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Saturday, February 24, 2007
Legend of Maravich worth telling twice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
It has been nearly 20 years since Pete Maravich, after a little recreational half-court game with some new friends, said to one of them, “I feel great,” then suddenly dropped to the floor. Dead.
Twenty years. Then suddenly coming forth this wintry season two books about Peter Press Maravich (his real name). One titled “Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich,” the other “Maravich.” Neither reaching for a headline in the tabloids, each calmly telling a story to a generation that missed it. Two guys, Marshall Terrill and Wayne Federman, have enlisted the consultations of Jackie, Pete’s widow, now remarried. The other, Mark Kriegel, wings it alone. In the case of the Maravichs, there is more than enough to go around. Pete’s father, Press, was a smoldering Serbian whose life eventually rotated around Pete. Pete’s mother, a troubled woman, committed suicide. His brother was at one time a Marine, and another time a bartender.
You will read in one place or another, over and over, that there never has been another basketball player like Pete Maravich. Behind- the-back, through-the-legs passer, make a basketball do things that a pool shark does with a cue. He lived life from one extreme to the other. He set records as a player at LSU that will never be threatened, much less tied.
“He could do anything humanly possible with the basketball,” Bill Fitch, the former NBA coach, said. He grew up mainly in the South, when his dad coached at N.C. State, Clemson and LSU. He was his father’s project, and his meal ticket. It is said that as Press lay dying of cancer, about eight months before Pete’s death, Pete leaned into Press’ ear and said, “I’ll see you soon.”
By this time Pete had found his faith and turned down no opportunity to spread The Word.
Now, let me take you back to the year 1968, when he was riding the crest at LSU. Games I’d seen him play, shots I’d seen him make, such as the “impossible” 50-footer that beat Georgia in overtime, set him aside from anyone who’d ever touched a basketball. So in the course of pursuing a story for Sport magazine, I found him moody, wary of strange people who only wanted to look at him, and closely attached to his brother Ronnie, not an uplifting influence, in the words of Bud Johnson, the sports information at LSU.
“The way he’s going,” Johnson said of Pete, “I doubt that he’ll live to be 30 years old.”
After LSU, Atlanta was next. The NBA and ABA were at war, and Pete had signed a fat contract with Tom Cousins, who was trying to give downtown Atlanta a sports transfusion. That was largely through the influence of Bob Kent, Cousins’ point man and an old friend of Press Maravich.
But Atlanta was no bed of roses. Pete didn’t get along with Cotton Fitzsimmons, the coach, and it was obvious some black Hawks players resented him for his fat contract and his “Globetrotter style.” After saying, “When I die, I want to die in Atlanta,” he was traded to New Orleans and later to the Celtics, and the beat went on. This game, at which he felt like a circus performer, did not bring him peace of mind. “I sold my soul to basketball,” he said at one time.
Earlier, he had told a sportswriter in Pennsylvania, “I don’t want to play 10 years in the NBA, then drop dead of a heart attack at 40.”
It was an amazing premonition. Here was a man who had everything but a missing artery. “There’s something wrong with me. I can’t figure it out, ” he’d said not long before he collapsed.
It turned out that he had been born with only one major artery where there should have been two. Doctors were amazed that he hadn’t fallen out when he was young. But now he was 40, had flown to Pasadena to appear with the evangelist, Dr. James Dodson. First, there was a little recreational game to be played on a court in the Church of the Nazarene. Pete hadn’t touched a ball in a few months. Even so, he dominated the game, “outclassing everybody,” one the players said. It was during a break that Dr. Dodson asked, “How are you feeling now?”
And Pete answered, “I feel great.”
He had met the fate he feared, playing 10 years in the NBA and falling dead at 40. Take your pick. One book tells it about as well as the other. Best part is that Pete found out what was real in life.
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