Hannah Erker has a story to tell about football and the man she loved
By a cloudy Wednesday morning four Januaries ago, the fight from a few days earlier still hadn’t been explained, but it had been forgiven.
The man screaming in the bedroom, that wasn’t Andrew Erker. The scary look, that had never been Andrew’s.
This was Andrew — every day he would wake up to make Hannah coffee before she left for work as a nurse. Every day, he told her the same thing:
Whatever you do today, be a good person.
Then he’d squeeze her tight, and lift her off the ground.
I love you.
He called it their bear hug. He kissed her. Said goodbye. They’d been married less than a year when he said that word for the last time.
Hannah had an awful feeling all day at the hospital. Andrew always checked in with a text. Something nice. Curious. Thoughtful. Not this day. So she called on her lunch break. The phone just rang. She texted. Nothing. She felt worse. This wasn’t like him, and after that fight from a few days earlier, she didn’t know what to think.
She left work and called her parents on the way home. She was scared. That feeling doesn’t leave, even all these years later, and it only worsened when she got home and saw his car.
She opened the door and called for him. Silence. Ran around the house. Nothing. Went to the basement.
And there was her worst nightmare. Her love, her husband, her man. Dead by suicide.
“All of my memories that I have with him are so good,” Hannah said. “I cherish them so much. They make me smile. They make me happy. Especially now, I can look back and just appreciate what I had. But of course there are some horrible memories from his passing, too, that are always so difficult.”
Hannah Erker is telling her story publicly for the first time. Doctors at the Brain Bank in Boston diagnosed Andrew with stage 3 (out of 4) CTE, among the worst and youngest cases they’d seen in hundreds of studies. They compared his brain and the traumatic injury it had endured to that of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez.
Hannah is not here to stop football from being played. She’s here to give some of us — parents, especially — something to think about. Football often comes at a cost. Andrew started playing tackle football at 7 and didn’t stop. He played at St. Thomas Aquinas High School, then as a defensive back and special teams player at Kansas State.
He didn’t talk much about any of that. When he did, he’d tell Hannah that football made him stupid. That he took too many hits to the head. He always sounded like he was joking. That’s what everyone thought.
Hannah misses Andrew. And she thinks about who might be next.
‘He’s very special’
Andrew Erker was kind. Hannah uses that word over and over and over again to describe her late husband. She knew it right away. Felt it immediately when they met one night at Kelly’s, the pub in Westport.
They saw each other from across the bar. He approached, asked if she wanted a drink. She got a beer and they started talking. She does not remember everything they talked about. But she’ll never forget what she felt.
“I just remember thinking, ‘He’s very special,’” she said. “That there’s just something about him that I wanted to continue to talk to him about. To get to know him. I just had this gut feeling that it was going to be something more than a conversation at a bar.”
Andrew asked for her number. He called the next day, and they hung out that night. They talked every day after. She told her friends she was falling in love. It all happened so fast, first with him driving in from Lincoln every other weekend, then her driving up north when he stayed home.
Within a few months, he told her that he loved her and wanted to make a family with her. He moved to Kansas City a year after they met, proposed a few months later, and they were married 10 months after that.
Andrew was about other people. He was smart and athletic and funny but never talked much about himself. Conversations went outward, not inward. He loved being outside. Loved wildlife and fishing and hunting and the feeling of being disconnected to everything except the moment.
She knew he played football, but not because he bragged about it. He walked on at K-State and impressed the coaches there so much that he started as a freshman — a classic undersized, high-effort defensive back and special teams player. That’s a hard existence.
He was never diagnosed with a concussion but talked of several times a collision left him unable to remember the rest of a game. Teammates would physically put him in the right spots before snaps of the ball.
He had good memories, too. His teammates. The friendships. He loved those parts. Loved most everything except the games, actually.
Andrew was not one to focus on the negative, so he kept most of that inside. He was good at everything, and after his death Hannah and Andrew’s best friend joked that he was even good at having CTE, because through what proved to be unbearable suffering he stayed positive and focused on those he loved.
Inside, he must have known what was happening. Outside, he kept caring about other people.
Toward the end, he’d forget stuff. Nothing extreme, but things that a 30-year-old shouldn’t forget — Friday night plans, for instance. And his temper grew. His fuse diminished. Hannah remembers some road rage. The pieces fall in place in hindsight, but that’s hindsight.
There’s really only one moment that scared her.
They had an argument. Nothing major. Hannah doesn’t even remember what it was about. What she remembers is Andrew in her face, with an anger she did not recognize. Something about the way he looked at her was scary.
“I didn’t think he was going to touch me or hit me in any way,” she said. “But his anger really just overtook him.”
She told him they needed to stop fighting. She didn’t know why the argument escalated. Let’s take some time, she said. Andrew went downstairs, and some while later Hannah saw him in the living room, alone and in silence.
“I could tell in his face he had no idea what happened, no idea what overtook him,” she said. “He apologized. He said to me, ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what just happened.’ In the moment, I was frustrated. Of course, I didn’t know what was happening.”
He died a few days later.
A deliberate message
Hannah wants to help. She’s telling Andrew’s story publicly for the first time through the Concussion Legacy Foundation. She’s sure Andrew never would have played tackle football so young if he’d known the potential consequences.
Our general understanding of CTE has grown tremendously in recent years, but there is still so much we don’t know about this insidious disease. The critical mass of worry best marked by “Concussion,” the 2015 movie starring Will Smith, has generally subsided. High school coaches are more educated. College football has changed some of its rules. The NFL has, too.
But the problem has not gone away. Concussions are back to being an injury designation.
Maybe that’s fine for professionals, but Hannah is not talking to professionals.
“I want people to not put their children in tackle football under the age of 14,” she said. “I want people to educate themselves on CTE. If you’re an adult and playing football and you know what can happen, then that’s your choice.
“I don’t think football is ever going away, and I’m not trying to make it go away. I’m just trying to educate people and parents and players on what could happen if they do play.”
That’s a deliberate message, and it’s one backed by research and shared in a PSA with Brett Favre. Younger kids have not fully developed the fatty sheaths that protect brain cells. Their heads tend to be larger relative to their bodies, with weaker neck muscles that otherwise might help absorb impact. CTE risk more than doubles after three years of playing tackle football.
Football is a terrific sport. But doctors are increasingly advising that kids play flag football and not tackle football until they reach high school. That’s still plenty of time for those memories and lessons to be gathered and imparted.
Hannah still watches games. The Chiefs are impossible to ignore here in Kansas City, and her weekends often include watching the game with friends. That took some time, if she’s honest. A few years back, she left her friends in the stands and cried in the car until the game was over. She wasn’t ready for the violence ... and the reminders of what that violence did to Andrew.
She’s in a better place now. She enjoys the social part of games and the energy of the city that surrounds them. But her experience gives her pause. She can’t help but think of what the sport did to Andrew, and what life would be like if he’d never played, or waited until he was older to start playing.
That’s why she’s talking now. She doesn’t want anyone else to have those same questions.
This story was originally published October 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM.