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Miami senior puts forward best game face Sunday

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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer Updated 1:10 AM Monday, December 14, 2009

OXFORD — You’ve heard of the “Three Faces of Eve.” Well, here are the Three Faces of Fletch.

“I was coming down the stairs in our house, and I didn’t have enough blood, and my heart was pumping hard, and I passed out,” said Adam Fletcher, the Miami RedHawks 6-foot-9 senior center.

“My next-door neighbor found me on the floor. My lips were blue. I had a real low pulse. They rushed me to the hospital. My resting heart rate was 150. My blood pressure was 70 over 30. They said if somebody hadn’t found me, I’d have had a heart attack.”

That was 2 1/2 years ago. After ankle surgery, he had developed a staph infection and was put on anti-inflammatory medicine, which ate away the lining of his stomach. He lost a lot of blood and collapsed the day his parents were attending his brother’s college graduation two hours away.

“That kid almost died,” Miami coach Charlie Coles said. “He’s come back a long way.”

After a week in the hospital, months of recuperation and 45 regained pounds later, he made it to face No. 2.

A starter last season, he wore a beard and averaged 4.6 points and 4 rebounds a game. Teammate Kenny Hayes from Northmont High said he looked like “a cave man.”

Coles — who has a special affection for Fletcher — said he went along with the look to a point.

“If he’s playing rugged basketball, yeah he can be a mountain man. But the minute he wasn’t, I’d say ‘Fletch, shave, You don’t deserve to look tough.’ ”

This season Fletcher said he used his razor in stages: “I had a scruffy look for the Dayton game and some others, but then I decided it was time for change.”

He was explaining this after Miami had come from behind to edge Wright State, 56-55, at Millet Hall on Sunday, Dec. 13.

“Right before today’s game I had a moustache, but every time I walked past the mirror, I’d start laughing,” he said. “I couldn’t build up confidence to wear it out on the court, so I just shaved it. I looked too old. It was more an established business look and not the look of a basketball player.”

And that brings us to his final face.

Clean shaven until cherubic, Fletcher had 13 rebounds and 10 points — his first career double-double — along with two blocked shots and a steal against WSU.

He was on the bench much of the second half, but when Miami whittled a 7-point deficit to 1 with just 65 seconds left, Coles put him into the game: “Fletch is the guy, if you need two minutes of solid play, I want him in there.”

The move paid off.

He rebounded a WSU miss that set up Hayes’ go-ahead lay-up with 22 seconds left. And when the Raiders’ Vaughn Duggins missed a potential game-winner before the buzzer, he again grabbed the rebound away from Raiders players going for the put-back.

“I felt I had the ball in my hands forever,” Fletcher said. “I was hoping the horn would go off and finally it did. ... That’s as big of a rebound as I’ve ever had.”

He said his game-ending grit goes back to that brush with death: “You never know what’s ahead, so every day now I try to give it everything I got. Today it worked.”

And with that, the man of many faces just smiled.

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