Loyola’s ‘Human Bruise’ : Even Tom Peabody’s Mother Has to Ask, ‘Is This Necessary?’

It may be a basketball floor to you, but it’s a 94-by-50-foot hunk of slip-and-slide hijinks to Tom Peabody, Loyola Marymount’s human bruise, the possessed pursuer of loose basketballs, the guy who just landed on the elderly gentleman sitting in the third row.

Peabody runs into benches, flops over press tables and body-bludgeons unsuspecting cheerleaders. So wild, so rambunctious are his on-court antics that his teammates have dubbed him Damien and The Terrorist.

“I watch him play,” said Delores Peabody, his mother, “and I just have to ask myself, ‘My goodness, is this necessary?’ ”

If you think that’s just a mother’s concern, consider the wide eyes of Barry Zepel, Loyola’s sports information director, who has watched Peabody, a former Mater Dei High School point guard, do his self-destructo act all season.

“The way he plays, you can’t help but admire him,” Zepel said. “Still, you don’t want the kid to die because of it.”

For all the abuse Peabody piles on himself, not to mention folding chairs, you’d figure he’d reward himself with his share of shots. There’s plenty to be had. Loyola is the nation’s No. 1 scoring team, having set virtually every National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Division I scoring record this season. The Lions scored a record 181 points against United States International University Jan. 31, allowing a record 150, a record total for a losing team, in the process.

“On this team,” said reserve forward John O’Connell, “if you catch the ball, then it’s time to give it a ride.”

But Peabody, who has played in all 23 games for Loyola and started 18 at small forward because of an injury to starter Bo Kimble, has attempted only 82 shots, an average of little more than three a game. Consider that Kimble has taken more than 100 and has played in only 10 games. Terrell Lowery, reserve point guard, has taken almost twice as many shots (130) as Peabody, even though he has played barely half as many minutes.

In the USIU point orgy, Peabody scored 5.

“When it comes to shooting, Tom is the team oddball,” said Paul Westhead, Loyola coach. “His (shooting) mechanics are fine. But he’s so consumed with the total game--with passing and playing defense and jumping on the loose ball--that shooting just passes him by. While the other guys are calculating where their next shot is coming from, Tom is busy exploding all over the place.”

So Mr. Peabody is in the middle of Shooters’ Heaven--a place that lives by Westhead’s “If you’re going to miss 49 (shots), why not miss 50?”--and he has decided that the way he’ll stay there is by being everything but a shooter.

“I know it doesn’t matter if I miss 20 straight shots here,” Peabody said. “But what I do is play defense as hard as I can, try and make steals, get the ball to the open man and take the pressure off the guys who are scoring.

“Sometimes I’ll be wide open and I’ll pass the ball and the coaches will just shake their heads. They want me to shoot more and they get kind of frustrated. But I’d rather give the ball to Hank (Gathers, the nation’s leading scorer) and watch him deal.

“It’s the only way I know how to play, I couldn’t play any other way.”

Peabody is second on the team in steals (38), third in blocks (nine) and assists (73) and is Loyola’s unquestioned king of pain.

“Sometimes, he hits the floor so hard that the guys on the bench will just put their heads down and close their eyes,” O’Connell said.

American Cable, which broadcasts Loyola games locally, has taken to superimposing Peabody’s body-abuse stats rather than his scoring average.

Tom Peabody:

Floor burns per game: 9.5

Floor burns tonight: 5

Besides burns, there are scars, scabs, bumps, bruises and stitches that form a relief map of one basketball player’s journey, one that almost came to an abrupt end Thanksgiving Day, 1987.

Peabody didn’t begin playing basketball until the eighth grade, but getting dinged up was nothing new. Growing up, he committed the ultimate offensive foul and broke his jaw in so doing, when he rode his bike into a wall that had established position. There were countless other minor injuries as well as “stitches all over my head.”

Peabody said his parents were “always worried that someone was going to see this kid all beat up and bring them up on child-abuse charges.”

Though lacking in basketball experience, Peabody’s athletic prowess was such that by his junior year he was the starting point guard for the Mater Dei team that went 29-0 and won the Southern Section 5-A championship.

The next season, with Peabody again at the point, Mater Dei won another Southern Section title. Even then his scoring stats were anemic--he averaged six points a game as a senior--partly because in his two years as a starter he played with the likes of Tom Lewis (now at Pepperdine, by way of USC), Mike Mitchell (Colorado State, by way of Fresno State) and LeRon Ellis (Kentucky).

“There were so many options,” Peabody said. “There never was any pressure on me to score, which was fine.”

Mater Dei’s tendency to set up in a half-court offense did nothing to endear him to run-and-gun Loyola, the school that Peabody wanted most to recruit him.

“I thought his style was suited to a slower game,” Westhead said.

Peabody went to Rice, which became an immediate disaster. A good student, he graduated from Mater Dei with a 3.7 grade-point average, Peabody failed his first four tests. He couldn’t play basketball after he sustained stress fractures in his foot and shin; his father, Pete, was ill with a weak heart, and he flat out missed home.

By Thanksgiving of his freshman year, he had had enough and headed home.

“It was like being in shock,” he said. “When I left Mater Dei, everything was as perfect as it could be; three months later it had all fallen apart.”

He enrolled at Orange Coast College and went about raising his grades and getting as far away from basketball as he could.

“That was the lowest I’ve ever seen him,” said Terry Peabody, his brother. “He reached this crisis where he was searching for his identity. He’d always been a good student and a good basketball player and now he wasn’t sure about either.”

Peabody said: “My confidence was completely gone.”

As his grades started to rise at OCC, so did his desire to play basketball. By spring, he was “chomping at the bit,” to get back on the court.

Figuring he had blown his one chance at Division I basketball, he prepared himself to play two years at OCC, then drop basketball completely and get his degree.

Playing on a summer league team that needed him to score, Peabody was averaging 20 points a game. One day he got a call from Judas Prada, Loyola assistant in charge of recruiting.

“When the call came from Loyola, the sun came back out for Tom,” Terry said.

Westhead arranged to come down and watch him play. Peabody had torn the ligaments in his right foot and had been advised not to play.

“I told the doctor to either tape it or show me how to tape it, because I had to play.”

And he played well enough that Westhead offered him a scholarship. Peabody sat out last year and has two seasons of eligibility after this one.

“When I got here, Coach (Westhead) called me in and said, ‘Not many people get a second chance; you’ve got yours, now do something with it,’ ” Peabody said. “The bottom line is that I’m playing, and I’m playing because I go all out. It’s the only way I know how to play, I couldn’t play any other way.”

Which bodes well for Loyola and its fans, well, those who steer clear of court-side seats.