'A son never forgets.' How Bengals star DJ Reader lost his dad but found himself
CINCINNATI − DJ Reader knew right away something was wrong.
It was early morning, June 30, 2014, and some of his roommates from Clemson University’s football team had just shaken him awake to tell him the school’s assistant athletic director, Jeff Davis, wanted to see him. He was in DJ’s apartment, waiting for him downstairs.
DJ, still groggy from sleep, climbed out of bed. He'd known Davis for years. He was a family friend. This wasn't a routine visit to check up on him.
When he got downstairs, Davis told him he had bad news. It was DJ’s father, he said. He’d been rushed to the hospital, but nothing could be done. He was dead.
DJ fell to his knees and screamed. There were no words, just anguish. A 6-foot, 3-inch 300-pound man, on his hands and knees, howling in pain.
His dad, David Reader, had been sick for years. Arthritis. Diabetes. Kidney failure. But this was news DJ wasn’t prepared to hear. His dad had been there for him since the day he was born, homeschooling him in English and math, coaching his teams, giving advice, helping him navigate his journey from talented young athlete to Division I football star.
DJ wouldn’t be where he was, he wouldn’t be who he was, without his dad.
On his knees, crying, DJ couldn’t think of what to do next. For the first time in his life, he felt lost.
And the person who’d always helped him find his way was gone.
You only get once chance
Growing up, DJ thought of his dad as Superman. It seemed to him he was everywhere, all the time. He was a teacher. A coach. The guy all the kids recognized at the recreation center in their neighborhood in Greensboro, North Carolina.
DJ, an only child, wanted to be with him, wherever he went, whatever he was doing.
His mom, Felicia, was grateful her husband and son were so close. Best friends, she used to say. David taught him to play football and basketball. He listened to Prince and Tupac with him as they drove to games and practices in the family van. And when David’s arthritis ended his own teaching career, he decided to home-school DJ from second to sixth grade.
His lessons went beyond schoolbooks. David told DJ it was important to treat people with respect, to be optimistic even in hard times, to be the kind of person who gives more than he takes. He taught him that being a man and being a leader required more than having the biggest muscles or the loudest voice.
David talked about these things, he told DJ, because a father only gets one chance to raise a son the right way.
“A son never forgets,” he’d say.
A void that's hard to fill
After losing his dad, DJ didn’t give himself time to mourn. He coped by playing football. He went home for the funeral and for a memorial service, but then he was back on campus, training, practicing, lifting weights.
His mom worried. She kept thinking about DJ’s first game without his dad. What will it be like for him, she wondered, to look up in the stands and not see him there?
“It was a deep valley experience for us,” Felicia said. “I needed to make sure that he was OK.”
So when she talked to him, she asked if he was taking care of himself. Did he need help? Did he need counseling? Always, his answer was the same: “I’m good, momma.”
But she knew he missed David. No matter how often she called, no matter how close he was to his teammates and coaches, it wasn’t the same.
DJ knew it, too. But he didn’t want to talk about it, because talking about it would mean admitting he was struggling. It would mean admitting he felt helpless. In his mind, as a 20-year-old Division I defensive tackle, that seemed like a weakness, like a failing.
He should be able to do this on his own, he thought. “This was before the days, like now, where people are super in on mental health,” DJ recalled. “All this stuff had happened and the only other coping I had was playing football.”
But going it alone made things worse. DJ played football, but he was just going through the motions. His dad had taught him to find joy in everything he did, but that no longer seemed possible without him. He felt numb.
“There was something missing,” DJ said.
DJ tried to fill the void with parties and marijuana. Nothing terrible. No serious trouble. But it was enough, by his senior year, to raise concerns among those around him at Clemson. He was told to take some time off and get counseling.
It was 2015, a year after his dad’s death. He missed six games while on personal leave that season, the most important of his career. It did not go unnoticed by NFL teams.
Before the 2016 NFL draft, DJ heard rumblings that some teams had raised “character concerns” about him.
That can be a big deal on draft day. A player can do all the right things for years, but if there’s any hint of trouble when they enter the league, their draft stock suffers. Teams are wary of risking time and money on players they think might not be fully committed to the game.
DJ went in the fifth round to Houston. He was the Texans final pick that year.
Finding success but not peace
When he got to Houston, the coaches assigned DJ a locker next to JJ Watt, the star defensive end and future Hall of Famer. By the time DJ arrived, Watt already was among the most respected players in the game.
DJ decided he wouldn’t waste the opportunity. He watched what Watt did, how he played, how he practiced, what he ate, how he worked in the weight room, how he treated his teammates.
And Watt took notice. He became a friend and a mentor. DJ realized Watt wasn't great because of his talent alone. He worked as hard or harder than anyone on the team, because that's what it took to get better.
“He’s not proclaiming he’s perfect while doing this. He’s just doing it,” DJ said of Watt. “That meant a lot to me.”
Watt taught DJ how to be a pro. He showed him that whatever else might be going on in a player’s life, that player needed to keep working, to focus on the job. Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t last in the NFL.
DJ got better. He went from a backup to a rotational player to a starter on the Texans’ line. Despite being a fifth-round pick, a guy teams had passed on time and again in the draft, DJ was now playing alongside Watt.
But as everything on the field began to fall into place, DJ felt something was missing. He was at the pinnacle of his career, but he still wasn’t fulfilled. Ever since his dad died, no matter how much success he had, he couldn’t help thinking that on any given morning he might wake up to terrible news.
Good times would never last, he thought. Something would go wrong. It was just a matter of time.
“That void of my pops not being there was like a big hole in me,” he said.
One conversation in 2019 forced him to confront that void, for the first time since his dad died five years earlier.
He was going to be a father.
On Nov. 9, 2019, Rocky Browning Reader was born.
Suddenly, being good at football wasn’t enough. DJ needed to be a good father, too. He needed to be good at all the things his dad was good at. He needed to teach his son the way his dad had taught him, because he only had one chance to get it right.
A son never forgets.
A new contract and a big setback
A year later, in October 2020, DJ crumpled to the turf at Paul Brown Stadium. It was his fifth game as a member of the Bengals, a few months after he’d signed a four-year, $53 million contract, the largest the team had ever given a defensive tackle.
He didn’t know the extent of the injury, but he knew it wasn’t good. His left leg buckled after another player was pushed into him.
Soon after trainers took him off the field on a cart, DJ learned he’d torn his left quadriceps. It was a serious injury, one that would end his season and, potentially, his career. Roughly 50% of players with the same injury never return to full strength.
For DJ, a long rehab was ahead. And it wasn’t just his career that was at stake. He had a son to think about. He couldn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself or complaining that this was the bad news he’d been expecting to come along and ruin everything.
He had to get to work.
“Having a son,” he said, “changed my life.”
During his rehab, DJ was able to spend more time with Rocky. He wasn’t away for long days of practice and games. He wasn't taking road trips with the rest of the team. He was home. Like his dad did decades earlier, he made his son the center of his life, even when his physical health sometimes made it difficult.
In at least one way, the timing was good. Rocky was learning how to walk, and DJ was re-learning how to walk. DJ decided they'd do it together, one step at a time.
“It forced me to do a lot that I probably wouldn’t have done early in rehab,” DJ said. “I probably would have sat there and been depressed.”
Along the way, DJ started to think about his life differently, outside of football. He thought about the lessons his father had taught him years earlier, about being optimistic, about giving back.
He remembered what his mother had told him, not long after his dad died: “The way you honor your father is to take his legacy, because you have his last name, and to keep going.”
Rebuilding a career, founding a charity
Before he took the field Feb. 13, 2022, for Super Bowl 56, DJ did what he’d done before every game since he was awakened that morning in his apartment at Clemson. He talked to his dad.
It was a way to remind him to think about the lessons he’d learned from his dad, to be the kind of man he wanted him to be.
His rehab had gone well. He'd not only healed, he’d come back stronger.
Near the end of the third quarter of the Super Bowl, with the Bengals leading the Rams 20-16, DJ burst through the line and wrapped his arms around quarterback Matthew Stafford, pulling him down for a sack.
The game didn’t end the way DJ or the rest of the team hoped it would, but the performance in the game and over the course of the season was validation to DJ and his teammates that the work they’d done on and off the field had been worth it.
The Bengals weren’t the team they used to be. They had come a long way.
He still missed his dad, but he no longer felt the emptiness he did in the years after his death. DJ filled the void by being becoming not just one of the team’s best players, but also one of its leaders. Heading into the 2022 season, his teammates voted him a captain.
“He’s just got the right winning edge to him that rubs off on everyone he’s around,” said Bengals head coach Zac Taylor.
More important to DJ, he’d also become the kind of dad his father raised him to be.
In late May this year, back home in Greensboro, DJ and Rocky sat side by side, dressed in tuxedos. They were celebrating, together, at a gala sponsored by a charitable foundation DJ created in honor of his father. He named the foundation A Son Never Forgets.
The foundation helps pay for scholarships, school resource rooms, back-to-school events, dental screenings, school supplies and reading programs. The foundation’s work isn’t limited to Greensboro.
A few months later, DJ would open a school resource room at Shroder High School in Cincinnati, the third such room his foundation has supported here and in Greensboro. One day, he hopes to expand his work with children by opening a school.
But on the night of the gala in May, DJ was thinking about one child in particular. He wanted Rocky, now 3, to be there with him because he wanted him to learn, from an early age, that this is the kind of work that matters most. They posed for photos together. They goofed around with friends and family. It was a great night.
Later, when he posted one of the photos of him and Rocky on Instagram, DJ gave credit to the man who made it possible.
“Love you, Dad,” he wrote. “This is only the beginning.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati Bengals player DJ Reader lost his dad but found himself
