Former Michigan State linebacker Jon Reschke discusses his second chance at playing at MSU and auditioning at pro day for NFL scouts. Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press
The weight room became Jon Reschke’s solace, his fortress, his refuge.
To rehabilitate the injuries, both to his body and his psyche. To forget the self-inflicted damage to his reputation.
To think. A lot.
About his words. THAT word in particular, the unthinkable one. The one no white person should use. The one none of his black friends had heard him use before.
About those days afterward. The damage it caused to relationships with his close friends, his teammates, his roommate. Their hurt, shock and anger.
A text message to a female acquaintance — one word of it; the N-word — set forth a chain of events that changed Reschke’s life.
A mutually agreed-upon departure from Michigan State’s football program. Torn knee ligaments caused by a freak accident on the beach. Uncertainty about his future, his image tarnished and his career in jeopardy.
“It was hands-down the toughest time in my life,” Reschke, 24, told the Free Press before MSU’s pro day in March. “At some points, I felt lost. I didn’t know what my next step would be.”
A year and a half after his exile, Reschke again was lifting weights, waiting for a second chance that was about to arrive, when he looked across the gym at Life Time Fitness in Shelby Township. There was Greg Jones, the Spartans’ former two-time All-American and one of coach Mark Dantonio’s all-time greats.
“Super random,” Jones, 30, recalled Saturday.
Their workouts stopped. Reschke walked across the room and apologized. To a former player who had been out of the program for nearly a decade.
In that moment, black and white ceased to exist. The two linebackers began a heart-to-heart conversation and began a relationship that played a pivotal role in Reschke returning to MSU for the 2018 season.
Reschke found perspective and an important black voice and supporter in Jones. He rebuilt relationships with teammates, who welcomed and voted him back onto the team. He got one more year in college — he wasn’t on scholarship — and now is chasing a professional football career because of their forgiveness.
“Everybody needs a second chance. I know so many people that messed up all the time, so I don’t judge anybody,” MSU defensive tackle Raequan Williams said. “I respect him for coming back and finishing. That took a man to do that.”
An ‘uncharacteristic’ text
To understand the path Reschke took to get back to MSU, it is important to go back to that winter day in January 2017.
“When I sent the text message, I would say I wasn’t in the right state of mind. I was built up with just so much anger,” Reschke said. ”And you can ask any of my teammates, they would vouch how uncharacteristic and how unlike me it was. So it was shocking to them, it caught them off guard.”
Reschke’s private text message mentioned one former teammate and began working its way back to others. One of his black teammates who knew the situation told the Free Press it was not so much about seeing the N-word but the context in which it was used, in a sweeping generalization about race instead of directed at the individual.
Reschke was with his roommate, Damion Terry, and former teammate, T.J. Harrell, both of whom are black, when they saw their friend’s message.
“They were upset,” Reschke recalled. “They were like, ‘I can’t believe you would say this. But look, this is gonna take some time. You know that, right?’”
Reschke said it took a few days, but he reached out to “every single teammate and apologized sincerely to them.” But it was too late.
He and Dantonio talked in late February. They mutually decided Reschke should transfer for his final year of eligibility. He issued a statement about the decision, calling the text “an insensitive and totally regrettable comment involving a former teammate.”
Jones heard about the situation from one of his business partners.
“And I said that (Reschke’s) life will be better,” Jones said, “because he will always have that respect and he will never, ever cross that line again for all the right reasons.”
‘My knee just buckled’
Reschke said he was despondent thinking his time at MSU was nearing its end. His friends, including Terry and teammates Byron Bullough, Matt Morrissey and Casey Schreiner, convinced him to join them in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for spring break. They even paid his airfare.
Reschke was there for a day, still working his way back from a Lisfranc fracture in his foot that cost him most of the 2016 season and left him unable to put pressure on it for five months.
They went to the beach. Reschke decided to go skimboarding. And then …
“My knee just buckled out,” he recalled. “It was a disaster.”
He tore the ACL and LCL in his knee, and part of his hamstring. He returned to Detroit and had surgery.
Reschke rehabbed without knowing where he might end up. Around Thanksgiving in 2017, he and Dantonio sat down and talked. There were schools interested in Reschke, but his coach had a different plan.
“Coach D said, ‘The best thing for you to do is finish out here,’ ” Reschke said.
A slow “pretty confidential” process of atonement began for Reschke, who earned his first degree from MSU in December 2017 – that continued into the spring of 2018.
It was around that time when Reschke met Jones, a former MSU captain and one of Dantonio’s most trusted ex-players.
Jones is married to former MSU women’s basketball player Mandy Piechowski, who is white. That mixed marriage gave Jones a different perspective that he tried to pass on to Reschke, who sought input into his situation.
To Jones, Reschke “just had a bad night.” But he made Reschke realize “those words have power.”
“I told Jon, ‘I’ve been through college, I get it, I know situations happen, man. But you have to think in the long-term,’ ” Jones said. “I tell a lot of the kids now, you won’t think that it matter, but it does, it all adds up, and people are watching you. Even when you don’t think they are, they’re watching you. He had a slip in the moment and didn’t think they were watching.”
The road back to MSU
Jones began training with Reschke, sending film to Dantonio and defensive coordinator Mike Tressel of Reschke’s recovery from the injuries. And through that process he told both Reschke and Dantonio that the only way a return could happen was if the players voted to make it happen.
“That’s all that mattered,” Jones said, “because I know what it’s like to be in that locker room with somebody for four years. And something like that happens, that’s a huge culture shock. I think it was important for the team to vote him back on. If anybody should be thanked, not so much me, but the team should be thanked for voting him back on and giving him another opportunity to continue his dream and his career.”
Dantonio brought Reschke back for a practice that spring, still with no decision made about whether he would return. His teammates, Reschke said, erupted and embraced him.
“Coach D just wanted to see how I would react being around the guys and how they would react around me,” Reschke said. “And it was like a reunion. … It was a really good feeling, a feeling of relief. It was a blessing that they would, with open arms, welcome me back like that.”
Jones gave Reschke one more key piece of advice.
“I told him flat-out that (the N-word) should never come out of your mouth ever again, ever, in a text or nothing,” Jones said. “That’s disrespectful to anybody you’ve ever played with or myself or anybody that you respect. That should never come out your mouth. And I told him that, and he said he was sorry.
“I think he thought I was yelling at him, and I was like, ‘Dude, I’m just trying to help you, saying that shouldn’t happen.’ He was almost in tears at that time.”
‘Grateful’ for a second chance
The team voted him back. He began working out that summer, fulfilling all the conditions to play in 2018. There were no problems.
“I think he was extremely grateful for his second chance,” Dantonio told the Free Press in a statement. “The decision to bring him back into our program was a step-by-step process and included our players. He looked our team in the eye and asked for forgiveness. Jon then responded by doing everything he could to help this team last year. It’s also a statement from our players on being open to forgiveness when someone makes a mistake.”
Williams, who is black, said Reschke “was great” as a teammate.
“The guys, everybody embraced him,” he said. “It felt like a real genuineness, that he was legit in the way he felt and sorry about all that had happened in the past. Everybody makes mistakes..”
It was a slow rebuild on the field, but Reschke played in all 13 games and finished with 33 tackles, including four of his six tackles for a loss in his final four games. The 6-foot-3, 235-pounder had nine stops against Ohio State, then four more on senior day against Rutgers.
After auditioning for NFL scouts at the Spartans’ pro day in March, Reschke effusively expressed regret for that text message. He talked with NFL front-office personnel and coaches about “the negative situation” and explained himself to them. And he tried to sell them on why the sixth-year senior, coming off two major injuries, would be a fit for their organization. He wasn’t selected in the NFL draft, which ended Saturday in Nashville.
“My agent has been hearing a lot of good things from a bunch of teams, like nine or 10 teams,” Reschke said, knowing his only shot at the NFL would be as an undrafted free agent. “I just talked to the GM from the Steelers, and we talked about the incident. And he said, ‘There’s a lot to learn from that, you know that.’”
Next stop: NFL?
Reschke went to Florida in January and worked out for two months at Applied Science & Performance Institute in Tampa. There, he worked with former NFL and CFL player Yo Murphy as his trainer.
Murphy, who is black, said his organization did its due diligence before working with Reschke. What he found, he said, was a player who “is just a character guy.”
“I just think Jon is such a passionate guy. He’s all gas, no brakes at times — he just goes,” said Murphy, who is the director of sports performance. “I don’t know where he was in that situation, but I really felt that he had come a long way as far as maturity.”
Reschke said the situation taught him a lot, but specifically “so much about forgiveness.”
“I’d never been in a situation or never really seen a situation like the one I was in,” he said. “What I learned about forgiveness is it takes a man to be able to forgive. It takes a grown man to be able to say, ‘OK, we can move on from this. I know that wasn’t who you are, I know we can move on from this.’ I learned a ton about forgiveness.”
Reschke understands if he is to catch on with an NFL team, he will have to prove himself all over again. That means a lot of special teams work, something he saw with friend and former teammate Riley Bullough do to latch on with the Tampa Bay Buccanneers as an undrafted free agent.
“Just get in touch with a coach that really likes you, and you go from there,” Reschke said. “That’s all you need is one guy to really fall in love with you.”
Murphy is in that camp. He believes Reschke is a NFL player.
“I really like that kid. He absolutely worked,” Murphy said. “I think he knows it just as well as we do, you don’t get second and third shots when you’re a guy in that situation.
“But the league is made up and these championship teams are made up of guys like Jon. I’m rooting for him.”
Contact Chris Solari at csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.
Recent Comments