Mother Has Message For Teammates From Her Son

Hester Addison can hear her son’s voice. “Don’t stay in that room,” he tells her.

Four walls of grief. Every inch committed to heart. A son and husband killed in the cruelest of circumstances - a car wreck, the other driver drunk, a kid himself. His life changed forever - even that a part of her grief. Her life shattered.

“Get out of that house,” her son says.

Do his teammates hear it, too? She wants them to. Needs them to. She comes all the way from Las Vegas to Cheney, to a memorial service for her son - 18 days after his death - to tell them what he tells her.

“Don’t stay in that room,” she says.

Four walls of grief. Got to be a door.

Three hundred six colleges and universities play NCAA Division I basketball. The casual fan can’t name half of them, or tell you one thing about half the rest. Straws in a stack of teensy-type standings.

Wagner - 2-2 in conference, 5-7 overall. It’s on Staten Island. Wright State - 1-3, 3-11. The coach got pinched for shoplifting and fired. The 10 teams of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference - 7-65 against the rest of Division I. Played only 13 home games among them.

Eastern Washington - 2-2, 6-8. Buried a teammate.

Getting out of that room.

Rarely has a team got its two-sense worth the way the Eagles have this week - a sense of accomplishment, a sense of loss. An emotional tug-of-war with few reference points.

On Saturday, the Eagles completed their first weekend sweep of Big Sky conference opponents in four years with a near-flawless performance against Weber State, a brand of basketball so long gone at EWU you didn’t think it could ever come back.

And on Monday, they said their final goodbyes at a campus memorial service for Hester Addison’s son, Rodrick McClure - their friend and teammate, killed in a car crash the day after Christmas on his way to rejoin the basketball team.

They went for closure - and then heard from Hester Addison that they won’t find it until they open the door.

And now they know that whatever happens this season - and so much has happened already - it will be irrevocably tied to Rod McClure.

“It’s not something you have to be told or something you have to say,” said senior Luke Egan. “You know that Rod’s with us.”

He just isn’t going to make any baskets for them. The Eagles must do that themselves.

Maybe no Eagle has had to come to grips with that as much as Kevin Lewis, who roomed with McClure and now lives alone because he “would feel uncomfortable with someone staying in his room.”

The memorial service, Lewis said, was important because “it made a couple of people realize it was a reality and not a dream. I knew it wasn’t a dream, because I look in his empty room almost every day. That’s how I deal with it.”

As a team, the Eagles deal with it in ways both private and symbolic. Three days after the accident, the Eagles mustered to play at Washington and Husky coach Bob Bender gave them wristbands with McClure’s No. 15. They cannot be worn in games, but they are worn in practice.

His jersey remains on display in their team room. His initials are stitched to their uniforms.

“We’re going to remember Rod forever,” Egan said.

But healing takes time. Spent from the ordeal, the Eagles got waxed at Washington, and a Big Sky road trip the next weekend was hardly any better.

“You know, this happened two years ago to Northern Arizona,” remembered Egan, the team’s true veteran. “Brad Snyder died during the season. I know now what they were going through.

“I could see our team folding - well, not folding, but it was tough. There was so much emotionally to deal with. I was getting the sense that we weren’t going to do as well as I thought.

Thursday night was huge.” Thursday night, the Eagles doggedly hung with Cal StateSacramento and got a 3-pointer from Travis King with 4 seconds remaining to snap an 18-game Big Sky losing streak.

“I’m used to other teams hitting that 3 on us,” admitted Egan. “That changed everything. Saturday, you could see the difference before the game. We never really gave them a chance to beat us, and I can’t remember the last time that happened. I talked to a couple of fans after the game and they were having as much fun as us. They were actually starting to say things during the game because we weren’t getting our butts kicked.”

Rod McClure knew he was in on the start of something. He was a building block - someone, coach Steve Aggers said at the memorial, “who would come by the office and ask what more he could do.”

The results are modest, but measurable. The Ratings Percentage Index by which the NCAA Tournament committee does its dirty work had the Eagles ranked 299th out of 305 teams last season.

This week, the Eags are No. 200.

“It’s thrilling, to tell you the truth,” Egan said. “It makes you want to work harder.”

They are out of that room. They will go back from time to time, but they will not stay.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review