She would never retreat to the bedroom to sleep. Instead, she lay on the living room couch, waiting for her husband to come home from work to share his joys or express his frustrations.
It could be midnight before he gets in the door and the kids would be up at 6 a.m. But Nicole Hazen would always try to stay awake for her husband Mike, the general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
• World Series Game 3 presented by Capital One: Tonight, 8:00 p.m. ET/5 MST on FOX (Pregame 7 ET)
“She would be…” says Hazen with watery eyes, “when we won, she was just always so happy for me.”
The story of the grieving baseball executive whose spirits were lifted by his club’s rousing postseason – just 14 months after he lost his beautiful wife of 45 years to an aggressive form of brain cancer – is a powerful subplot in this World The Series between The D-Backs and the Rangers are tied at 1-1 heading into Game 3 on Monday night at Chase Field.
These images of Mike Hazen, 47, pacing his suite, engrossed in every note, mean something more when you know what he’s been through and what he’s going through while raising four teenage sons, theirs miss mother. The celebration at every step, soaked in sweat and champagne and in the arms of the close friends with whom he worked for so long, is sweeter when you have suffered as much as Mike Hazen.
But that is only half the truth.
The other half is the story of Nicole, whose passion for this game and this team transcends the usual baseball bride boundaries. She was absorbed in her husband’s work, analyzing ball games, obsessing over every outcome, and sometimes even criticizing his transactions.
“Her love for the D-Backs,” says manager Torey Lovullo, “was real, it was fierce, it was everything.”
Baseball fans watching this World Series should know Nicole’s story and feel her presence. Because the D-Backs – this young, fun, fierce and surprising team – aren’t just trying to win a championship for their heartbroken boss.
They’re trying to win it over for their biggest fan.
The Ferrara family had the best seats in the worst house.
Old Cleveland Municipal Stadium on the shores of Lake Erie was, to be honest, a dump. It had seen better days and better teams than the ones the Indians fielded in the 1980s.
But Rick and Phylis Ferrara and their children — daughter Nicole and son Ricky — were die-hard fans with season tickets in the front row of a section between home plate and first base. And Rick, who died in 2019, had a rule that the family strictly followed.
“We never left an Indians game until it was over,” Phylis says. “Even if they lost badly.”
Being a loyal sports fan was just one of the values instilled in Nicole Marie Ferrara. Born January 4, 1977, she grew up on the east side of Cleveland, attended Gilmour Academy High School, earned her bachelor’s degree in English and teaching certificate from John Carroll University, and earned her master’s degree in special education from Notre Dame College of Ohio. Her first job was as a seventh grade English teacher at Kenston Middle School.
She made many friends along the way.
“You wouldn’t be able to figure out who her friend might be because she liked everyone,” says Phylis. “She kept all her friends away from elementary school, high school and college. She had friends from all walks of life. She was just the kind of person everyone liked.”
Of course there are similar things, and then there are similar things. And Nicole didn’t like the guy she was supposed to go to the Cleveland Orchestra with on the evening of January 19, 2002.
Nicole called her mother and asked if it would be sensible and respectful to cancel the date, even though she knew the relationship would ultimately go nowhere.
“I think it’s okay,” Phylis said, “as long as you talk to him, let him know nicely.”
So the poor guy with his parents’ orchestra season tickets was cut off by the conductor. Instead, Nicole organized an evening with her friend. They went to a bar called the Winking Lizard Tavern in Cleveland Heights.
About a football field’s length away was the apartment of two boys from Boston who, yes, were watching football. And in a major football faux pas, they had run out of beer.
Hazen, then a young scout for the Cleveland Indians, attended his beloved Patriots’ matchup with the Raiders in the AFC Divisional Playoff matchup that later became known as the “Tuck Rule Game.” Mike and his roommate, a Boston native, watched in agony as Tom Brady fumbled the ball on a late drive, then were ecstatic when referee Walt Coleman overturned the decision because of the relatively new “tuck rule.” The Pats retained possession, tied the game with a last-minute field goal and won it in overtime.
As they ran screaming through their apartment, Hazen and his roommate realized they had already drunk all of their alcohol.
“We have to get out!” one of them shouted.
So they went out. To the winking lizard.
Fate winked at Mike and Nicole that night.
“I thank Walt Coleman every day,” says Mike.
The two started talking and quickly realized that they were both hungry. There was a place just up the street called Panini’s that served huge sandwiches with fries and coleslaw at odd hours. An unhealthy start to a healthy relationship.
They shared a sandwich and shared their lives from that moment on.
“Mom,” Nicole said to Phylis on the phone the next morning, “you won’t believe this, but I met a really nice guy!”
“Mom,” Mike said on the phone that same day to his mother Lois, a longtime educator, “I met this girl and you’re really going to like her. She’s a teacher!”
Lois thinks now and laughs at how hard her son fell.
“It was instantaneous,” she says.
Mike says: “We just connected on so many different levels. We just had so much in common and the values we shared.”
In Nicole, Mike found a young woman who loved her family more than anything, who wanted to be a mother more than anything, and who not only tolerated his all-consuming relationship with sports, but was as ardent a fan as he was. They became engaged within a year and a half, married a year later, and had their first son, Charlie, a year later.
Life can go fast when you know what you want.
Mike’s career also progressed quickly.
Hazen, a rising star in the world of baseball operations, was hired by the Red Sox in February 2006 as director of player development. He brought his young family to his hometown. They packed a lot of life into that float, but Nicole left her lifelong Indians fan base and all those games at Municipal Stadium in the rearview mirror.
She was on her way to Boston.
When the Red Sox faced Cleveland in the 2007 American League Championship Series, there was no conflict of interest for Mike’s Cleveland-born bride. The Sox defeated the Indians in seven games and Nicole was happy about the win.
“I’m telling you, man,” Mike says, “she had to ride or die. The Indians were outside!”
That was Nicole’s way. Passionately devoted to a loved one. And adaptable to the happy, but sometimes ridiculous, lifestyle that comes with a 162-game career in the sport.
It can be a lonely life when your spouse works nights, travels often, and is emotionally and financially invested in a highly competitive business. But not for Nicole. She quickly made friends in Boston, where the Hazens spent 11 seasons and had three more sons – John, Teddy and Sam, all born about a year and a half apart.
“She would have had ten children,” says Phylis. “When she was pregnant with Sam, we were actually having dinner and she was talking about having her fifth child. She hadn’t even had the fourth one yet!”
Nicole loved these children more than anything, organizing everything, juggling their schedules and theirs. Every meal was a home cooked meal. The Hazens didn’t eat out.
“I have other daughters with four children,” says Lois, “and they were always amazed that she never complained and never said, ‘I’m here alone and I’m going to round up these boys and take their places.’ I don’t want to take anything away from what Michael did. He is also a great father. But the majority of it fell on Nicole’s shoulders, and she was just great at the job.”
She would have contributed to this job if Mike hadn’t talked some sense into her. One day they were sitting on the couch in the living room. Mike had an appointment for a vasectomy.
Nicole began to sob.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” she said.
Mike laughs as he tells the story now, because the four little boys were all upstairs, shaking a crib, banging things and making noise in the family’s old house with thin walls and floors.
“Listen to them up there!” pleaded the exhausted father. “We have to do this! We can’t have five kids!”
Great moms don’t give up easily, but Nicole ultimately admitted that an infield of Hazen boys was enough.
“But that’s exactly what she was,” says Mike. “She loved being a mother more than anything in the world. And I love that I come from a big family, so I really love that too. And I don’t know…that’s just been our whole life. It was baseball, and it was our kids. That’s what we did.”
The Hazens have put down real roots in New England. But Mike was such an important factor in the Boston ballclub’s success that the baseball industry took notice. When he was offered the opportunity to become executive vice president and general manager of the D-Backs in the fall of 2016, he was excited… but a little embarrassed.
“So,” he said to Nicole, “are we moving to Arizona?”
Nicole wasn’t embarrassed at all.
“Hell yeah, we’re moving to Arizona!”
They moved to Arizona.
This time they had four adolescent boys with them and no family ties to lean on. It does not matter. Nicole rebuilt everything, making loyal friends with mothers at school and wives at work—especially Lovullo’s wife, Kristen—and becoming an instant favorite of Chase Field’s employees.
“She was critically important to us,” team president and CEO Derrick Hall wrote in an email. “She never missed a field and was involved with our manager, our assistant general managers and our players’ families. While Mike sometimes became grumpy and tense during one season, Nicole provided a smile and a positive attitude. She wanted to win more than anyone, but wanted to keep everything in mind for her family.”
As she did as a child in Cleveland and after a transplant to Boston, Nicole threw herself into the team in her “hometown.”
Like any fan, she had her favorites — notably Paul Goldschmidt, David Peralta, AJ Pollock, Jeff Mathis from the 2017 team that won the NL Wild Card Game and Merrill Kelly from the current club. And while she fully supported her husband, it’s safe to assume there were times when the loyal D-Backs fan revved him up and made him feel like he was in his own home on a sports talk radio show to be.
Never more so than when Mike Goldschmidt was traded to the Cardinals before the 2019 season.
“What are you doing?” Nicole asked Mike incredulously.
Mike began trying to explain the trade from the front office perspective.
Then it hit him.
“You don’t care why I did that!” he said, laughing. “You’re just mad at me for trading Goldy!”
There’s this beautiful photo of Nicole from the 2017 postseason. She’s standing in the stands at Chase Field among the faithful, waving a Sedona red rally towel and a D-back t-shirt with a loving cartoon depiction of her face and his name of her husband. She is radiant, full of life.
It’s a perfect representation of Nicole. Avid fan. Devoted wife. Beautiful, radiant soul.
This is where it becomes difficult to tell and read the story.
On May 2, 2020, just as our lives were being turned upside down and most work was being done remotely, Mike was on the phone in his backyard and spoke with Ken Crenshaw, the D-Backs’ director of medical services. It was the middle of the day and Mike had no idea why Nicole suddenly came towards him with a strangely distorted face. She was making strange noises.
“Was she bitten by a scorpion or something?” was his first thought.
As Nicole approached, Mike’s concern grew. He put Crenshaw on FaceTime to show him Nicole’s face.
“Put the phone down and call 911,” Crenshaw said.
An ambulance arrived. Nicole was placed on a stretcher and taken to the emergency room. At first, doctors thought she might have suffered a stroke. But when they did a CT scan, they saw the spots on her brain.
For more than a month, Nicole underwent a series of tests to find out how bad her condition was and why she was suddenly having seizures. The spots were in a particularly sensitive area on the left side of her brain, so her doctors were hesitant to perform a biopsy. Ultimately, however, it was necessary and it confirmed that Nicole had glioblastoma – a complex, fatal, rapidly developing and treatment-resistant brain tumor.
There is no cure for glioblastoma. Treatments include surgical removal, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and various clinical trials. According to the National Brain Tumor Society, the average survival time for glioblastoma patients is only eight months and the five-year survival rate is only 6.9%.
In Nicole’s case, she appeared to be in good shape after a craniotomy to remove as much tumor as possible, followed by six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation. But her condition worsened several times in 2021, requiring two more craniotomies and three different drug therapies. By October 2021, the risk of further surgery was too great and over the next ten months, Nicole’s body betrayed her. She lost the use of her hands, then she stopped walking, then she stopped talking, then she stopped swallowing.
She passed away on August 4, 2022, shortly after she and Mike celebrated their 18th wedding anniversary. It was a devastating loss not only for her family, but for the entire D-Backs family.
In this moment, however, we focus not on the cancer that took Nicole’s life, but on the courage she showed in her unwinnable battle.
“She was amazing,” Lois says. “She was the bravest and most positive person I have ever met. She never complained. Never. She taught me how I would behave if I were ever sick.”
When Hall’s wife, Amy, was delivering food to the Hazen house one day, Nicole, who couldn’t speak, opened the door, hugged Amy tightly and sobbed. Then she wiped her cheeks, stepped back and smiled.
That is courage.
“She didn’t have to say anything,” Hall writes.
The community rallied around the Hazen family. So many people said what so many people say in these terrible situations: “If there’s anything I can do to help…”
At some point during the D-Backs’ brutal 2021 110-loss season, a player gave Mike that exact message to pass on to Nicole. Mike knew she wouldn’t accept the player’s offer in any way, but to be nice, he brought it up with her one day while helping her get dressed.
“Hey,” Mike said, “[Anonymous D-back] asked if there was anything he could do.”
“Do you know what he can do?” said Nicole. “[Expletive] Play better!”
If Nicole had only one complaint during her struggle, it was that she was unable to fulfill her duties as an eighth-grade English teacher at St. Francis Xavier Elementary School at a level that met her satisfaction. Especially since the school was still in distance learning at the time of her diagnosis.
After her second craniotomy, Nicole developed severe apraxia of speech. She would stutter and have difficulty finding her words. And sometimes, at the end of a study session with her students, she would turn off her computer screen and start sobbing.
Mike would try to intervene.
“Listen, I have no idea what you’re going through, how fucked up this is,” he said to her one day. “But you’re teaching these eighth graders empathy. I know you’re trying to teach them English literature and it’s not going the way you want, but think about what they see you trying to do for them. They are 8th graders and probably have no understanding whatsoever. But maybe one day they will.”
You will be.
And as painful and scary as it is for her own children to be without their mother, they too will always appreciate everything she has done for them.
“I love my children more than the world,” says Mike. “She loved my children even more.”
A particularly difficult moment in the two years Nicole battled glioblastoma was when she and Mike went for a walk in their neighborhood. The subject of grandchildren – the grandchildren Nicole will never meet – came up. She stopped in the street and sobbed hard as Mike held her in his arms.
It’s a painful memory, but one Mike will always share with his sons.
“That’s how much she loved you,” he tells them. “She wanted to be with you until it was time to be gone. She wanted a ride.”
Nicole’s journey ended long before her destination. She fought so hard. She tried so hard to stay until the end of the game. But it’s a nagging fact of life that sometimes the brightest bulbs burn out prematurely.
“She was an incredible person,” Mike says. “She was an angel. I know people say that about their loved ones. But that’s exactly what she was. There was no one who didn’t like her. I had never met anyone in my entire life, 20 years, that she and I both knew didn’t like her. She was such a connection between people.”
It’s a testament to Nicole’s influence when the Hazens, with help from the D-Backs, launched the Nicole Hazen Fund for Hope – a charity that gives more patients with aggressive brain tumors access to rapid, state-of-the-art care – art treatment and compassionate support – the Donations poured in. Mike says the fund has raised more than $2 million for the cause so far.
“That was one of the things we talked about during our two-year journey with it,” Mike says. “We want to try to find solutions that doctors can offer their patients so that they don’t get a terminal diagnosis.”
In the visitors’ dugout at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Mike tells his wife’s story. It’s just a few hours until Game 1 of the World Series when the field is full of ballplayers taking batting practice and members of the media conducting interviews. Before the stands fill with hopeful fans and bring the noise to baseball’s biggest stage.
At the height of the career he’s worked for his entire life, Mike introduces himself to a reporter.
“One thing she said was that she never wanted to be forgotten,” Mike says. “And I know why she didn’t want to be forgotten. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be publicly forgotten. She didn’t want to miss the ride we were taking.”
Mike agreed to cut open the vein and tell his wife’s story in such detail because he knew she should be at this World Series. And when he bares his soul in the dugout, there is no doubt that it is her.
She’s also in the stands. She’s with Charlie and John and Teddy and Sam. She is with Phylis and Lois and the other family members who attend every game of this World Series run.
“She orchestrated this for Mike,” says Phylis, “and for all the people who helped her, because the whole community cared about her.” All these people who this means so much to, I think she’s behind it .”
It’s loud in the stands at these games. The roar can be overwhelming. But even in some of the most intense moments, Phylis swears she heard her daughter in her ear telling her to sit down and relax. She can hear them laughing.
Maybe Phylis is right. Maybe Nicole has that.
In Game 1 at Globe Life, the D-Backs suffered one of the worst late-inning gut punches in World Series history, giving up a game-winning home run to Corey Seager and a walk-off blast from Adolis García in the bottom of the ninth in the bottom of the 11th. But they immediately bounced back the next night, getting seven great innings from Merrill Kelly.
Nicole’s favorite player.
Near the end of his wife’s life, Mike came home from work one day to find Nicole lying on the couch, as was often the case in their marriage. The cancer was about to claim her. She could barely move and she couldn’t speak.
“Did you see the game today?” Mike asked, already knowing the answer.
Of course she had seen the game. It was a game in which Kelly had dominated his opponent, a day in which the D-Backs were victorious.
Nicole nodded.
“How about your boy Kelly?” Mike said excitedly.
And Nicole smiled.