‘You do it out of love’: Washington State graduate Brock Eager continues passion for the hammer throw while putting construction management degree to work

On an abandoned Twitter account, Brock Eager is identified as a “professional” hammer thrower.

The scare quotes are his, and they’re for irony. It’s not a withering self-assessment.

Because, really, the Washington State grad is better than pretty good – ranked seventh in the United States in the event by Track and Field News the last two years, with a lifetime best of 248 feet, 10 inches that puts him in the all-time top 20 nationally.

And there’s nothing in his approach that suggests it’s a hobby. From dieting off 50 pounds to building his own throwing pad and weather shed, Eager’s commitment to the sport is resolute, if not absolute. It can’t be absolute because, well, he has another profession.

That’s right, two professions. Just one livelihood.

Still, there are days when he lives for the hammer alone, and a couple of those are coming up Thursday and Saturday at the Iron Wood Throws Classic at the club’s facility east of Rathdrum on Highway 53. The eighth installment of the best little meet around offers a new competitive incentive – Saturday’s session has been designated as a bronze level Continental Tour Event by World Athletics, track and field’s international governing body. That puts $30,000 in prize money and world ranking points at stake for fields that feature more than a dozen Olympic and World Championship veterans, including American record holder DeAnna Price in the women’s hammer and Olympic bronze medalist and world champ Yaime Perez in the women’s discus.

And Brock Eager, resident of the Spokane Valley and pride of the host club – and of Tunista Construction.

On the eve of a recent meet in Nashville, Eager was holed up in a hotel room with the two monitors he packs on road trips, doing what he does when he’s not in the weight room or fine tuning rotations and release angles. For the last year and a half, Eager has been an estimator for Tunista, a Tacoma-based heavy civil construction firm, putting to use the construction management degree he earned around winning two Pac-12 titles.

In this gig he struck a little gold, working for bosses who have athletic backgrounds. Tom Hawken, the lead estimator, played basketball at Bellevue College; president Lloyd Melone III wrestled at WSU.

“They’re very understanding about giving me time as long as I get my work done,” Eager said. “The have a grasp of what you have to do to compete.”

Here’s what Eager has to do: rise at 6:30 a.m., be at his laptop by 7, clock out at 3 p.m. and then head to the Iron Wood facility to finish off a 12-hour day. Last winter, it was up at 4:30 and into the gym at 5. That’s when he was still working with Bob MacKay, a renowned throwing events coach who was living in the Valley but has since returned to California. And that’s when he rolled up his sleeves and really put that degree to work.

“He had 10 acres,” Eager reported. “With my parents and some other people, we’d built some throwing pads at Tahoma, where I went to high school. So we leveled out a pad 20x40 and my parents came over a couple of times to help out. I laid the form works and rebar, and Tom helped me out and we did two different pours and we put on some walls and a tent cover for a structure.”

And if you go on Instagram, you can find Eager doing his spins in the dead of winter, ball of the hammer set afire, and hurling it high toward a snow-covered hillside, where it’s extinguished on impact.

Hey, if a flaming hammer doesn’t represent a passion for the event, what does?

Eager has been pretty much hooked on track’s most arcane event since the seventh grade, introduced to it by his father, Keith, and a fellow track coach, Howie Kellogg. He reached 231 feet with the 12-pound high school hammer before enrolling at WSU, where his Pac-12 victory as a sophomore in 2017 was the Cougars’ first in the event since 1988. He was sixth in the Olympic Trials in 2021, the year he threw his lifetime best, and has reached 247-1 already this spring.

“There are things I could be better at if I had more time – a little better with stretching and recovery and preemptive stuff,” he said. “But you have to make do with what you have. Some pro throwers don’t have jobs, others are part-time.”

His Iron Wood affiliation provides him a training facility and coaching with center director TJ Crater plus an equipment stipend. An Emerging Athlete Grant from USA Track and Field covers some meet travel. And there’s some money to be won, though Eager said, “I might have made five or six grand off a track season.

Sexy shoe contracts? For milers and 100-meter runners, yes. Hammer guys, not so much.

“It doesn’t trickle down far. If you’re the top guy in the hammer, you’re probably making $100,000-ish. A Ryan Crouser (in the shot put) might do $500,000 or $750,000, but he’s out there destroying world records.”

The hammer guys aren’t there yet, but they’re inching up. It took 256 feet to make the Olympic team in 2021; the previous trials, it was 243 “and now that’s like eighth in the U.S.,” Eager said.

“You do it out of love. I was too stubborn to quit out of college because I knew I had more in me, and after the COVID year, I had a breakthrough. As long as you can keep building, it’s going to bring you back.”