EWU’s Stuckey sticks out

It’s hard to know whether it’s more accurate to say that Mike Burns has hitched Eastern Washington’s basketball wagon to a mere freshman or that Rodney Stuckey has hijacked it.

Not that it matters, really.

What’s to be seen in Cheney – and next week in Spokane – on these chilly evenings is both rare and seductive, the beginning of something. A living thing, with its own DNA.

It is not that Eastern hoops is completely reborn from the death march that was the 2005 season, Burns’ first in the transition from the giddy heights of the school’s first brush with March Madness the year before. Too much growth remains, a good chunk of it likely to come with dates Friday at Washington and Monday in the Spokane Arena against Gonzaga .

But the scant evidence available from EWU’s first seven games at least suggests a revival, or rather something new on its own terms.

Rodney’s terms.

Eastern’s prize freshman would argue that characterization – “It’s not about me,” was his protest in a conversation the other day – but Burns wouldn’t, necessarily.

“I don’t think we’ve been shy about trumpeting our belief in Rodney,” he said, “or the rest of this group, for that matter. But we knew we had a special one.”

It’s not hard to see how special. Stuckey is already averaging 20.3 points a game – making him the highest-scoring freshman in the country, ahead of North Dakota State’s Ben Woodside, who is not quite a point behind. In the last three games – all EWU wins – that number has climbed to 24.3, most recently a 30-point tattoo he inked on UC Riverside.

He also leads his team in assists, steals and 3-pointers, and any number of things that are impossible to quantify.

And so we’ll add another: You’re watching the early evolutionary stages of the best player in Eastern history.

This is said with apologies to Ron Cox, who left a deep imprint on EWU hoops in the mid-1970s and remains its leading scorer, rebounder and winner, at least in the last half of the 20th century. It’s just that those were the days when Eastern’s rivals were Western and Central, and the December dates were against Whitworth and Montana Tech.

On the upcoming long weekend, the Eagles play the Nos. 10 and 11 teams in the nation, depending on the poll of your choice.

Different contexts, different players – except perhaps in one regard.

Feel.

“Rodney’s a Ph.D. in basketball,” Burns said. “He just understands the game and what’s going on. For him, the game moves a little slower than it does for everyone else – and he can make plays because of that vision or intuition.”

So spellbound by this quality was Burns that he’s installed Stuckey at point guard, a position he didn’t play in high school at Kentwood but which was instead manned by his brother, LaRon, who’s now at Big Bend Community College. This has required some acclimatization on Stuckey’s part, but of course a bigger transformation had to be affected off the court last year when he had to sit out of competition and prove himself in an academic setting.

Stuckey hadn’t met the NCAA requirements for core classes coming out of high school – something he blames on “not taking things seriously enough my first couple of years,” hardly unique to teenage athletes. But he took his first year at Eastern seriously – pulling a 3.45 grade point average in some 50 credit hours.

“It’s just about being more focused and organized,” he said. “Study table five nights a week helped out, too.”

Stuckey has faced down his share of problems in his young life. His father, Ronnie Turner, left the family when he was young. Before his senior year at Kentwood, he moved away from his mother, Faye, and in with family friends – though the two remain close and Stuckey calls her “a cool mom.”

But nothing tested him than the death of his older brother, Davon Jackson, who in 2003 was shot by Seattle police after he had killed a close friend during an argument that police said was fueled by a drug episode. Jackson, two years older than Stuckey, had introduced his younger siblings to the game “taking us to the park and teaching us everything.

“It was tough, always thinking about it, but you have to get through tough times,” he said. “It’s something you have to get over. It helped to have family and friends around me who understood – and basketball helped, too.”

It certainly helped Stuckey get noticed. He was recruited by Washington State – Burns was an assistant there at the time – along with Washington and Oklahoma State, among others, and obviously his game would have fit at any of those schools. But since those schools don’t accept non-qualifiers, his academic standing would have required a stay at a junior college or a detour to a prep school – something Stuckey decided “wasn’t my deal.

“Yeah, you think about playing in the Pac-10, and it crossed my mind that it was something I wanted to do,” he said. “But the JC route or prep school wasn’t what I needed. I liked it here. I wanted to come here and win.”

Having signed with a program that was on its way to the NCAAs in 2004, Stuckey may not have thought that he’d have to see it through a deep valley – that he would be the one who’d have to help it learn how to win again. Surely he had that kind of background – his Kentwood teams finished sixth, third and first in state; teammates Kellen Williams and Brandon Moore also come from state championship teams.

“I just want to win,” he said. “I come from a high school team that lost maybe 10 games throughout my years there, and I’m playing now with a bunch of guys who are really good and who have won. We’ve got a long ways to go, but there’s a lot of fun years ahead of us.”

If that seems like a lot of long-term expectation to dump on a freshman, Burns isn’t so sure.

“I think it was important for him to play Division I basketball as soon as possible – and I think it was important for him to be in a place where there was a sense of family and closeness, and I like to think he’s found those things at Eastern.

“But I also think the timing of him entering the program and assuming the role he’s assumed is perfect. Sometimes you go to a bigger school and your role is different, or lesser, or you have to serve a certain apprenticeship. That’s not the case here. We’ve asked for and got a lot from him immediately, and you can see his impact on the team. That’s kind of exciting.”

And maybe even a little scary. The birth of something often is.