WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Sam Hartman is looking for the correct myth to make his point.
Is it Sisyphus and the boulder?
No.
Is it Atlas holding up the heavens?
No.
Is it Icarus flying too high?
That’s the one.
The Wake Forest quarterback is explaining why Icarus needed a weight. “It’s a ball and chain that keeps you humble,” Hartman says. “To keep you from falling off this earth.”
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Had Icarus had one of those, Hartman explains, he could have tested out his wings. But he wouldn’t have melted them by flying too close to the sun. He wouldn’t have fallen. Hartman has such a weight in his life. It does keep him humble. It does keep him from floating away and subsequently crashing down. But in the past six months, Hartman has come to understand that if he isn’t careful, that weight can drag him into a place just as bad as where Icarus wound up after he crashed.
Because earlier this year, Hartman started seeing a therapist. A football mentor — Hartman declines to reveal that person’s identity publicly out of respect for their privacy — told Hartman therapy could extend his career and generally improve his life. Hartman, raised in football to bury the bad, to suck it up and keep moving, to keep his feelings to himself, wasn’t so sure. Then he found himself in an office once or twice a week and it all came pouring out. His fears. His anxieties. The weight.
Hartman understands some people will read this and judge him. He doesn’t care. Because Hartman also knows that if someone reads about his experience and asks for help, then that person’s life can improve. Though the sport is changing, Hartman knows most people raised around football traditionally have been steered away from discussing their feelings. As a football player and the son of Mark Hartman, Sam grew up believing there wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be solved by trying harder to be perfect. “My dad is a surgeon. So you’ve got to be perfect,” Sam says. “He works on spines, so you’ve got to be more perfect.” Even when his mom Lisa suggested years ago that her boys talk to someone if they needed to unload some emotional baggage, Sam thought he should just push it down and keep going. But the past few months have taught him he couldn’t have kept that up much longer.
If he can go to therapy and then tear up the ACC through the air, then Hartman can help that stigma fade. In the long term, maybe he can learn how to process his own trauma so that he doesn’t pass along the bury-it-deep model he previously embraced to his future children. In the short term, the sessions have helped Hartman have his best collegiate season. Through 11 games, he has thrown for 3,475 yards and 31 touchdowns and helped Wake Forest to a 9-2 record. If he can lead the Demon Deacons to a win Saturday against Boston College, they’ll earn their first berth in the ACC championship since 2006.
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“It’s a science project,” Hartman says. “My body I know pretty well. I’ve been training for football since I was 6. I’ve been training my mind for six months.”
Hartman started seeing his therapist to talk about some of the football issues that nagged at his mind. He hated the way he played in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl to end last season. The score was tied at 21 late in the third quarter when Hartman started a nightmare stretch that included four interceptions in fewer than eight minutes of game time. The final pick ended with Hartman tackling Wisconsin linebacker Collin Wilder at the Wake Forest 3-yard line.
Nine seconds after that play ended, Wisconsin had a three-touchdown lead and would roll to a 42-28 win. Needless to say, there was plenty to unpack from that game, and that’s why it had gnawed at Hartman all the way through spring practice.
But as Hartman and his therapist talked, they tunneled closer to a root problem. Hartman buried trauma and tried to ignore it. So when he struggled to move past those interceptions in a football game named after a condiment, it was most likely because he struggled to process all of the traumas in his past. That included one that loomed over all the others— the weight that could keep him tethered or sink him.
‘The guy I wanted to make proud’
Sometime in the late aughts, Demitri Allison rode his bicycle to a youth football practice led by coach Chad Grier. “I’m supposed to be playing for you,” the elementary schooler said. After the practice, no one came to pick up Demitri. Grier took him home and learned the kid lived at the end of a dead-end road across from a cemetery with an elderly grandmother who was on dialysis. She was doing her best, but the boy needed more. Various families — including Grier’s — helped through the years. When Grier became the offensive coordinator at Southlake Christian in Huntersville, N.C., he asked the administration if Demitri could come to school there as well. Grier knew the Hartmans because he had coached Sam and his older brother Joe in various sports through the years, and now Demitri would be going to school with their boys. Grier’s oldest son Will played quarterback at Florida and West Virginia and now plays for the Dallas Cowboys. His younger sons, Hayes and Nash, became social media celebrities in high school and now make a living as influencers. But back then, the Hartmans and the Griers were family friends united through sports. And when Mark and Lisa met Demitri, they wanted to help provide a more stable life for him. Starting in early high school, Demitri began staying a few days at a time at the Hartmans’ home in Davidson, N.C. Sam and Joe were in middle school. After a while, Demitri just stayed. He simply became the oldest Hartman brother. Sam looked up to Demetri, who made him laugh, who gave him advice, who ran routes for him in the backyard. “He was my hero,” Sam Hartman says. “He was the guy I wanted to make proud.”
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Wearing No. 10, Demitri played receiver at Southlake Christian. He went to Elon University to play football, and by all accounts he led a happy, productive life there. But in November 2015 — when Demitri was a junior — he disappeared. Friends and family called police to help find him. Lisa got him on the phone. He told her he loved her, and that was the last time they spoke. On Nov. 11, 2015, Demitri was found dead after falling from a 10th-story window on the North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill — 36 miles to the southeast of Elon. Police ruled his death a suicide.
ESPN’s Jen Lada told the story of Demitri and Sam’s relationship beautifully earlier this month on ESPN’s College GameDay. To understand their bond, just watch.
On the field, Wake Forest QB Sam Hartman is never alone as he carries the memory of his brother, Demitri, with him into every game.
Off the field, Hartman has made it his mission to remind others that they too are not alone. pic.twitter.com/iteS6Knr5i
— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) October 23, 2021
When news reached the Hartmans, teammates and coaches began coming by to offer support. Joe stayed near them. Sam remained out on the family dock, alone. Lisa says Sam can be “the center of the party” when he wants. He’s one of those people who can talk to anyone. But the extrovert side is only a piece of his personality. “The reality of it is that Sam is much more guarded,” Lisa says. “He likes being alone. He can be alone forever.”
Two days after Demitri’s death, Sam switched his jersey number to 10 and led Davidson Day to a 31-14 win against Charlotte Latin to claim a state title. He’d been told he didn’t need to play if he didn’t want to. Lisa says he never considered not playing. He swallowed the grief and plowed ahead.
In the months following Demitri’s death, Lisa would ask Sam if he needed to talk. He’d turn her concern back on her. “He had a stiff upper lip,” Lisa says. “It’s one of those things where I remember saying, ‘Someday, if you ever want to talk about this … And he’d say ‘You too, mom.’” Lisa thinks Sam bottled up those feelings out of a sense of duty. “He had to be really strong about it,” she says. “Because there were some people who didn’t handle it as well and had a big struggle. So I always wondered. Where is that? How far down is it? When is it going to come up?”
Lisa feared that it might bubble up in an unhealthy way. And Sam believes it did at times. Instead of talking out issues with teammates in high school or at Wake Forest, he might get surly or withdraw. But until he started therapy, he thought that was a normal response.
Lisa knew it wasn’t. Shortly after she had Joe and Sam, she took up tennis. She had a friend who had played in college who gave her lessons, and she loved learning the game. Nothing felt better than mastering a shot in practice. When she got proficient in practice, she decided to join a league. That’s when the trouble began. Even in an adult recreational league, she couldn’t tame her nerves before matches. Once, she took her pulse. It pounded at 140 beats per minute. The same friend who taught her tennis suggested Lisa see a therapist to discuss her nerves.
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In an early session, Lisa suggested she simply quit trying to play competitively. The therapist responded by drawing a Venn diagram on a whiteboard. Tennis intersected with parenting and with relationships and with all of Lisa’s other duties. “It’s coming out in tennis right now,” Lisa remembers being told. “But I promise you it’s going to come out somewhere else if you don’t figure out what it is.” After working through her own issues, Lisa decided not to quit. That next season, she went undefeated.
So she was thrilled when Sam took that mentor’s advice and began talking through his own issues. Sam has worked to learn to process the big-picture traumas (such as Demitri’s death) and the little-picture ones (throwing off his back foot on one rep in practice). “Sam is his own worst critic,” Grier says. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad.” Sam has learned that if he can talk through his feelings after one of those smaller incidents, they don’t fester and become something bigger later. “I don’t want people to think that I don’t care when I make mistakes,” he said. “But if you care so much that you make six more mistakes, no one cares if you do care.” As for the bigger issues, he’s learning that they’ll always be a part of them. He needs to work to focus them in a healthier direction. “Things like that you really can’t flush,” Sam says. “It’s turned into ‘How do I use it?’” So instead of the boulder that sinks him, it’s the weight that keeps him grounded. “That’s my thing that holds me,” Sam says. And then he thinks of Demitri. “He didn’t have one,” he says.
Sam has needed that weight lately. The week of the NC State game coincided with the sixth anniversary of Demitri’s death. He went to therapy twice. “None of it was about football,” he says. “But still it helps. It’s about grieving. It’s about relationships. It’s all intertwined.” And it has helped Hartman’s football life along with everything else. Grier, who coached Hartman through high school, has seen a different player this season. “You can see it when you watch games,” Grier says. “I can see in between plays that his demeanor is so calm. When things don’t go just right, there’s no drama. It used to be that when he threw a pick, it would eat at him. He didn’t throw many, but they really bothered him. Now he processes it and moves on.”
(Bob Donnan / USA Today)This month has brought fresh challenges for a player who grew up uncomfortable being complimented because he feared accepting kind words meant he didn’t care about fixing any mistakes he made. “You did a good job, but…” was Sam’s default thought. In the past month, Sam’s name started appearing in Heisman Trophy odds. He appeared on watch lists for other awards. That’s a lot of “You did a good job.” Sam’s mind kept looking for the “but.” “I’ve been miserable,” he says.
Even though his arms and legs are covered in the FieldTurf version of road rash from crashing into the turf and from getting pounded by opposing defenders, Sam worries that if he even slightly acknowledges these compliments, his teammates will think he’s more concerned about individual awards than team success. He worries that strangers will think he put himself above the team. But when he talks it through, it helps. His teammates love him because he’s worked alongside them. He’s bled with them. If he wins an award, no one will resent that. His teammates would be proud.
Sam’s therapist has encouraged him to plant regular reminders to keep himself centered. He carries most of his tension in his shoulders. During a conversation, he has his arms crossed and his shoulders cocked back — pulling everything up. “She’d be all over me for that,” he says with a laugh. And he breathes. And the shoulders drop into their normal position. The breathing is critical. Sam has programmed his phone to regularly remind him to breathe.
His phone also reminds him to “block the bullies.” Who are the bullies? The star QB on an ACC campus doesn’t exactly have some modern-day Biff Tannen trying to shove him into a locker. For Sam, the bully is his own inner voice, which frequently sounds like a football coach from a bygone era. “It’s one of those deals where everyone has one,” Sam says. “Mine is wired to berate me. That was really bad my whole life until this summer. That was my biggest focus.”
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Sam would love an inner voice that sounds like Demon Deacons coach Dave Clawson. He wants to work toward a mentality similar to Clawson’s. The coach rarely allows outside circumstances to dictate his mood. “He’s the same guy whether we win by 60 or lose by 60,” Sam says.
The Deacs have done a lot more winning than losing this season. They need to bounce back from a 48-27 loss at Clemson last week, but a win Saturday at Boston College would cement this team’s place in history. Hartman will have more decisions to make later. Because of the free year of eligibility the NCAA granted all athletes in 2020, he’s officially a redshirt sophomore even though this is his fourth year in college and his third year as Wake Forest’s starter. He could conceivably play two more seasons in college. Or he could head to the NFL, where his skill set could make him one of the top QB prospects in the 2022 draft. He’d rather not even think about that now. All he wants to do next week is prepare to face Pittsburgh in Charlotte on Dec. 4. To do that, Sam and his teammates will have to win in Chestnut Hill.
If they do, more compliments will come. He’ll have to deal with those. More pressure will come. More attention will come, but that could produce more positives. Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel saw the College GameDay story on Sam and Demitri and shared it with his team with the hope that players would be more willing to talk if they need help with mental issues or anxiety.
The #Titans have used 82 players this year… record is 84.
Derrick Henry is on IR.
Julio Jones is on IR.
AJ Brown days ago opened up about his battle w/ depression & revealed he thought about taking his own life a year ago.
How is this team 8-2?
Culture. Built by Mike Vrabel. pic.twitter.com/t9rXysDeCs
— Emily Proud (@emily_proud) November 15, 2021
Sam hopes word of the strides he has made in therapy also will reach other football players. He wants them to know it won’t make them weak. Quite the contrary. Therapy has made Sam Hartman a better quarterback and a better leader. He believes it also has made him a better man.
He won’t shy away from talking about all of that now. He knows the weight won’t drag him down.
It will keep him exactly where he needs to be.
(Photo: Courtesy of the Hartman family)
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