Sam Jacobs was just a teenager when tragedy struck for the first time. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last.
In December, 2004, close family friend and fellow Ardrossan lad Nick Peterson, 18, was riding a surf board behind a boat when he was taken by two sharks off Adelaide’s West Beach.
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His death created national headlines, sparked an overhaul of shark surveillance in Adelaide and rocked the small Yorke Peninsula town where Jacobs and Peterson grew up.
The Jacobs and Peterson families were close. They used to holiday together.
And so Nick’s death, and its extremely public nature, hit the 16-year-old aspiring young footy star hard.
“That was my first exposure to death and it was a really challenging time,” he says.
“It’s just about being there for your mates and being there for your family. Clearly we were all hurting.”
Jacobs, who went on to play 208 AFL games for Carlton, the Adelaide Crows and Greater Western Sydney, has opened up publicly for the first time about how he has coped with a litany of tragedies that have shaped his identity.
He’s now 38, a father of three young daughters – Imogen, 7, Alba, 5, and Willow, 3 – and coaching top-of-the-ladder Woodville West Torrens in the SANFL. He sat down with Mark Soderstrom on The Soda Room podcast to tell his story and help promote the Eagles’ blockbuster home game against Glenelg on Saturday, where the clubs will raise awareness about mental health and wellbeing.
He also wants to explain why he returned to play a game of country footy for his old club Ardrossan on Anzac Day, what he has learned from more than 20 years in the football industry and how he has overcome the death of six significant figures in his life.
Jacobs was a rookie-listed 19-year-old at Carlton and preparing for a pre-season exhibition game against Fremantle in South Africa in 2008 when tragedy struck for the second time.
He woke to a message from home saying another good mate from that close group of families in Ardrossan, Matt Black, had died.
“The circumstances I won’t go into too much, but once again, (it was) another tragic time for us as a community,” he says.
“Here I am on the other side of the world trying to play a game in 12 hours’ time.
“Matt’s sister was in my class. So just in my year 12 class I had two friends, one male, one female, who both lost their brothers in tragic circumstances. It was obviously a pretty challenging time.”
Jacobs, who grew up with the nickname “Fritz” but is now known almost universally as “Sauce”, debuted for the Blues in front of 87,000 people at the MCG the following year but moved back to Adelaide in 2011 where he established himself as one of the best ruckmen in the AFL.
But tragedy continued to haunt him when assistant coach Dean Bailey succumbed to cancer in 2014 and then senior coach Phil Walsh was killed in July, 2015.
He celebrated one of the happiest days of his life when he married fiancée Izzy on New Year’s Eve 2016, but their world was up-ended only a couple of months later when Izzy’s father Mark died, also of cancer, in February.
And then, on the eve of the 2017 finals series and after the Crows had finished minor premiers, Jacobs’ brother Aaron, two years his senior, died from illness.
“You do sit there and wonder ‘why me’ and ‘why does this happen’ and all that sort of stuff,” he says.
“For anyone that’s been involved in footy, your tentacles do stretch far and wide, so sometimes I think that plays a part, but it’s something which, until my time’s up, it probably won’t ever make sense.
“It’s not that I’m here to say ‘poor me’ – it’s just part of my journey and I think that’s one of the big things I’ve learnt is your journey and your time in life – it is what it is.
“It’s a big part of my life and it is a big of who I am and I’d like to think the reason why I am who I am is because I’ve managed these situations.”
Jacobs says the ability to compartmentalise that helped him juggle his football commitments at times of grief was especially relevant when Aaron, 31, died just nine days before he helped the Crows to a dominant qualifying final win against GWS.
The three-time all-Australian squad member says his thoughts and best wishes went out to current Crows captain Jordan Dawson, who has missed two of the past three games after the body of his elder brother Jaryd was found near their home in Robe.
“My situation, coming to a final, I think was potentially a little bit different,” he says.
“It was another opportunity to hopefully win a premiership, so I wasn’t passing this up for anything.
“While there was a part of me that wanted to do it for Aaron, it wasn’t my sole reason. I needed to do for myself as much as anyone else.
“I was really clear I was playing, so then it was about, ‘all right, well then how do I then structure my week to manage this grief, but also perform’.”
Perform he did. As he did again two weeks later, when the Crows stormed into the grand final via a 55-point preliminary final thrashing against Geelong. They lost the season finale to Richmond by 48 points at the MCG but Jacobs says the finals series gave his family a purpose and something to get excited about during their time of mourning.
“When the time was right, I was gonna grieve properly, but I just managed it as I went and found a way,” he says.
The tears started flowing after the final siren on grand final day and an image of Izzy comforting a distraught Jacobs in the changerooms dominated the front page of the next day’s Sunday Mail.
Despite that grand final heartache and his immediate emotional response, he looks back on that game with overwhelming positivity.
“Being the footy head I am, I loved every minute of it, even the loss,” he says. “Yeah, it sucks we lost and of course I would rather win, but I’ve played in a grand final against a Richmond footy club who’ve become a dynasty.
“I’ve played in front of 100,000 in a grand final… performed in a grand final. I’m pretty lucky.
“Footy’s a big part of my life, absolutely, but you can’t let your happiness be dictated to by a game of footy. I get sad when we lose. I get happy when we win. But I like to think that I’m a pretty resilient person and I can move on pretty quickly.”
Jacobs says he sought professional help to guide him through the toughest of times and concentrates on surrounding himself with the “right people” – both in times of grief and general life.
That’s one of the messages he attempts to instil to his players at the Eagles, and why he does whatever he can to get back and help his struggling hometown footy club Ardrossan.
The 202cm redhead retired from AFL after seven games with GWS in 2020, coached the Yorke Peninsula Football League’s Kangaroos in 2021 but ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament in the final game of the season.
He coached the Crows’ SANFL side in 2022 and then became playing-coach at Flagstaff Hill, leading the Falcons to a Southern Football League premiership in 2023 before assuming the role of Eagles coach in the SANFL the following year.
He has always maintained close ties with Ardrossan, which has been unable to field a B Grade team this season and lost its first three games by 218 points, 105 points and 156 points respectively.
He played two games for the Roos in 2024 and when the Eagles were scheduled to play a Friday night SANFL game last month, he drove to his home town the following day to pull on the blue and white guernsey once again.
“I guess in my position with my job (at the Eagles) I need to make sure that I didn’t put myself in situations where I could get hurt,” he says about the latest game, in which he played as a permanent forward and didn’t move outside of the 50m arc.
“It was more about just being in the 50, being there to help some young guys coming through… create a contest, kick a couple of goals.”
Jacobs says he grew up playing football and cricket on the Ardrossan oval and the town (population 1200) threw its support around him and his family when Aaron died.
“Success at Ardrossan isn’t just about premierships – it’s having a club for the community,” he says.