Bengals TE Drew Sample, wife Ang trying to get family out of Ukraine
Cincinnati Bengals tight end Drew Sample and his wife, Ang, are trying to get their extended family out of Ukraine after Russia invaded last month.
That effort, they said on Fox News on Monday morning, has been tough.
“I call [my family] up on the phone, and they answer it. They’re sitting in the dark in the basement,” Ang said. “I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’”
Ang was born in Ukraine, but moved to the United States and then married Sample while they were in college at Washington. She still has a lot of family living in Ukraine, including grandparents, her aunt, cousins and more.
The biggest priority, they said, is to help get her grandmother out of the country. She currently lives in a rural village, per the report, without any electricity — which has become even more dangerous with freezing cold temperatures in recent days.
“The conditions are pretty miserable for a 76-year-old woman to be hiding in a basement at her age,” Ang said. “It’s just dangerous for her to even get in and out, but to be in her house is even more dangerous with air raid sirens going off.”
Sample had 11 receptions for 81 yards last season, his third with the Bengals after they selected him with the No. 52 overall pick in 2019. The 25-year-old has one year left on his initial four-year, $5.5 million deal with Cincinnati.
Now, nearly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Sample said they are trying to make a plan to get their family out of the country safely. How they do that, though, isn’t clear yet. Ang also said their family is hesitant to cross the border into a neighboring country, as they don’t know what they would do after that point.
“For us, it’s just been hard because there’s really no good answers. The Ukrainians are proud people, and so for her family without any concrete plan of what’s going to happen when they leave the country, they really don’t want to leave,” Sample said.
“We’re really their only other family, in the United States. Even if they flee to these other countries bordering Ukraine, they’re really not leaving to anything better … We’ve just been trying to see if there’s anything we can do to set up a plan where we can get them to us so they feel comfortable leaving, because it’s obviously dangerous for them. Really the unknown there, at least being at home is, for them right now, is better than the unknown in a different country where they don’t know anybody.”
