If you’ve had it up to here with traditional watch-guy fare—Daytonas and Nautilii and the like—then check this out: A known Rolex collector, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce swapped out his Day-Date for a decidedly more under-the-radar option while celebrating his Super Bowl win this past week.
At the XS Nightclub at Wynn Las Vegas, Kelce was spotted rocking a Breitling Bentley Flying B, a collaborative model from the early 2000s that saw Swiss manufacture Breitling step well out of its pilot’s watch comfort zone: Housed in a rectangular, 38.5mm 18K white gold case set with 74 diamonds, it features a white mother-of-pearl dial, diamond indices, and a jump hour complication as well as a sub-seconds display.
For the uninitiated, a jump hour complication is a type of “digital” display in which the hours are contained on a disc behind a window—at the top of the hour, the hour “jumps” immediately to the next. Patented in pocket watch form by Joseph Pallweber in 1883 and used by IWC on several beautiful timepieces, the complication’s heyday came in the 1920s and 1930s as part of the Art Deco movement, where it migrated to wristwatch form.
Today, the complication isn’t particularly popular and is largely relegated to high-end watches—partially because it requires careful regulation of power in order to maintain healthy amplitude in the movement while powering the “jump” mechanism.
The Breitling Bentley Flying B, which debuted in 2006, was meant to celebrate Bentley’s mascot from the 1930s—a time coinciding with peak popularity for the jump hour display. Powered by an automatic, chronometer-certified movement, the model was discontinued in 2010.
The Flying B is a far cry from Kelce’s other watches, many of which seem to be Rollies such as a Submariner ref. 126610 and the aforementioned Day-Date ref. 228238. (It’s also quite a departure from the rest of early-2000s Breitling, which was then mostly focused on oversized pilot’s watches rather than diamond-studded, Art Deco-inspired dress watches.) But this may very well bode well for us, watch people: Maybe the three-time Super Bowl winner will prove to be among the more compelling and unpredictable watch collectors to grace these pages? Time will tell.
