Alex Peavey was raised on ACC basketball. His father was an esteemed fundraiser at Duke and Virginia, and Alex spent untold hours at Cameron Indoor Stadium and University Hall as a fan and, eventually, a UVA student.
Peavey witnessed All-Americans such as Christian Laettner, Ralph Sampson and Michael Jordan, but it wasn’t the players who riveted him most. It was the coaches.
Virginia’s Terry Holland, Maryland’s Gary Williams, Wake Forest’s Dave Odom, Georgia Tech’s Bobby Cremins, NC State’s Jim Valvano and, naturally, the gold standards: Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and North Carolina’s Dean Smith.
Those larger-than-life personalities ignited a desire to coach. And they are the reason that middle-schooler Alex recorded the 1988 ACC Tournament final between Duke and Carolina.
The Blue Devils prevailed, the first of Krzyzewski’s record 15 ACC Tournament titles, and Peavey watched the game repeatedly, sketching the plays from a contest that featured Duke’s Danny Ferry and UNC’s J.R. Reid.
Nearly four decades later, the VCR tape collects dust in Peavey’s Midlothian home.
“For me, it’s just breaking apart a puzzle,” he says, “and it’s really fun and invigorating. And then if the puzzle gets harder, it’s more invigorating and not frustrating.”
Meshing an intellectual approach to strategy with meditative techniques, Peavey fostered careers in coaching, counseling and mindfulness training that connected him with athletes such as NFL quarterback Russell Wilson, Major League Baseball pitcher Daniel Lynch and former UVA lacrosse captain Mikey Thompson, plus college basketball coaches such as Virginia’s Ryan Odom, Virginia Tech’s Mike Young and Penn State’s Mike Rhoades.
Alex Peavey with then-VCU basketball coach Ryan Odom in 2024. (Courtesy/Alex Peavey)
Today the vast community of those he has touched is assembling at Peavey’s side as he continues the fight of, and for, his life.
“I think it’s a really inspiring story,” says Thompson, now the men’s lacrosse coach at Division III power Christopher Newport, “and on the flip side of that, there’s a lot of great need for his family. And the last thing that those around him want is for his family to be feeling long-term impacts from something that is completely outside of his control.
“At the end of the day, he could have been dead several times, so no one could have ever forecast how expensive it is just to stay alive. So, everyone is rallying to make sure his family is in a really good position moving forward.”
“In The Moment”
Peavey still has the photo on his phone. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2017, a Friday, and doctors had told him that he might not survive the weekend. As he and his wife, Sarah, prepared to leave home for the VCU Medical Center, Alex snapped a photo of their children, 5-year-old Bodhi and 3-year-old Jane, sitting on the front porch.
“Is this the last time I’ll see them?” Alex wondered.
Months of withering fatigue had led to tests, the last of which revealed catastrophic kidney failure. Get to the hospital, doctors ordered. Now!
There, during multiple surgeries, they found a more dire condition: incurable metastatic prostate cancer. Peavey was 39 and thunderstruck. But he attacked the subsequent chemotherapy with an athlete’s resolve and a meditator’s calm.
Alex Peavey and his wife, Sarah, are shown at VCU’s Massey Cancer Center in 2017, shortly after his initial diagnosis. (Courtesy/Alex Peavey)
Peavey had discovered mindfulness while hiking, rock climbing and white-water rafting out west as a teenager and then reading “Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior” by NBA championship coach Phil Jackson.
Peavey carried that Zen outlook to his time at UVA, where he studied psychology, volunteered as a recruiting assistant in the football office, worked on the basketball stat crew and coached the freshman basketball team at nearby Woodberry Forest School.
During an internship at the Washington Redskins’ training camp at Frostburg State University in Maryland, Peavey happened upon legendary DeMatha High basketball coach Morgan Wootten, who was conducting his summer camp at Frostburg. Then-Furman coach Joe Cantafio was among the Wootten camp counselors, and he advised Peavey to explore the master’s program at VCU’s Center for Sports Leadership.
Graduate degree in hand, Peavey landed at Wofford, where he worked for Richard Johnson and then Young. Four years later, he returned to Richmond as head coach at the Collegiate School.
Wilson, a Super Bowl champion quarterback with the Seattle Seahawks and now with the New York Giants, was Peavey’s star player.
“I think great coaches are great teachers,” Wilson says in a documentary about Alex produced by former Collegiate student Jess Speight, “and Coach Peavey is … one of the best coaches I’ve ever had. He taught me how to think and dream big, and he was always that guy who believed in me.
“I think so many of us get fearful of this mindfulness. What does this mean? It just means the ability to realign with the moment. That can be when you’re fighting cancer. That can be in the middle of a football or basketball game.”
Peavey’s devotion to mindfulness led him to exit coaching, the better to serve students in his counseling position at Collegiate. He taught mindfulness classes, and in a cameo took on an English class for a co-worker on paternity leave.
Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” was the class basis, “which allowed us to connect all the dots across all stories across all of time,” Peavey says, “and we dove into the philosophical lessons of the ‘Tao Te Ching’, the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ and the Bible, my kind of stuff.”
Needing a more flexible schedule after his 2018 diagnosis, Peavey left Collegiate and became VCU basketball’s de facto sports psychologist, first under Rhoades and then Ryan Odom.
Odom especially leaned on Peavey last season, when the Rams won the Atlantic 10 regular-season and tournament championships. Peavey was a frequent presence at the practice complex and occasionally traveled with the team.
So vital was Peavey to the cause that he was among the VCU contingent who climbed the ladder to cut the championship net at the A-10 tournament.
Alex Peavey helped cut down the net after VCU’s Atlantic 10 Tournament championship last season. (Courtesy/Alex Peavey)
“As much as he could give to us given the circumstances, we were going to take,” says Odom, now the head coach at UVA. “We knew he was going to help us …
“He starts with his personal journey and how he uses mindfulness to navigate (cancer). We’re worried about pick-and-roll defense and how to attack a 2-3 zone, and he’s worried about a lot bigger things. It gave us the ability to think about keeping things in their proper perspective.”
Speight’s hour-long documentary, “In The Moment,” shows how Peavey, now approaching 30 cancer-related surgeries, runs toward the pain, physical and emotional, rather than from it. Counterintuitive and daunting, yes, but for Peavey effective and essential.
“It was like he kind of just decided if this is how it’s gonna be, I’m going to live my life,” Sarah says in the film.
Indeed, whether motionless in an MRI tube, enduring another round of treatments, attending a Phish concert at Hampton Coliseum, reconnecting with Wilson this fall before a Giants game or frolicking on the beach with the family at Pawleys Island, South Carolina — he and Sarah were married there — Alex keeps mindfulness near.
He had no clue during his teens, 20s and early 30s, but believes fervently now: More than two decades of meditation, of training his mind to find peace amid turbulence, to treasure nature and the arts, was preparing him for the ultimate challenge.
Consider the 40 radiation treatments that Peavey had this summer.
“I stepped into it as one in a row, one in a row, one in a row, as opposed to counting to 40,” he says, “because if I did all 40 at a time, I wouldn’t have made it.”
How often do we hear coaches echo the “one-game-at-a-time” mantra? That was Peavey.
“Mindfulness has given a language to what sports taught me over and over and over and over,” he says. “For me, it was athletics. For someone else, it might be the theater or painting or music — and music for me, too. But really athletics has been this laboratory of life experiences.
“Then, when you get hit with all of the life experiences in a package at age 39, it’s amazing how many flashbacks I have to sports moments that were really difficult, but self-imposed difficult because you chose to play the game. And now it’s a non-voluntary difficult situation, but it’s informed by all those moments across athletics.”
Alex and Sarah knew eight years ago that he wouldn’t outlive cancer. What they didn’t know is that in 2020, they’d be blindsided by his second diagnosis.
“Better than the day before”
To keep his kidneys functioning, Peavey has stents in both ureters, the ducts through which urine passes from the kidneys to the bladder. The stents must be replaced several times per year, and during such a procedure in 2020, surgeons found neuroendocrine cancer in his bladder.
Doctors told Peavey that such a secondary cancer usually stems from lung cancer. Never had they seen a case rooted in prostate cancer.
Peavey’s unique plight led him to the University of North Carolina, where, after a three-hour meeting, doctors crafted a plan for their colleagues at VCU to execute. Convinced that the neuroendocrine cancer is the most pressing blaze, they are attacking it fiercely, hoping to temper its growth before taking an equally aggressive tack against the prostate cancer with the latest advances in medicine.
Accustomed to survival estimates of days, weeks and months, Peavey for the first time is hearing “years.”
Alex Peavey and his son, Bodhi, are shown with New York Giants quarterback Russell Wilson before the Giants’ game against the Washington Commanders this season. Wilson said Peavey is “one of the best coaches I’ve ever had.” (Courtesy/Alex Peavey)
“I’m glad to say I’m typically better than the day before,” he says, his voice strong and lucid. “… I’m still lucky if I’m awake past 8 o’clock at night most days, but that also has to do with having two middle-schoolers wearing me out.”
Cancer has even messed with Peavey’s lifelong affair with all things music.
He grew up playing drums and the harmonica, and when cancer struck, a friend brought a ukulele to the hospital. Peavey taught himself to play while in ICU. He has since learned the mandolin.
“Music is definitely a medicine for me,” he says, “whether it’s listening to vinyl, going to a live show or playing an instrument. There are times when my whole body is out of commission, when I am involuntarily horizontal for extended periods of time, and I can still at least pick that mandolin while lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling.
“In the moment, it’s a welcome diversion from whatever cancer or the medicine is doing to my body, and it is a futile attempt to repair a brain that feels like it has been deconstructed by three lines of chemo in eight years.”
While fatigue is a constant, limiting Peavey to one central activity a day, there are “weird days” when nausea, vertigo and/or vomiting rear their head.
The vomiting is so random that Peavey keeps what he calls “barf bags” in the car. Indeed, Bodhi and Jane are used to him getting sick on the drive to school or a practice, emblematic of the tightrope that Sarah and Alex walk with their kids: Give them as normal a childhood as possible while sharing the truth about Dad’s condition.
Peavey’s experience counseling young people who had lost a parent to cancer told him there was no other choice.
“It was very consistent,” he says, “that the parents who withheld information — with the best of intention, with all the love in their heart, like, ‘Let’s protect our kids from this’ — if the parent died and the kid realized they weren’t told, they were more angry at the parent than they were at the cancer.”
Sarah and the kids, armed with empathy and compassion beyond their years, are Alex’s primary “why,” his reason for following Jim Valvano’s famous command to “never give up.”
But just as there’s a secondary cancer, there’s a secondary why: Peavey prays that his ordeal will lead the medical community to unearth new treatments, that maybe, just maybe, insight gleaned from his journey will save future lives.
That’s why the Peaveys love VCU Medical Center. It’s a teaching hospital, and they welcome the students who shadow his doctors.
To explain his thinking, Alex quotes Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Belly of the whale
The overarching theme of extended interaction with Peavey is gratitude.
Gratitude for another day, another week, another month. Gratitude for his medical team’s tireless efforts and his family’s unwavering support.
Gratitude for his Christian faith, God’s omnipresent comfort and the prayers of friends, loved ones and even mere acquaintances.
“I don’t know who all is praying out there,” Peavey says, “except the ones who have said it. But it’s felt over and over and over, and without a doubt has gotten us through really dark times. Joseph Campbell talks about the belly of the whale, where you’re in the thick of it, and those are the moments where, in the deepest darkest belly of the whale, that the prayers of others get the loudest.”
Where Peavey gets emotional, where his voice catches and tears emerge, is when attempting to express his gratitude for all who have helped his family since his diagnosis. Meals, childcare, transportation, encouragement.
As a counselor, Peavey is wired to help those in need. Cancer forced him to learn how to accept help, to shed the prideful fear of burdening others.
He is humbled by the outpouring.
“I kind of laugh at it,” Peavey says. “Typically, over the last eight years, if I’m crying, it’s not because I’m in pain or I’m sad, it’s because I’m just so grateful for something that just happened.”
But the Peaveys need more help. Alex is on disability and unable to work. Only after Alex finished radiation in August was Sarah able to resume her full-time position at the Cancer Retreat Center, a nonprofit that offers cancer patients counseling, massage therapy, yoga and mindfulness classes.
And their medical bills are mounting.
Toward that end, Odom, Young and Rhoades have cowritten an open letter to anyone in the Peaveys’ orbit asking them to pitch in through the HEADstrong Foundation.
“This is one of those stories that will resonate with people,” says Odom, who invited Peavey to speak to UVA’s team this summer.
“Here he is eight years into a cancer battle, and he’s still swinging,” Young says. “Competitive, tough. A selfless servant. We’ve got to do the right thing to help a family that means a lot to all of us. I love the guy, and I love his family.”
Peavey’s voice catches as he ponders his friends’ efforts. He pauses between sentences.
“We’re at that breaking point,” he says. “It’s fascinating. I so remember sitting in the doctor’s office in 2017 talking about diagnosis, prognosis, timeline, and we didn’t know if I had a month, three months, a year. We knew the stats said, at best, the survival rate for five years is 3%.
“What I so wish, and I know it’s not a pleasant conversation, but no one told us that this would take every dime we ever saved. And it’s not that we wouldn’t have accepted treatment. I just wish we knew. …
“It’s relentless because first the medical bills come and then you realize the other stuff doesn’t stop. Like your car still needs tires, you still need groceries. All the other stuff that you did budget for continues, but you didn’t budget for cancer bills.”
The Peaveys have qualified for financial aid from VCU Health, but it’s not enough. Moreover, during their last application process, the billing department referred them to a collection agency.
“It’s just a ruthless, relentless system where the health-care providers are some of the most amazing people I’ve ever come across,” Peavey says. “But the financial system is tough. I get choked up about this because it’s really hard to — like on one hand, you try to survive for your kids, but on the other hand, you’re draining every dime out of your family’s pocket. So it’s this real tough dichotomy.”
Peavey would not want this story to end with a somber note. As Thompson describes, he has stoically embraced “the truth of it all,” not just his cancer, but the entirety of a post-cancer existence that has presented him the sight of his alma mater winning a national basketball championship, the joy of renewed friendships and, most important, the gift of additional time with Sarah, Bodhi and Jane.
“As bad as cancer is,” Alex says, “the other end of that spectrum is something truly miraculous. (Faith) really helps you see with great clarity when, where and how God is always at work. …
“There may be a singular bad thing going on, but there’s a hundred helpers that come with it. And that’s what so potent.”
David Teel, david.teel@virginiamedia.com
