Chris Solari

Lansing State Journal

EAST LANSING – Look around Michigan State’s sideline during fall football games, it’s hard not to notice a bearded, older man milling about, bundled up and looking scrawny in the midst of Mark Dantonio and his massive players.

He’s not a high-profile donor buying the best access in Spartan Stadium. Father John “Jake” Foglio gives the MSU athletic program something other than money. He was a team chaplain for the football team under Duffy Daugherty and has been around the program for more than 40 years. He now gives a sympathetic ear, a moral compass and spiritual guidance to both Dantonio and Tom Izzo.

“He’s always there. We talk. He’ll be out here,” Dantonio said at practice recently. “I consider him not just a very close friend but a spiritual adviser.”

Father Jake almost wasn’t there for them last year. The 86-year-old Catholic priest had a car accident in February last year. It left him severely injured, physically and mentally. His prognosis looked bleak.

Through deep faith and Marine grit, Foglio endured rigorous physical and cognitive rehabilitation at Hope Network Rehabilitation Services. He made a full recovery and was back on the sidelines with the team last fall without missing a game, standing alongside the Spartans as they surged into the College Football Playoffs. And he plans to be there again Saturday, when MSU plays its spring game at Spartan Stadium.

“When I came back, they hung on to me,” Foglio said. “And they didn’t need me. It was a reciprocal support.”

'It wasted me'

It happened a little less than two months after MSU’s dramatic Cotton Bowl victory over Baylor on a Friday night in February. Foglio had dinner at the Olive Garden restaurant in Okemos. He was driving alone to his home in northwest Lansing.

As he approached the intersection of Willow and Knollwood streets, near the School for the Blind, something happened. He’s not really sure what.

“I don’t think I fell asleep. I know I didn’t have a stroke. I don’t know what happened – it might have been a lull,” Foglio said. “All of a sudden, I smacked into a parked car. No one else was hurt. Thank God, I’d rather get killed certainly more than hurt someone else.”

He got out, angry at himself, and walked around his car. A few people were nearby. “Father,” they said, “you better sit down.”

“The ambulance came and got me,” he recalled, “and I don’t remember much after that.”

He broke six ribs on each side of his body. He broke his sternum. He broke both of his clavicles. His brain, liver and heart all were traumatized.

“I wasn’t speeding,” he said. “But the impact, even at 35 or 40, just wasted my car. And it wasted me.”

A different tune

Father Jake remains a celebrity at Hope Network. There’s reason for that, well beyond his role with the football program. He has been a fixture in East Lansing and at MSU for nearly 70 years.

Foglio grew up in New Rochelle, New York, where he played some football and baseball as a kid. He arrived at MSU as a student in 1948. His calling was a career in radio, and the school had one of the best programs in the country then.

“I didn’t want to be a priest. I always knew I had to be a Christopher to carry Christ, but I wanted to do it as a human being and have a family and stuff,” he said. “My mother gave me a line that said, ‘Radio gives wings to words and music.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ So I was going to do it through radio.”

After working at WKAR radio as a student, Foglio accepted his first job out of college in 1951 at WTVB in Coldwater. It didn’t last. He was drafted into the Marines during the Korean War and spent two years on active duty in the Atlantic Ocean. Being a Marine challenged him. He realized he didn’t need to prove his manhood among some of the toughest, roughest sods out there.

'Keep your head up'

The ambulance rushed Foglio to Sparrow Hospital that frigid February night. He would spend the next six to seven weeks there in the early stages of his recovery.

One night, when Father Jake wasn’t all that lucid, there was a visitor in his room: Connor Cook.

“I would say to him when he’d have his head down, ‘Lift up your head! You’re GOOD! Don’t put your head down! Poise!’ And he’d go, ‘Yeah! Yeah!’” Foglio said. “So I was semiconscious, and I felt this big hand on my head, and the voice said, ‘Get up and get out of here! Keep your head up!’ It was him.”

That’s the type of love Foglio gets from MSU’s sports teams, whether it was Izzo visiting him at Sparrow or Dantonio asking him to speak at his own father’s funeral.

“Father Jake, you know, he’s a soulmate,” Dantonio said. “He’s been there really since I came back here in 2007.”

Izzo sat with Foglio’s family while Father Jake was unconscious. He met the priest nearly 30 years ago when he was a graduate assistant coach under Jud Heathcote.

“He’s just such a passionate, intriguing, caring person,” Izzo said. “I remember visiting him in the hospital, and I didn’t think he’d live.”

Foglio has been around Izzo's program as a guest for years, but his main sport always has been football. He often visits Dantonio's practices and goes on the road with the team. He's around for players to confide in, if they feel the need. Cook, who attended Walsh Jesuit High School in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, developed a strong bond with the priest. Father Jake holds a pregame Catholic mass for those who want to attend. It's one of the voluntary church services available to players.

Dantonio was there for Foglio during his rehab. Just like Father Jake was there for him and his family when Dantonio suffered his heart attack after MSU’s dramatic win over Notre Dame in 2010.

“He’s such a tough man,” Father Jake said of Dantonio. “You have to be strong to be gentle, and he does that. He doesn’t capitulate. I just think he’s a great friend and a great mentor for me.”

It’s reciprocal. Said Dantonio, “He’s helped me, too.”

From Duffy to now

Off active duty from the Marines, Foglio changed course and changed his mind. His days in radio were over. He enrolled in the seminary.

He became an ordained priest in 1961 and spent time in inner-city parishes in Kalamazoo, Jackson and Flint before returning to St. John’s Student Parish in East Lansing, where he stayed from 1967 to 1969.

He was reassigned to Fenton for a three-year stay, but returned to East Lansing and St. John’s in 1972. That’s when he strengthened a relationship with legendary MSU coach Daugherty and began to spend time with the Spartans’ football team.

“I was very close to Duffy,” Foglio said. “I was just a support for the team and Duffy with another denominational person. I traveled with the team. Some of the guys were stuck to be my roommate, and I could just see them saying, ‘Oh, crap, I’m stuck with the priest.’”

He remained around the Spartans under Denny Stolz and Darryl Rogers in the late 1970s before slowly drifting away during George Perles’ regime. It was partly because Foglio was pursuing a doctorate and received it in 1985 from St. Mary’s University in Baltimore. He did his studies remotely. Then in 1986, Foglio accepted a faculty position in MSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. The Fetzer Instutute in Kalamzoo gave him a grant to develop MSU’s curriculum on spirituality and medicine.

“Everyone has a spirituality,” Foglio said. “Not everybody supports it religiously, and they’re not synonymous. Atheists, agnostics and secular humanists are very spiritual people – we all are. The searching and pursuing of excellence in human living is spirituality.”

Foglio is awaiting word about becoming an endowed chair in spirituality at MSU. He has the blessing of President Lou Anna K. Simon, but there is no time frame. He hopes to find out “before I die, so I gotta stay alive.”

Hope, faith and healing

When Father Jake returns to the halls of Hope Network Rehabilitation Services, staff workers give him big hugs and smiles and mention they saw him on TV during football games. Patients warmly welcome him back and wish him well, and he gives them blessings and prayers in return.

“He was always very caring,” said Becky Weinberg, Foglio’s case manager at Hope. “From the time he came in to the time he came out, I don’t remember a time when I sat down and had a conversation with him and the first thing out of his mouth wasn’t, ‘How are you doing? How is your family? Are you OK? Are you doing well?’”

His recovery there was nothing short of a miracle.

“From the day he came in he said to us he wanted to get back to playing tennis,” Weinberg said. “I don’t think any of us believed the person we were seeing ever played tennis.”

Foglio moved from Sparrow to Hope Network in April of last year. He was in a wheelchair when he arrived. He went through “rigorous” physical therapy – “They really bust chops here,” he said – and cognitive exercises to help him return to living independently.

Over 11 weeks, the wheelchair gave way to a walker, then eventually to trotting. Staff got him pantomiming his tennis swing in the hallways. He took driving lessons, first on an in-house machine and then out on the road. His mind, still foggy from the accident, progressively returned to its usual clarity.

“The transition he made from when he came in to when he left was amazing,” Weinberg said. “It was amazing over the weeks to see him start clearing. He was always there cognitively and talking and away, but he just started to clear the better and stronger he became.”

Back to normal

Foglio left the facility in early July. He still required assistance for things such as showering and needed a driver at first. That frustrated him and tested his patience. He didn’t like feeling “paternalized.”

“I’m an independent person. I’ve learned to be helpfully dependent. I think,” he said. “Especially when it came close to infringing on my privacy. I don’t care about people watching me shower. But to think that I can’t shower without somebody being there, I can’t handle that.

“My mother always taught me to take risks – not to risk impetuously or without good reason. But hope – it’s the name of this place – hope is risking when you have sufficient evidence to take a leap, that’s the leap of faith. That’s in Hebrews, chapter 11. Confident assurance concerning things we hope for and convictions about things we don’t see.”

The limitations are gone now. Foglio can drive on his own and doesn’t need any help going about his busy, daily life. He’s back playing tennis a few times a week and hopes to make it to the 95-and-over Senior Olympics.

It wouldn’t surprise any of those closest to Father Jake.

“I think the guy really walks on water,” Izzo said. “It’s hard to explain. He’s a priest who’s really real.”