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It probably won't surprise you to learn that I wasn't much of a sports kid growing up.
I come from a family of musicians, not athletes.
I managed to get through four years at Syracuse without ever seeing a basketball or football game.
And I have no regrets.
And yet, with time, I've learned that I love the emotions involved with sports.
I love seeing people dance through a city because their team won.
I am fascinated by fans who feel a deep personal sense of loss when their favorite player suffers a season-ending injury.
To put it another way, Ted Lasso worked for me, but not because of the soccer.
One of the things I'm always curious about when it comes to sports is partnership.
What does it feel like to be the spouse or significant other of an athlete who suddenly has to pick up and move because their person got traded?
Where do they find support?
You're pulled to this random city that you probably are not from and you have no friends or family there, and your husband's gone four out of eight months of the year.
So you're spending a lot of time alone.
This is Jordan Whitlock.
Jordan just turned 27.
She has a PhD in genetics and splits her time between Boston and Fort Myers, Florida.
Jordan's husband, Garrett, is a right-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.
Before we get into it, I should disclose that Red Sox principal owner, John Henry, also owns the Boston Globe.
Jordan and Garrett Whitlock are living the dream in many ways.
I mean, Garrett made it to the majors.
Only the most elite athletes on the planet ever get that far.
But the instability, the high stakes, the public pressure, the threat of constant change.
It can be hard on everyone involved, which is why finding a sense of community, Finding those people who can help ground you at difficult moments, is essential to making it all work.
We really wouldn't be able to do it, because there's just so much that goes on that's unpredictable, that you really need those people that are stable, that you can depend on.
That's honestly true whether you're in this game or not.
We're built for community.
We're built to be in fellowship with people.
And when you are alone and don't have that support system... things begin to crumble and fall apart.
From the Boston Globe and PRX, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Even a non-sports person like me knows that trades and player moves are part of the deal.
You have to accept the possibility that you'll wake up one day and your idol is gone.
Locker cleaned out, sent to a rival club in a faraway market.
After all, sports franchises are notoriously fickle.
Loyalty doesn't necessarily make money or win championships.
The Boston Red Sox trade Mookie Betts.
And David Price to the Dodgers.
A blockbuster deal that lands the Milwaukee Bucks all-NBA guard Damon Lillard.
It's a three-team trade.
Less than a week after throwing out feelers, the Carolina Panthers.
Well, they found a dance partner to trade all-pro, running back Christian McCaffrey, and it's the San Francisco.
For me, I'm most interested in the part of these moves you don't see, because it's often not just the player who makes an abrupt exit.
Spouses partners children, sometimes extended family.
They're affected by these moves too, especially those who've made a home in the city where the team is based.
Today, we bring you a two-part series on the unique lives of pro athletes and their partners and how they get help from people around them and from each other.
We begin with Jordan Whitlock, whom you heard at the start.
Part two will be about Shannon Allen, the wife of Hall of Fame basketball player Ray Allen.
They're two different people with different stories, but they helped answer my questions about what it's like to be with an athlete whose career can take over everything.
I wanted to know how they've made sure not to lose themselves, and I wanted to know who's helped them along the way.
Sports fans, this is for you.
Non-sports fans, well, you'll have to trust me here.
I'm very into these stories, I swear.
Jordan Whitlock's story begins as a young girl in Woodstock, Georgia, outside of Atlanta.
She has a younger sister and her parents, but she also has these next door neighbors from South Africa.
And those neighbors become part of Jordan's family.
I kind of grew up with this mixed culture of like sharing holidays and like birthdays and all big celebrations, with a blend of like the South African family and their culture and then my traditional nuclear family.
So I have two additional siblings through that, like one sister and one brother, who technically aren't by blood, but we consider them family.
When you were younger, what did you think your romantic life would be like as a grownup?
I guess I never really thought about it, right?
Like, I was a tomboy.
I had Nerf guns.
I was, like, outside all the time.
I never really was the princess you know like.
Oh, I'm going to have this big fancy wedding and live in a castle and skip through a meadow with this handsome prince charming boy.
What does capture Jordan's imagination as a young girl is sports, namely soccer.
Jordan is tall.
She will grow to be 6'2".
So she plays some volleyball in middle and high school.
But it's soccer that she loves.
And it's soccer that earns her an athletic scholarship to the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
How was the balance between sports and academics?
It's kind of like juggling two full-time jobs.
So soccer demanded probably like 40 plus hours a week, and then you're in a full load of classes.
So you kind of had to just figure out how to balance the two.
I would be running from practice ending at like 930 to a class at 945 and be like the sweaty kid in the back row with my bag and like grass all over.
On the Tuesday of Jordan's first week of college in 2015, she's just finished her freshman orientation.
Her soccer coach had informed all the players that if they lose their soccer kit, they'll be kicked off the team.
Jordan panics because she just left her gear in a communal washer.
I sprinted across campus like a crazy person.
And into the laundry room, and the second I get in there, I cannot figure out which washer it is.
And so I'm like frantically running around, ripping open all these washers, trying to find my stuff.
She finally does find it.
And that's when she notices something else.
A cute, tall boy who's also doing his laundry.
It turns out Jordan knows the guy who's with him.
He introduced me to the cute guy in the corner.
And so that's kind of how Garrett and I met.
He came up and kind of pulled his laundry out and just made some small talk next to me.
And, you know, she's like, oh, hey, what's your name?
You play sports?
Cool, me too.
Later, Jordan learns that Garrett had already finished his laundry by the time she shows up.
But he spends another $4 to rewash his clothes so he can stay and talk to her.
That's kind of like our how we met story.
I'm in love with that.
Yeah.
You know, because I see sometimes people meeting... at a laundromat in the movies.
And I'm like, yeah, that doesn't happen.
No, that did happen.
Yeah.
After the meet cute, Jordan and Garrett spend the following days kind of circling each other.
They're both student athletes.
She's on the soccer team.
He's on the baseball team.
So they end up in a lot of the same places on campus.
One Wednesday night early in the semester, Garrett's roommate Kyle, with whom Jordan has a chemistry lab, engineers a late night restaurant outing for the three of them.
He literally like third wheeled us hanging out at this like barbecue joint in downtown and forced us to like be in the same space and made sure I had his number.
Jordan then invites Garrett and a friend of his to her family's house back in Georgia over Labor Day weekend.
But on that trip, just like at school, everything's squarely in the friend zone.
Jordan starts to wonder if this crush is actually going to turn into anything.
And then it was right before Halloween.
We still were kind of just hanging out and he hadn't asked or made anything official yet.
And so finally, I looked at my soccer roommates and I was like, all right, if Garrett doesn't ask me out literally tomorrow, I'm done.
And so I guess they left the room and literally went and found him.
And he came and took me on a date that night and asked me to be his girlfriend.
From here, the fall of their freshman year at college, Jordan and Garrett are officially a couple.
At this point, Jordan has no way to really assess Garrett's prospects as a baseball player.
He hasn't played a single college game yet.
For him, baseball is just something he loves and a ticket to a free college education.
At that point in his career, it was more just like, hey, I'm here.
I'm excited to be here.
I'm just here to play baseball and have fun and like classes or, you know, like another thing I got to do in order to do that.
Besides, for all her interest in sports, Jordan doesn't actually know that much about baseball.
I grew up in Atlanta and was a quote-unquote Braves fan growing up, right?
But I went to games.
It was like a social thing for me.
I didn't know who was good or who wasn't or what made you a good baseball player.
So I would have had no idea if he was good at baseball or not.
He's always had a very competitive spirit and strives to like do the best and like be the best at whatever it is he like puts his mind to but, and so i knew that about him obviously, when we started dating, but i didn't realize like, the full extent of the potential for his career at that point.
Fast forward to june of 2017.
Garrett and jordan have just finished their sophomore year of college.
At 21, garrett is now old enough to be drafted out of college by a pro team, but the university of alabama birmingham, is is not one of the biggest Division I programs.
Plus, he's coming off a back injury, so his immediate prospects for going pro are uncertain.
The first two days of the Major League Baseball draft come and go.
Garrett doesn't get the call.
On the third day of the draft, Jordan and Garrett are with her family at a beach house in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
Garrett checks his phone after a game of spike ball and he sees he has a voicemail from a baseball scout.
Garrett calls the scout back, and that's when he gets the news.
He's been drafted by the New York Yankees.
I was shocked.
You don't know if he's going to go, and then I was kind of curious.
Okay, well, he's going to New York, which we didn't expect.
We thought it would be a couple of other teams.
New York was not on our radar at all.
But overall, I was really—aside from the shock, I was super excited because—
This is something that he's been like working for, you know, and he was like training really hard.
And this was kind of like that big next step for him to like get into a new playing field and stage for his career.
It's an exciting time.
Garrett flies up to New York to sign the paperwork.
He's officially a pro baseball player, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
But it means big changes for Garrett and Jordan's relationship.
They've been dating about 18 months at this point.
Jordan still has two years of school to finish, plus her soccer commitments.
Her life is in Birmingham.
Garrett has to pack up his stuff and report to one of the Yankees' farm clubs in Florida.
In a flash, their relationship goes long distance.
We're used to seeing each other every day after classes, catching up before practice, eating breakfast together in the dining hall, etc.
Seeing each other at night for like watching a movie or a TV show together on the couch every night.
And so the long distance was a big transition, but we were willing to like give our relationship a shot because we felt like we'd had a good foundation and felt really confident in what we had.
So we just kind of decided to give it a go and just see what happens.
These first few weeks apart in the summer of 2017, are the first taste of a new life for Jordan and Garrett, a new reality.
They've officially joined the ranks of all of those sports families out there who live at the mercy of the sports gods.
The punishing schedules, the whims of team ownership, the total lack of control over your life.
Again, it's all for a larger cause.
If you've gotten this far as a player, it means your career is thriving.
You've been given a chance to make it at a level very few athletes ever reach.
But it's a major adjustment, one that requires a lot of help.
A community of friends, family and fellow travelers, who all become the most important teammates you've got.
More after a quick break.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, we're back.
So Jordan Whitlock is two years into college when her boyfriend Garrett gets drafted by the New York Yankees.
That same summer, Jordan makes her own professional transition.
After two years of studying engineering, she develops a love for genetics and decides to switch her major.
I was super interested in genetics kids with rare disease that are less than one of 2000 in the world that have their particular genetic disorders.
They could be the only one in the world, one of 50, one of 100.
And I just became super passionate about that space and wanted to put myself in a position where I would be able to do impactful research or things that could help people in those communities.
Garrett at this point is starting to work his way up through the Yankees' farm system, first in the Gulf Coast League in Florida and then with the Pulaski Yankees of Pulaski Virginia, in the Appalachian League.
There's obviously a time zone difference depending on where he is.
So for us, luckily, it was only an hour.
But that hour makes a big difference when I'm rushing off to an early morning soccer practice and he's not awake yet.
And then by the time I'm in classes and done for the day, it's an hour later and he's in bed because he has to get up and train the next morning.
So it was a lot of quick stolen moments or like a quick, hello, good morning, good night phone call.
And then just lots of texting throughout the day to try to stay connected.
This is when Jordan really starts to recognize and value community.
And she finds it in a couple of places.
The first is her adopted hometown of Birmingham, where she has her soccer teammates, her peers in the genetics program And, perhaps most importantly, her faith community.
The second place Jordan, starts to find support is among the wives and partners of Garrett's teammates.
Even if they didn't live in the same state, and being able to like connect with them or give them a phone call or FaceTime when, like I, was really struggling helped a ton because they are also in the same situation.
Jordan quickly learns that to develop these relationships she has to actively seek them out on the trips she takes to see Garrett.
I usually was able to go about like once a month.
So I'd see him for like 48 hours every four weeks, roughly.
And his roommates would try to see if the other girlfriends or wives could also visit at the same time, so we could get to know each other and hang out.
So I would show up to visit him at baseball or whatever city he was in.
And I kind of just have to go to one of his games and look for another girl sitting alone in the stands and then go find her and say hey I'm, Are you with one of the players?
My name is Jordan.
Like, what's your name?
Just kind of put myself out there and meet random strangers who would later become best friends.
One of those women is Gabby Otto, the wife of pitcher Glenn Otto, who's also part of the Yankees farm system.
Gabby plays college basketball so she and Jordan connect especially well, could kind of like reach out to each other for support, or like when we were struggling and the guys are gone or we're not able to visit for eight weeks because of a game or stuff like that.
Minor league baseball is a grind for players like garrett.
You're living with roommates in tiny, crappy apartments, you're riding in cramped buses, you're making basically no money, all in the hopes that that one day you'll reach the big leagues.
Within the Yankees' farm system in 2018 and 2019, Garrett plays for a number of different teams up and down the East Coast.
He's in Tampa, Charleston, Trenton, New Jersey.
Jordan is still finishing her undergraduate degree for much of this.
He's just kind of bouncing around.
All that's changing is the airport that I'm flying into to go see him.
Then, in late 2019, two big things happen.
One.
Garrett has Tommy John surgery to repair a torn elbow ligament a somewhat common procedure for pitchers.
Two, he and Jordan get married at a vineyard north of Atlanta.
When the COVID lockdown hits in the spring of 2020, it works out pretty well for the two of them.
Normally, Garrett would have to do his rehab and recovery at team facilities in Florida.
But with everything shut down, he can't go anywhere.
He actually got to stay in Alabama and do all his PT and stuff at home with me.
So that was nice because we had this sort of like the first time ever we actually got to live together and like be in the same place for a while over the whole time we've been together.
Up until this point, with Garrett's athletic success far from guaranteed, they figure it's Jordan's career that will be their plan A By the end of 2020.
She's a year into her PhD program in genetics at her same university, the University of Alabama Birmingham.
That was part of my motivation aside from my passion for the rare disease to go after the PhD because it would give us like a solid career to help support our family so that he could still pursue his dreams.
Garrett's pitching career then takes a major turn in December of 2020.
He's picked up by the Boston Red Sox in something called the Rule 5 draft.
It's a complicated process, but basically this gives Garrett an immediate opportunity to join a major league franchise, and a pretty desirable one at that.
Jordan is thrilled for him, but she has a lot to balance.
My heart was torn between the science that I love and had started and was pursuing and the rare disease research, and wanting to be there to support him and Jordan enjoy this new wild ride that he had embarked upon as a major leaguer, because that's the pinnacle of his career, what he's worked for for so long and what makes all of the sharing apartments and the grind worth it.
So it was probably one of the hardest years that I've had to date, trying to stay rooted in what I was passionate about and had started and remind myself why, so that I would finish while also missing out on a lot of like big career moments and like things that were cool for our family that he was getting to experience.
Prior to the 2021 season, Garrett heads to Fort Myers Florida, which is the home base of the Red Sox in the preseason.
As the year goes on, Jordan does her best to be there for important milestones, sometimes taking red-eye flights from Alabama to get to a game.
And if she's lucky, one dinner with her husband.
Then she'd fly home the next morning.
Thankfully, my mentor for my PhD, she kind of knew our situation going into my school.
And so I was able to tell her hey, you know, if he makes it to the big leagues, I'm not missing his debut.
Like, I will just tell you if I'm sick if I have to.
So I got to be there for his debut once. which was cool.
He played in his first game on Easter Sunday, which was special for us.
The major league debut, however, of Garrett Whitlock.
He was really impressive in spring training, a Rule 5 guy.
Martin Perez will go in game two against Tyler Glasnow.
Swung on and missed.
He put him away.
First major league punch out for Garrett Whitlock.
So Jordan makes it to Garrett's biggest moment so far, his major league debut.
Even better, Garrett performs really well then. earning high praise from Red Sox manager Alex Cora.
But there's a lot Jordan can't be there for.
She can't be there if Garrett gets injured or if he has a bad game and is getting beaten up in the media.
She also misses out on some of the charity and community outreach events put on by the Red Sox organization.
I can't help gather socks for the homeless or do the fashion show runway that raises funds for the local community, because I'm not around.
So it's more missing out on the hard moments and then the opportunities and events where I get to kind of get connected in his world and meet the people he spends the day-to-day with and their significant others.
This goes both ways too, because you're doing exciting work.
Can you tell me what the thesis was about at the time and what you were experiencing in your PhD?
Some of my PhD was focused on gathering this model for this rare disease called Shinzel Gideon Syndrome.
There's less than 100 kids in the world that have it.
So it's considered ultra rare.
And I was trying to understand what is the cellular or tissue specific mechanism that's kind of driving and making these kids sick.
I felt like he wasn't missing out on as much at home as I was missing out with his life, just because I sit at a lab bench in a room with no windows or I'm sitting on a computer programming all day.
Whereas he's going to baseball games and traveling to cities and flying on a plane and doing all this cool stuff.
But it seems like it's also lonely.
You're both having to be lonely sometimes.
Yeah, you are lonely a lot.
Thankfully we had the opportunity during that time while he was home injured, to really build a solid community of other couples and married people.
That kind of helped us.
You know, was like the glue that held us together.
If you listened to our last episode with Sophia, you heard her talk about the team of people she assembled to help her through a difficult time her Avengers crew.
Well, Jordan Whitlock has her own version, recruited from the different communities she and Garrett belong to.
Once they're part of the Red Sox organization, Jordan again goes in search of other women at the ballpark who are in her same position.
You develop relationships faster because you cut out all of the small talky BS at the beginning, because there's not really time for that right.
You can't afford relationally, to wait four months to really get to know someone because the season's halfway over and at that point you've missed out on all this time.
You could have really been building an intentional, deep relationship with some of these girls.
She's met some of her closest friends within the Red Sox orbit, including Abby Houck, the wife of Red Sox pitcher Tanner Houck, and Bree Madden, the spouse of Red Sox staffer Charlie Madden.
But she says there's no guarantee any of her friends will still be there tomorrow or next month or next season.
So she and the other partners stay connected in other ways, like the book club Jordan is a part of, for example.
We pick one book every season that we all just kind of read.
And so if we're all in the same place, we'll talk about it that month in person.
Or if not, then we'll kind of zoom in and just use that time to do something normal that allows us to be connected, even though we're with different teams and scattered all across the US right now.
I asked Jordan how she and Garrett deal with the public scrutiny that comes with being a pro athlete and whether other partners have been helpful in offering guidance.
Yeah, we don't look at Twitter or social media.
It's just not worth it.
I mean, I have an Instagram, and he does too, and I keep a Twitter for work, but that's really all we use it for.
We just kind of tune out the noise and don't really pay attention, because you never know what people are going to say.
Jordan also says that the Red Sox organization itself is good about helping families acclimate to their new environment.
I have to assume other pro franchises are set up for that too.
They kind of orient you when you get there, give you resources and recommendations for a physician, a pediatrician, a vet, because most of us haven't typically been in the city or are new to the city when we get there at the beginning of the year.
Another thing about baseball is that it is a very long season.
Every team plays 162 regular games and that doesn't include the six weeks of preseason or, if your team is good, a postseason run.
On most of those days.
Jordan says Garrett and his teammates spend nine to 12 hours a day at the ballpark.
Days off are pretty rare.
So even when they are in the same place, it's not like they have all this time together.
Jordan says that 2023 was the hardest year of their entire relationship.
She was often hunkered down in Birmingham, finishing her dissertation.
Garrett was all over the country with the Red Sox.
They saw each other just 16 days between February and October.
On top of that, they got tragic news over Labor Day weekend that Garrett's brother Gavri, drowned in a lake accident outside Atlanta.
Thankfully, that was one of the weekends where I was actually visiting him when we got that news.
So I'm so glad I was able to be there and support him during honestly, one of the most life-changing moments that we've had, one of those moments that made jordan truly appreciate her community, like their friends from church in birmingham who stood by them, and the baseball friends who became their chosen family.
In december, after that intense, grueling year, jordan graduated from her phd program, with garrett there to witness it.
The graduation was a big deal for me because it kind of marked, you know, the end of this long season of long distance and tons of plane tickets and travel and multiple time zones.
And also like the culmination of my degree, which for me was a huge accomplishment, because I there were a lot of times where I thought like, is this all worth it?
Do I really still want to do this?
Not only was Garrett there for Jordan's graduation, he even read her dissertation, she says.
He's actually like paid a lot of attention and does make me feel special because he will give my elevator pitch to like the athletic trainers at Fenway and they all call me doctor now.
So even though I'm not like on as big of a stage or a platform as him, I think he still does a really great job at making my career feel just as important.
I mean, you're still very new to this, but you've also experienced a lot.
And what advice would you give about finding help and also learning to be flexible.
I have learned to not be afraid to ask for help, which is something that for some people, myself included, is hard sometimes to do just because of pride.
But I found that if you ask, people are almost always willing to help you out, because people don't know if you're struggling or you need it.
They can't read your mind.
This year, Jordan looks forward to recovering from her PhD program, stepping back from her work for a bit and just spending time together again.
What are some of the things you're looking forward to as you start, as you approach a season that you'll be there for?
Just to kind of do the silly stuff.
Like we don't grocery shop together.
We don't get to eat dinner together ever.
Just to be around and do like normal things.
Come summer, Jordan and Garrett are probably going to need help in a whole new way, because Jordan is pregnant with their first child.
She's due July 2nd.
As luck would have it, the Red Sox have an away game scheduled for that evening.
But they'll figure it out.
I've had to kind of learn.
It doesn't matter what apartment or what city I live in as long as I'm with Garrett.
It doesn't matter what we're going to do tomorrow or that we can't plan a vacation because we don't know our schedule for the next year.
As long as I have him because that's what's most important is just being able to be with him and being able to be together.
Stay tuned for part two of our series on the lives of pro athletes and their partners.
Next, we'll talk to Shannon Allen, the wife of former NBA star Ray Allen.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe and PRX.
Today's episode was produced by Jesse Remedios and Scott Hellman.
Ned Porter does our audio mixing, sound design and mastering.
Jordan's interview was recorded by Jared Gonzalez.
Maddie Martell does our audience engagement.
Special thanks to Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send a letter about your problems to loveletters at boston.com.
We're online at loveletters.show.
Did you say PlayStation?
Do you play games together?
We do.
I got sucked in.
What do you play?
We play a lot of Call of Duty together.
I also play the Hogwarts Legacy.
The long distance is nice because we can game together as a date night even though we're not together.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
