The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1178918
NOVEMBER 2019 THE WOLVERINE 19 BY JOHN BORTON T oughness arrives early in the Glasgow household. Patch it up and keep mov- ing. Fifth-year senior linebacker Jor- dan Glasgow learned it at an age he can barely remember. The younger brother of two former walk-on Wolverines turned stalwarts and now NFL performers, the young- est Glasgow absorbed enough hard knocks to prepare him for anything. When Jordan was only 2, the DeKalb, Ill.-based family enjoyed a day boating in Wisconsin. While brothers Graham and Ryan — four and three years older than Jordan, respectively — skimmed across the water, the youngest dozed into an adventure of his own. "Jordy must have fallen asleep when the boys were tubing," Dr. Ste- ven Glasgow, their father, recalled. "I took a fast turn, Jordy fell over and got a gash in the top of his head. We're physicians, so we handle things a little bit differently." In fact, the patriarch of the clan and his wife, Michele, are both ortho- pedic surgeons. In this case, Steven employed some basic carpentry once the day on the water ended. Putting a temporary patch on the cut, Steven and the boys spent a cou- ple more hours on the boat. They then headed back to DeKalb for a stapling procedure he described as "pretty easy." "I numbed up both sides," he re- called. "My wife's not there. Unfor- tunately, there's a nurse in the room, and I kind of forgot about that. I break out the staple gun. I've got Jordy pinned down, and I've already numbed up his head. He's talking away, and I pop in the first couple of staples. "I've got the boys there, and Ryan says, 'Hey, can I try?' And I said, 'Yeah, sure.' I started handing the staple gun to Ryan, and the nurse screams! Then I yell, 'Oh, no, you can't.' "Then it's, 'Dad, what about me? My turn! My turn!' That was Jordan. He was screaming — not out of pain or fear, but out of excitement. He doesn't care if his brothers get a turn. He wants his turn to put staples in his head. I said, 'Boys, no one can do this but dad, because I'm the doctor.'" The Glasgow boys have been un- der construction for more than two decades now, and it's tough to argue with the results. Graham served as the trailblazer at Michigan, walking on in 2011 and eventually getting voted the Wolver- ines' best offensive lineman in 2015. He's in his fourth season of starting for the NFL's Detroit Lions. Ryan, 13 months Graham's junior, also walked on at Michigan and be- came a stalwart lineman, but on the defensive side of the ball. He earned All-Big Ten second-team honors in his final season in Ann Arbor, twice shared the team's Defensive Line- man of the Year award and — de- spite tearing an ACL in 2018 — is in his third season with the Cincinnati Bengals. When Jordan started two games at viper for Don Brown's defense last season, he became the third Glasgow to go from walk-on to Wolverine starter. He opened the first seven Michigan games this year at weak- side linebacker, posting a career-high 11 tackles against Army before re- cording seven with a recovered on- side kick at Wisconsin. He notched a pair of sacks against Middle Tennes- see State and Iowa, plus he matched his career high with 11 stops and blocked a punt at Illinois. Jordan has been following in his brothers' footsteps — and in their minds, jumping the gun to do so — all his life. That made for an interest- ing family dynamic in the formative years for all three. "When I was really young, my brothers were much closer than I was to them," Jordan recalled. "They were more antagonistic to me." His early childhood memories of the future NFL performers weren't necessarily Hallmark Channel warm and fuzzy. That said, Jordan insists he wouldn't change a thing. "I wouldn't have had it any other way," he said. "Them bullying and being rough on me made me who I am. That's what gave me a thick skin. That's what made me, quote- unquote 'tough.' I appreciate every experience I've had with them." Jordan deferred to his dad when it came to some of the particulars of the family tales. The elder Glasgow stepped in like a linebacker filling the hole in a goal-line stand. "Even though they were a year apart in school, they were more like twins," Steven said of Graham and Ryan. "Whatever one was experienc- ing, the other was experiencing. They have been incredibly close because of that experience. "As far as they were concerned, they had to deal with this gnat. If you said to Jordan, what was this experi- ence like, he'd tell you, 'They never gave me the ball. They never let me play. If they let me play, they beat up on me.'" The physical evidence exists to back that up. The older boys were in the 125th percentile in height and 150th in weight, according to their dad, and would just "pound the day- lights" out of Jordan. "Jordy's first broken bone came from playing football with his broth- ers out in the backyard," Steven con- tinued. "They didn't let up on him, and Ryan fell on him and broke two bones in the palm of his hand. "He comes up and his palm is bent. His mom gets an X-ray, and it's at Glasgow (No. 29), Michigan's starting weak- side linebacker, was second on the team in tackles through seven games with 51 stops and third with 4.0 sacks. PHOTO BY LON HORWEDEL NINE YEARS IN BLUE Linebacker Jordan Glasgow Completes His Family's Long And Successful Run At Michigan