Separated from his family and turned away from football, Derek Wolfe woke up alone on Thanksgiving Day.
In a pandemic-stricken season, the Ravens defensive end has become numb in some ways to 2020's more gutting features. His wife, teenage stepdaughter and 1-year-old daughter were back home in Colorado, a decision he’d endorsed and now had to endure. The Ravens, mired in a coronavirus outbreak, were still days away from reuniting at the team facility. Their game against the Pittsburgh Steelers had already been pushed back once; another two postponements would soon be announced.
Wolfe remembers feeling pretty lonely. Only the generosity of his landlord, a “really sweet lady” who’d prepared him some Thanksgiving dinner, softened the edges of another hard day.
“It’s been tough,” Wolfe said in an interview Saturday morning, before the Ravens’ final day of practice for Monday night’s game against the Cleveland Browns (9-3). “It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just the way it is. I’m making a sacrifice for my family right now, and obviously, I’m still living my dream, so there’s sacrifices that come with that. And it could be worse.”
For all that Wolfe has — his health, his family, his new starring role on one of the NFL’s best defenses — he is thankful. Hopeful, too, that at least Christmas will be a little more normal this month, his loved ones by his side in Maryland.
But Wolfe, maybe more than any player on a Ravens team (7-5) striving for the playoffs, understands what’s lost when family falls away. It hurts him to not see his girls because he knows the intimate pain of a fractured childhood. Every day, his family changes in ways big and small. All he can do is tell them he loves them, that he misses them, and cross off the days until he sees them again.
“It’s difficult, man,” Wolfe said. “I really do miss my daughter and my wife and my oldest like crazy. That love — I never had that kind of family love. So once you have it and then it’s, like, not there, it’s difficult.”
The plan was to make it work, long distance. Wolfe knew it wouldn’t be easy. He’s on a one-year deal in Baltimore. His wife, Abigail, is managing rental properties back home and helping to oversee construction of a mountainside cabin for the family. Wolfe’s stepdaughter, Tatum, is 13 — “You can’t just switch schools,” he said — and Roxanna was born less than 18 months ago.
When the Ravens reported to Owings Mills in July, Wolfe struggled to say goodbye. The pandemic had transformed the NFL’s offseason — no attending minicamp, no meeting teammates — but it’d given him all the time he wanted with his family. He watched Tatum become a teenager and Roxanna say her first words. “I’ve waited my entire life to know what true unconditional love feels like,” Wolfe wrote in an early-March Instagram post.
At training camp, though, there was room for only football. Wolfe, who went a month without seeing his family in person, said he suffered from separation anxiety. He welcomed the structure football afforded him, but he also knew it could provide only so much.
Growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, Wolfe didn’t know his biological father. He’s said his stepfather physically and verbally abused him. Even after his stepfather divorced Wolfe’s mother, who struggled with alcohol abuse, Wolfe went to live with him. It wasn’t until a friend’s family offered Wolfe a permanent home that his life started to stabilize.
When Wolfe became a stepfather, marrying Abigail in 2017, and then a first-time father last year, he had a family all his own, unspoiled by the life he’d left behind. He could give what he had not always been given. After eight strong seasons with the Denver Broncos, Wolfe had financial security and an opportunity to chase a Super Bowl in Baltimore.
For the first half of the season, as Wolfe worked himself into what coach John Harbaugh called “dominant” form, he tried to make 2020 bearable. Every few weekends, Wolfe flew his family into Baltimore before games. At the team facility, he bonded with teammates like defensive tackle Brandon Williams, who called him “an amazing friend.” In his downtime, he went bowhunting for deer.
But with COVID-19 cases spiking and flu season approaching, Derek and Abigail decided cross-country flights were too risky. So, despite the pains of separation, they have kept their distance. Wolfe last saw Tatum before the season, and Roxanna over a month ago. Abigail FaceTimes with Wolfe every day. She sends him videos of their baby getting bigger, smarter, stronger. She tells him he’s not missing as much as he thinks.
Wolfe cannot totally convince himself of that. He wonders about the words Roxanna’s saying, thinks about the hugs he’s not giving. He misses drawing her a bath, putting her to bed and singing her a lullaby, his voice the last thing Roxanna hears as she drifts off to sleep.
“I just want to be able to hold her,” Wolfe said. “I just want to be able to hold my daughter. That unconditional love — she’s really the only blood that I have in my life. She is the only blood relative that I have, is my daughter.”
This holiday season, it is a familiar despair. Around the facility, teammates, coaches and staffers have missed family parties, birthdays and get-togethers, kept from parents and siblings by a pandemic that’s killed nearly 300,000 Americans.
Those are the realities of everyday life, Harbaugh said Saturday, no different for NFL players than the fans who root them on.
“It’s just a tough time in the world right now for relationships,” he said. “Our guys have handled it really well. I’m really proud of the way our guys have handled it. I don’t think they let it affect the business part of it too much, but it’s very important to be sensitive to that … and to understand that everybody is kind of going through a lot right now.”
For now, all Wolfe can do is wait. The Ravens’ “Monday Night Football” matchup with Cleveland is something of a homecoming for him, even if the family he cares most about is halfway across the country. When he wakes up Tuesday morning, the Ravens could be one step closer to a third straight postseason berth, and his family one day closer to joining him for the holidays.
Just wait until Christmas, he’s told them. “It’s only a couple more days,” he said Saturday, as if eager to convince himself, “and they’ll be here.”
