Graham Couch

Lansing State Journal

In 15 years in this business, I’ve never covered an athlete more impressive than Joe Reitz. I’ve covered far more graceful athletes, but perhaps none with more personal grace. Or drive. Or humility.

As a college basketball player at Western Michigan, Reitz was a 6-foot-7, 250-pound bull in a china shop. As a professional football player, he was a 315-pound survivor, playing his final seven seasons in the NFL with his hometown Indianapolis Colts in a league that usually turns players like him into vagabonds.

Reitz retired from the NFL last month at age 31. I hadn’t spoken with him in several years when he called just before March Madness took hold. He sounded like the same grownup kid I used to interview almost daily a decade earlier.

No inflated sense of self. No BS. Just Joe. Just a guy who had built his dream life and was about to truly live it — his college sweetheart as his wife, a fourth child on the way, his knees mostly intact, a barn with a basketball court built next to their new house in a suburb north of Indianapolis.

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“I’ve got the the (WMU) Bronco logo painted on the court,” Reitz said. “I’m in there every day shooting jumpers, trying to get my stroke back. Not that I was ever a long-range shooter.”

No, he wasn’t. In four years at WMU, he never attempted a 3-pointer. His game was in the paint, where he was an undersized all-conference center. His wide shoulders and tree-trunk legs caught the eye of a Baltimore Ravens scout during the Mid-American Conference tournament his sophomore year, planting the seed of an NFL career. Reitz had been a two-sport star at Hamilton Southeastern in Fishers, Indiana — the same school that more recently produced Gary Harris, Zak Irvin and Randy Gregory. He chose MAC hoops over Big Ten football, following his first love as far as it would take him.

Had Reitz been three inches taller, he’d still be in the NBA, a bruising backup center, a beloved locker room guy. He wouldn’t be retiring now. Not from basketball.

Football, though, is a sport that comes with a higher long-term cost. And Reitz had so much to lose.

On the day he called, after a family outing, he took a turn putting his three children — ages 5, 3 and 2 — down for their naps.

“I was up doing it by myself,” Reitz said. “I got downstairs, and I was in a full sweat, and (my wife Jill) looked at me and laughed. I said, ‘I might be going back to football.’”

“He doesn’t even know,” Jill said. “In the season, when he would come home, dinner would be made, he had to do such minimal work. I think it’s a little culture shock now. I haven’t completely thrown him to the wolves.”

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That’s the dream, though — to give his wolf pack his full attention, to let his wife, once a track and cross country standout at WMU, have time for her own dreams and ambitions and to figure out what’s next as he finishes his MBA at Indiana University.

Reitz, in some ways, hit the lottery in life — born into a good family, with size and athletic gifts most aren’t blessed with. But he created a lot of this, too, with his competitive will, with his knack for leadership, with his understanding of his place and with how he treats people. For athletes, Reitz should be a role model. If children look up to athletes, athletes should look up to Reitz.

He lasted in the NFL and with the Colts — and left on his own terms — because of these traits, and his modest salary. He made more than $3 million last season but, he explained, “For a lot of my career I was making (NFL) minimum salary, which is still really, really good money, but it allowed me to not have some crazy salary cap number. You see a lot of guys who get let go for that reason.”

Reitz’s tenure in Indianapolis outlasted all but Pro-Bowlers Robert Mathis, Pat McAfee and Adam Vinatieri. With Mathis and McAfee retiring earlier this offseason, at the time Reitz stepped away, Vinatieri and offensive tackle Anthony Castonzo were the only other holdovers from the pre-coach Chuck Pagano era, pre-2012, in Indianapolis.

“I think it’s his willingness to move around and play different positions and really do anything that was asked of him,” Castonzo said. “Sometimes I think guys’ egos get in their own way. Joe really has no ego.

“I just remember him throwing up because he’d be going (full tilt) all practice. We’d all be chuckling, he’d be dry-heaving. He’d work his butt off. Guys respect that.”

Reitz played four positions along the offensive line in the NFL, started at three last season. He’s come a long way since being a rookie on the Ravens practice squad, rapidly adding 50 pounds on a Fig Newton diet.

Same guy, though. In a world that changes people, it’s refreshing to see.

“There was zero change in who he was certainly in all the years I was with him,” Castonzo said. “When I was a rookie in the league, Joe already seemed like he was an old man to me. He was kind of like a dad figure. He just had that dad aura around him. He was like that when I first came into the league. He was like that to the last day he was there. We’d always give him crap that he was the epitome of a dad.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.