Success and heartbreak arrived almost side by side for ESPN’s Laura Rutledge. The former Miss Florida, who married baseball player Josh Rutledge in 2013, initially just wanted to be a “baseball wife” before ultimately deciding to pursue sports media herself. She started from the very bottom and climbed her way to the top, only for tragedy to strike in a way she admits she still has not fully processed.

Laura’s ESPN journey began with a limited 12-event deal in 2014. Fast forward to 2017, and she became the host of SEC Nation, a role she continued in the following year as well. But during one of her broadcasts in 2018, she learned that her brother Alex had gone missing, and instead of leaving the show, she chose to remain professional and continue working.

“When it happened, I was at work covering an event, and I kept going,” Laura said on the Pivot podcast with former NFL Star Ryan Clark. “I found out that he was missing and went back to do a SportsCenter hit a few minutes later. And I can’t believe I did that. I should have left, but I didn’t know what else to do. My family was like, “No, you need to stay. We’re going to figure out what’s going on.’ But now I regret that a lot.

It was not an easy decision to make either. At the time, Alex had only been reported missing during a cave diving trip, and Laura’s family told her they would handle the situation while they tried to figure out what had happened. The devastating news of his passing only came later.

“I should have been like, ‘Hey, I have to leave. Like, I have this horrible tragedy happening, and I didn’t know how to tell anybody. It’s just wild to think about. I don’t think I really have let myself grieve. I just kept going cuz I was like, ‘I don’t know anything else.’ I don’t know how else to be, even when it happened.”

Alex and Laura shared a close bond. Despite her rise to national fame, it was her brother who kept her grounded and connected to her roots.

After his death, it felt like her world came crashing down. Even through that immense grief, Laura kept her emotions bottled up and rarely allowed herself to fully let it out.

“We’re still, you guys know, like dealing with grief, it’s like it morphs into so many versions of itself,” she said. ” I think, just as a family, we kept things very private. And that was kind of my choice. I felt like I can’t, you know, I can’t talk about him without breaking down, and that was always. That’s always going to be the case. But I felt as if I could hold it together; that would be good for my family.”

When Laura was 9 years old, her parents relocated the family from a four-bedroom home in Atlanta to a modest two-bedroom cottage in Walton County, Florida. While all the siblings previously had separate rooms, Laura now slept on the top bunk bed while her two younger brothers, Dave and Alex, shared the bottom. Growing up in that close environment helped Laura build a deep bond with her brothers, especially Alex.

“It really was the best time of my life,” Laura said about her Florida home.

Laura Rutledge gave Alex a lasting tribute through her children

Laura Rutledge is happily married to Josh, and the couple has two children. Their daughter, Reese, was born in 2019, a year after Alex’s death, while their son, Jack Alexander Rutledge, was born in 2023. In Alex’s memory, Laura gave her son his middle name. Although her children never got the chance to meet their uncle, she believes Alex would have been the “best uncle” and still carries that feeling with her.

“I think that the hardest thing is that he hasn’t gotten to see my kids because I think he would have loved being an uncle, and they would have loved him so much,” she said.

“We talk about him a lot for them so that they can know him, and they ask a lot of questions about him and stuff, which is great. Especially Reese. Jack is still too little, but Jack will know a lot cuz his middle name he’s named after him. So, yeah, he’s the best.”

Laura opened up publicly about her loss for the first time, and the revelation left Ryan Clark visibly moved. As she became emotional while speaking about her brother, Clark gently consoled her during the conversation. The whole ordeal of sharing that grief and opening up must have helped her fill those old, unattended wounds. Now, she wants to live her life and achieve everything, because that’s what “he would want.”