Where Have You Gone

SULLIVAN: This week marks the debut of a new basketball biography, PISTOL: The Life of Pete Maravich. Former Daily News sports writer, Mark Kriegel drains a three-point shot with this one. Kriegel was one of this city’s best sportswriters when The Daily News made the bad play of axing him and keeping the mean midget, Mike Lupica. But since he left his Daily News column he scored a touchdown in 2004 with his book on the New York Jets legend, Joe Namath, and in 2007 he is back and red hot with PISTOL.

Pete Maravich is a touchstone for older basketball fans. He worked his NBA magic from 1970-80 and those were dark days for the league. By 1976 the NBA was spinning out of control with thugs and drugs and Maravich was one of the few players you would even want to see play. He was a human highlight film. A tall and skinny guy who could do magic with a basketball, Maravich had the wildest passes and funniest dribbles and made you remember that basketball was fun.

Fun? Fun! And that is just what the NBA needs today. It has it in Steve Nash and Gilbert Arenas, and at times Dwyane Wade, but the NBA needs some Maravich sorcery before it devolves into a niche sport.

HOLLANDER: Kriegel wrote a biography, not a hagiography. During the dark days of the 1970s NBA, Maravich was one of its darkest characters. He suffered from severe depression and alcoholism. He was also convinced that UFO’s lurked among us.

Julius Erving called Pete Maravich a “basketball genius.” He was. But like many other geniuses—Bobby Fischer, Vincent Van Gogh, Frederich Nietzche—Pete Maravich was tormented by demons. Pete’s domineering father, Press Maravich, made little Pete do hundreds of innovative ball-handling drills nightly until his fingers bled. My favorite among these drills was teaching Pete to control his ball-handling at varying speeds by dribbling out of the open door of a moving car driven by his father. The result was a basketball wizard with combined talents the game had never seen before. The price was Pete’s sanity.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Pete Maravich. I could watch old film of him forever. His best days were in college at L.S.U. where his games became national events. Maravich is still the all-time leading NCAA scorer, averaging a staggering 44.2 points per game, without the benefit of a three-point line

As a pro, no one does or did everything Maravich did—a pure shot like Larry Bird, the ball-handling dazzle of Bob Cousy, court vision like Steve Nash and a repertoire of moves like Earl Monroe, Allen Iverson and Michael Jordan combined. And this guy knew how to be a rock star before anyone in the NBA knew what a “sports celebrity” was. He wore that crazy beatnik-meets-satantic goatee, sported a progressive Beatles mop-top, drove the flashiest sports cars and became the first NBA player to endorse a non-basketball product—Vitalis!

But unlike so many of today’s stars, Pete Maravich didn’t play basketball for a sneaker contract, a segment on MTV Cribs or ego-gratification. Pete Maravich played basketball to stay alive.

Less than a year after his induction to Basketball Hall of Fame, Maravich suddenly dropped dead at age 40. A stunned coroner discovered that Pistol Pete had been born without one of the two artery systems that supplies blood to the heart. This condition usually kills its victims before they are 20, sooner if the victims participate in strenuous activities.

It’s a medical miracle that Pete Maravich lived as long as he did. Somehow he knew basketball was his life support system. It made his heart whole. Knowing this, I find it hard to watch so many ungrateful NBA millionaires play night after night, year after year with no heart at all.

SULLIVAN: Well, yes, Pistol Pete was a rather odd bird, and as you insightfully write, most people of genius are. It is amazing to me given all your odd quirks and ticks that you are not a genius—just weird.

The Maravich book does dissect how his father worked Pete out to become Pistol Pete. But the book also gets into how the father Maravich was well ahead of his time. He was a great player and a great coach (John Wooden called Press Maravich a coaching genius). Press also hired African-Americans to his 1950s era pro-teams back when that was not a common thing. He saw what basketball could be and let his son carry that message.

Maravich’s weird behaviors may be explained by the fact that maybe he knew that his days would be short. Either way, Pistol Pete Maravich could teach these new school chuckers that are now ruining the NBA how the game could be played. The NBA still has not recovered since Michael Jordan retired. The only three that can save the league Arenas-Wade-Nash are out numbered by knuckleheads.

HOLLANDER: If today’s NBA players want to take anything thing from Maravich’s game it should be the fake. The guy had head fakes, shoulder fakes, ball fakes, hesitation fakes, stutter steps and other brilliant weapons of misdirection I’ve never seen since. So rarely in today’s game do you see an effective, studied use of the fake. Pete Maravich, on the other hand, had more fakes than a Houston tittie bar.

As we’ve said here, Maravich played in the NBA from 1970-80 and shed the mortal coil at 40 years of age. A spooky Maravich told a Pennsylvania reporter, years before his untimely demise, “I don’t want to play 10 years [in the NBA] and then die of a heart attack when I’m 40.”

I’m glad childhood doctors missed Pistol Pete’s heart defect or we may not have had him for as long as we did nor witnessed the magical form that he assumed.