EWU receiver Bode Gardner and his dad, Brian, reflect on emotional cancer struggle: ‘I wasn’t going without a fight’

It was senior night for the Mt. Spokane boys basketball team, and Bode Gardner could no longer hold back the tears.

It wasn’t about the game. That had gone fine.

It wasn’t really about the end of his high school basketball career, either.

The tears were about his dad, who, less than a month earlier, had received a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis.

“We were playing Ridgeline, and I remember after the game breaking down,” said Gardner, now a redshirt sophomore at Eastern Washington. “I couldn’t stop crying.”

Brian and Angie Gardner had raised their four children – Bailey, Bode, Sloane and Laine – on the principle that many families in athletics do: You can do hard things.

A cancer diagnosis challenged Brian, a former Eastern Washington football player and a football coach for nearly three decades since, to live up to what he’d instilled in his children.

“It’s funny. My kids grew up hearing me say, ‘Quit being soft, get through it, you’re fine,’ ” Brian Gardner said last week. “And so it was their time to say, ‘Dad, get your butt up, quit being soft, get outside.’ ”

Diagnosed with lung and rectal cancer in January 2024, Brian Gardner has been cancer free for more than a year. He still gets checked every six months, and those checkups, he said, can be worrisome. But Brian Gardner refuses to live a life of worry. He’d rather focus on his children, like Bode, who is trying to earn more playing time at wide receiver for the Eastern Washington football team this season.

“You hear of people in the same situation. They beat it and then it comes back down the road, so there’s always the fear that it’s going to come back,” Brian Gardner said. “But I’m not going to let it control my life and worry about it every single day.”

A lot of tears and questions

It was a lack of worry that delayed Brian Gardner from addressing his symptoms earlier.

Once he Googled it, Gardner realized he had all the signs of rectal cancer. So when he sent in a stool sample and the results came back, “it wasn’t a big shock to me,” he said.

Gardner was 49 when doctors found a tumor. Rectal cancer. Stage 3.

Then they scanned his body and found another spot on his lung. That made it Stage 4.

“The first thing I thought of was my kids,” Gardner said. “For me, hearing of cancer I always associated it with death. Just sitting with them and telling them was hard.”

Bode said he already had a bad feeling in his gut when his parents sat them down.

“I knew,” he said. “A lot of tears that night. A lot of question marks. It was hard for a while, but for a while we didn’t tell anyone. I was in the middle of basketball season. … We just wanted to keep it down low.”

Soon after, Bode committed to play football at Eastern, a decision made all the easier because of his dad’s diagnosis. He finished his senior year at Mt. Spokane, and during that time, his dad’s condition didn’t change all that noticeably.

Brian Gardner finished out the rest of the spring 2024 school year and even came back to coach football the following fall.

Terry Cloer played football with Brian Gardner at Mt. Baker High School, then at Walla Walla Community College and at Eastern Washington after that. For many years the Cloers and Gardners have rented a cabin together at Priest Lake. For the last five, the two have coached the Mt. Spokane football team together.

When Gardner was diagnosed, Cloer wrestled with his own emotions but said he knew Gardner would fight it.

“I literally couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t talk about it in front of the team,” Cloer said. “I just couldn’t hold the emotion back.”

Another thing Cloer knew was that Brian Gardner wanted to watch his son play college football.

“That was always a dream for him,” Cloer said.

Chemo worked for a while, but it reached a point where Gardner’s body couldn’t hold down any food. He dropped from 205 pounds down to 140.

It was then doctors decided to give him a month off from chemo. And it was then his children started forcing him to go for walks.

“My kids and wife would force me,” he said. “We’re walking the dog and we’re walking Dad.”

Doctors switched his cancer treatment method, and it was “a gamechanger,” Gardner said.

In January 2025, doctors – who had already removed the cancer in his lung many months earlier – removed the rectal tumor. Initially it was a success, but three weeks later they found Gardner had developed a post-surgical infection.

All the while, Bode Gardner was going through his freshman year at Eastern, balancing school and football with being there for his family.

“I would come home and he was so underweight, so that was hard,” Bode said. “He kept getting worse and worse, and I was going through fall camp, through a bad breakup. My freshman year was hard, and it got to the point where I didn’t want to see him because I’d come home and he’d be 80 pounds underweight.”

Through the whole process, too, Brian Gardner tried to reassure his children that he would be fine.

“It was important for me to let them still do their thing,” he said. “Don’t let it dictate what you’re doing as a teenager. Go be with your friends. Don’t be worrying about me.”

The treatment of the infection was terrible, Brian Gardner said, and it forced him to take a leave of absence from teaching during the 2025 spring semester.

But as he had along the previous stages, Gardner was able to get through it, and he was able to return to school that fall. As often as he could, Gardner watched Bode and Laine, now 17 years old and a state champion sprinter at Mt. Spokane High School, compete in their sports.

During that fall football season, Cloer was named Coach of the Week by the Seattle Seahawks and was given a pair of tickets for a Seahawks game. He invited Gardner to come.

“He didn’t want to take the days off,” Cloer said. “I said, ‘You haven’t taken a day off all year.’ ”

Gardner relented, and so he went with Cloer to what ended up being a December thriller: Seahawks 38, Rams 37.

Already Cloer recognized the drive that Gardner possessed. He’d known it for 30 years. But the manner in which Gardner fought cancer was something he pointed to often when he talked to his football players.

“I often talked to our team about being a man and showing strength and being strong,” Cloer said. “That’s what we’re talking about.”

Yet Gardner doesn’t see his battle with cancer so much as something he was destined to win, or as some formulaic surety that if he put in a certain amount of effort, he would defeat it.

“I was going to do everything I could here to fight and take care of myself, but ultimately it was in God’s hands,” Gardner said. “If it was my time, it was my time. But I wasn’t going without a fight. I was going to fight like crazy to make it not my time.”

Football camp is in full swing now for the Eagles, who are four weeks from their season opener at Northern Arizona. Bode Gardner, who missed the end of last season due to an injury, is hoping to earn a more prominent role on offense this season putting on the same jersey his dad did as a linebacker 30 years ago.

It’s no guarantee, of course. But Gardner is just trying to live by the principles his parents taught him: You battle through adversity.

“It’s just special, every time I step on the field,” Bode Gardner said. “Being a legacy kid, it means something.”