The New York Times Sports department is revisiting the subjects of some compelling articles from the last year or so. Here is our November 2018 report on a college football player’s battle with depression.
His smile was back, but now it had a 14-karat flash.
As he sat across from me at a Los Angeles taco stand, I could sense an optimistic lightness to Isaiah Woods, the college football player whose battle with mental illness I wrote about last year.
“I feel great,” he said. “I feel like I have a whole new life — and it’s one I really like.”
When I first met Isaiah, in early 2018, I noticed how naturally upbeat, open and optimistic he was. But then, as I got to know him, I watched as he grew downcast. His face became a sullen mask. Now, during our taco lunch two weeks ago, I saw with relief that his lighthearted grin was back.
And he had given it a flourish.
To highlight his happiness, he had two tiny letters implanted in a front tooth — LA — just like the Dodgers’ insignia. L.A., the city where he’d been raised, the city that is once again his home.
The letters were 14-karat gold.
Isaiah’s story, in The Times on Nov. 15, 2018, told about his nearly fatal battle against anxiety and hopelessness. His affliction peaked in 2015, while he was a freshman receiver for the University of Washington. He had shown great potential. Coaches said he could become a star. Secretly, though, he was hitting the lowest of lows.
Isaiah attempted suicide twice. He was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, and he left the Huskies during the next spring practice.
He tried to come back two years later. When I began reporting his story, he was about to start playing for Portland State, a smaller school with lower expectations and less pressure. He wanted to perform at a high level. He dreamed of doing well enough to capture the attention of N.F.L. scouts looking for someone tall and powerfully built whom they could count on to catch even the trickiest of passes.
Isaiah made it all the way through his first year in Portland, but it wasn’t easy. He rarely played, and he didn’t like being a second-stringer far from the bright lights he’d grown used to at a national power like Washington. “Nothing ever really felt right,” he said as we sat on tall stools at a Trejo’s Tacos, a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles.
Portland State Coach Bruce Barnum had planned for Isaiah to be a big contributor this season. But as spring practice began, Isaiah struggled once more. Getting out of bed became harder and harder. “I started to feel sort of like I did at Washington,” he said. “It was some of the dark feelings again.
“I knew it was time for me to leave. I caught myself before it really got bad this time. Caught it way quicker than in Seattle because this time I knew more. I knew the signs.”
“I love playing the game of football,” he continued, “but not the other stuff that goes with it. I stress myself out way too much.”
Isaiah had always prided himself on being a free spirit. He dabbled in art. He loved fashion and design. Unlike many other college athletes, he didn’t like wearing anything on campus that would identify him as part of a sports team.
He also tended to chafe at stern authority, at coaches he felt were too strict, too gruff, too much like drill sergeants.
“The culture of football just isn’t for me,” he said. “When you play football in college, you are not supposed to do anything else, not supposed to have a life that is interesting. Just lift weights, work out and play.
“You’re only a football player, and it’s not expected that you would really be anything more. I hated that mind-set, not being an individual, not being able to be yourself.”
In April, he left Portland State. Mike Lund, the college’s athletic department spokesman, said in a telephone interview this month that it seemed Isaiah had lost his passion for the game.
Isaiah said he and his girlfriend, Madison Bickel, who had stood by him during his troubles, decided to split up, though they remain friends.
Despite the tumult, Isaiah, now 22, said he felt better than ever.
And as creative as ever.
He works at a Nordstrom department store near Beverly Hills, where he sells the latest in designer fashions. He said he no longer dreamed about the N.F.L., instead imagining a career in design — or maybe as a Hollywood art director, “shooting cool videos and all that.”
The Times article opened a new world to him. It is still rare to read about a young African-American athlete struggling so openly with mental illness. Readers, he said, responded with deep appreciation. Dozens of them, he said, told him that he had helped them understand depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide.
He has been invited to speak publicly about easing the stigma of mental illness, particularly for young people and people of color, and did so most recently in September at a Barclays Center conference for youth activists.
He knew that his dark feelings might return and that he had to be vigilant — aware of his moods, and ready to get help if he needed it. But speaking publicly, he said, was good medicine.
“It really helps to feel like the story of my journey has been helpful to people going through some of the same things,” he said. “The kinds of issues I’ve faced are never anything someone should be ashamed of.
“I want to be part of that change.”
