‘Don’t ever give up’: Philipsburg native, NFL veteran Jon Condo delivers message at NFF banquet

Jon Condo worked as a substitute teacher for three months after being released by the Dallas Cowboys in 2005. A year later, after being waived by the New England Patriots, the Philipsburg native painted houses with his father’s company. He was actually on the job when he received word from his agent that the Oakland Raiders were interested in working him out.

“Can you get to Pittsburgh in four hours for a flight?” Condo recalled his agent asking. The long-snapper put his paintbrush down, made the flight and never looked back.

Condo, now a 13-year NFL veteran, served as the featured speaker at the National Football Foundation’s Central Pennsylvania Chapter banquet at the Penn Stater Hotel & Conference Center on Sunday. The central message of Condo’s speech was, “Don’t ever give up” — and more than four dozen high school honorees were in attendance to absorb his advice.

A total of 52 football players were recognized as scholar-athletes on Sunday, including five from Centre County. Kael Gardner (Bald Eagle Area) and Isaac Spotts (Penns Valley) were honored, while Tommy Friberg (State College), Kyle Myers (Bellefonte) and Daniel Slogosky (Philipsburg-Osceola) received $1,000 scholarships.

Slogosky said the speech by Condo — a three-year letterwinner in football, baseball and wrestling at P-O — “hit home.”

“His speech shows that you don’t always have the easiest path, no matter how easy it looks from the beginning. And it doesn’t matter how much you’re promised, you might not get it,” Slogosky said. “It gives you a special sense of who the hometown hero really is.”

Condo’s road certainly wasn’t conventional. Prior to his speech, the two-time Pro Bowler met with media members and explained how his path to this point started, really, with a conversation with Jay Paterno. The former Penn State assistant visited Condo, then a junior, at P-O.

“He was giving me his pitch and said, ‘How would you like to play at Beaver Stadium in front of 100,000 people next year?’” Condo said smiling. “And I was like, ‘Well, you know, I’m going to be a senior in high school.’ So it kind of turned me off. I was going to be a senior. He could have figured that out.”

Moving forward, Condo said Penn State liked him — but Maryland was the move. The P-O star redshirted his first year with the Terrapins and was in line to serve as Maryland’s backup linebacker the following season. But in spring camp, the team was left looking for a long-snapper after its starter failed out of school.

Condo, who had never snapped between his legs before, practiced tirelessly over the summer and won the job in the fall. The new long-snapper was happy to have a starting role on the team. But, after securing the spot, Condo could no longer play linebacker and participated in only 10 percent of most practices.

For someone so competitive and active, that was an adjustment — one many players struggle with, Penn State head coach James Franklin noted before the banquet. Franklin, who was Maryland’s wide receivers coach at the time, remembers Condo as a “class act.”

“The way he approached things with his maturity and his work ethic, he very prideful in his role on the team,” Franklin said. “So once he got into the NFL, it didn’t surprise me that he was going to be a guy to not only make it, but also put together a damn good career. ... It doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

Now, after playing for the Raiders from 2006 to 2017 and latching on with the Atlanta Falcons in 2018, Condo is a free agent. The door is still open for him to return to the field in 2019, but if no team calls prior to the regular season, he’s content with hanging up the cleats. Condo, who lives with his wife, Jaclyn, in northern California, has three young children to look after and coach one day.

“I’ve been blessed to have the NFL career that I’ve had,” the 37-year-old Condo added, “and I’m at peace with everything that I’ve accomplished.”

And that success as a lightly-recruited kid from Centre County resonated with the up-and-comers in the audience.

“I learned a lot from that speech,” said Friberg, who will play football as a preferred walk-on at Michigan. “I’ll carry that on when I go to college and never give up in whatever I do.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2019 at 7:41 PM.