualify him from this conversation, though. You know what himbos love? Mascots. And boy, does Bryce Harper love the Phillie Phanatic. So much so, in fact, that at various points of the season, Harper paid homage to the goofy green giant on his cleats, headband, shin guard, belt, and arm brace—which he needed because he returned to the field less than six months after major surgery! Himbos are simply more powerful than medical science. Look it up.

What this year in sports really taught us is that there’s hope for himbos all over this big and confusing world. A fun-loving dude from Ohio who doesn’t know how to spell squirrel can begin the year by winning his second Super Bowl and be dating a pop star by the end of it. A man who can’t identify a map of England can conquer not only English soccer, but the entire European continent. If you’re a sports fan reading this at home and thinking, I’m not too bright, but I can run real fast, jump real high, and have a pure heart beating in my chest, 2023 was for you and your people. Thank you for all that you do.