He’s ‘just Daddy,’ and that’s fine

David Peed has never been a big Glory Days kind of guy.

Even while putting up eye- popping numbers as a record- setting small forward at Eastern Washington University two decades ago, he never gave much thought to what it all meant.

And he still doesn’t today.

“I’ve never been much of a stat guy,” the 40-year-old Peed admitted during a phone interview from his home in Las Vegas, where he drives a recycling truck during the day and operates his own mobile DJ service, Nyte Tyme Entertainment, at night.

“I guess I didn’t notice all the points I was scoring back then. I really didn’t.”

But for fans following Eastern’s fledgling Big Sky Conference basketball fortunes at the time, Peed’s prolific point production was impossible to ignore.

During his two seasons as a starter under coach Bob Hofman, the Bay Area native and transfer from Skyline (Calif.) Junior College, scored 1,154 points and averaged 18.3 points per game – the highest total in school history at the time.

He had his best year as a junior in 1988-89 when he scored a school-record 626 points and averaged 20.87 a game. And a year later, in helping the Eagles to an 18-11 record that included 11 Big Sky wins – another EWU record that stood until the 1999-2000 team finished 12-4 in league play – he scored 430 points and averaged almost 15 a game.

In a mid-December matchup against UC Irvine in 1988, Peed went off for a school-record 44 points, knocking down 18 field goals to set yet another single-game school record – the only one that still stands.

For that, Peed can thank Rodney Stuckey, who played just two seasons (2005-07) at Eastern before leaving school early for the NBA. Stuckey stayed around long enough, however, to put his name ahead of Peed’s on every one of the Eagles’ major single-season scoring records.

To which Peed says, “Good for him,” adding he followed Stuckey’s accomplishments as closely as he could in Vegas.

And when Stuckey was selected by the Detroit Pistons in the first round of last year’s NBA Draft, Peed was watching on television, “going crazy.”

“Who would have thought a guy from Eastern would get drafted that high?” he asked.

Actually, there might have been some Eagles fans who felt Peed was deserving.

But after finishing his career at EWU, Peed left Cheney without earning his degree, in hopes of hooking on with a team in the Continental Basketball Association.

A couple of tryouts netted little in the way of interest, however, so he went to France, where he played two seasons with the Thames Valley Tigers, averaging close to 28 points both years.

At 6-foot-4, Peed had played as an undersized small forward at Eastern. But because of the scoring numbers he posted there, the Thames Valley coach thought he was getting a big man who could score inside.

“It was funny when I first got there and the coach saw I was only 6-4,” Peed said. “You could tell he was really disappointed, so he put me at point guard, and I’d never played point guard in my life.”

It hardly showed that night, though, as Peed wowed the crowd and his coach – but not his owner – with 12 assists.

“I’m laying in my hotel the next morning thinking, ‘Man, I can do this,’ ” Peed recalled, “and then the owner of the team came into my room, threw the newspaper down on the bed and, ‘No! You’re an American. Americans are supposed to score points. So even if the coach says this is the play to run, once the ball gets to you, you don’t do it. You go and score, instead.’

“I thought, ‘Wow, there must be some bad blood between him and coach,’ ” Peed said. “But from then on, I was putting it up.”

Following his second season in Europe, Peed returned to Oakland, Calif., and started working out with several of the area’s NBA players in hopes of catching the eye of an NBA scout.

That plan was short-circuited, however, when he torn an ACL during a private workout at the local YMCA. Peed suffered the injury, which would eventually require three surgeries, while performing a drill that had been recommended by an attractive young lady named Paulette, who was managing the YMCA.

But rather than take his disappointment out on the young lady, Peed married her.

“She told me about the workout that blew my knee out and pretty much ended my career,” he said. “I knew she was meant to be my wife, then. So I called it a day for basketball, married her and we started having my beautiful daughters.”

The couple moved to Las Vegas with those two daughters, Skai, 13, and Summer, 9, a short time later, while Peed’s oldest son, Alex, 21, stayed in the Bay Area to pursue his career as a member of popular rap group.

Upon their arrival, Peed started driving the recycling truck as a way to get medical benefits for his family. But the thing that replaced his passion for basketball was his night job and playing music at private parties for celebrities such as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, rock drummer Tommy Lee and former professional athletes like Dennis Rodman and Jose Canseco.

“You name ‘em, and I’ve probably done a party for ‘em,” Peed said, when asked about the celebrities he has served. “I’m actually a little calloused to it now.”

As he is, it would seem, to the sport of basketball.

Peed hasn’t played in a pick-up game, or even picked up a ball, in years, admitting to having packed on a few pounds – almost 65 of them, in fact – since his days as a svelte, 215-pounder at EWU.

“Ooooh, man,” he said, when asked about his current weight. “I gained a whole bunch of pounds. I’m up to about 280 now, and most people are like, ‘Hey, do you play football?’

“But my wife says I wear it well.”

Still, Peed’s connection with basketball has been reduced these days to watching an occasional game on television and discussing the sport with friends.

A while back, he indulged himself by mentioning to a friend that he used to “play a little college ball, back in the day.”

It was a rare venture back into the past for Peed, whose daughters still know little about his splendid college career.

“Naturally, the guy didn’t believe me, so I had him Google my name on the Internet,” Peed said. “But what came up first was a story telling about how Rodney Stuckey had broken all of David Peed’s records at Eastern Washington.

“But, hey, that’s OK. My two girls still don’t have a clue about my college days. To them, I’m just ‘Daddy,’ and that’s good enough for me.”