Pistol Pete
I wanna tell you all a story about a guy named Pistol Pete Maravich. Maravich was a college basketball star from 1966-67 to 1969-70 for LSU and played professional basketball during the next ten years (basically the 1970’s) for three teams, mostly the Atlanta Hawks and the then New Orleans Jazz. To say Pistol Pete could score and handle a basketball is like saying Jimi Hendrix could play music and handle a guitar.
Pete Maravich grew up with a basketball in his hands. Legend has it that as a child he used to dribble a basketball to and from school, because, well, he was Pete Maravich and that’s what people who loved basketball did. He got really good being an early version of the gym rat that lived and breathed basketball. Besides great ball handling skills developed in his youth, he also learned trick shots, passing, and most importantly, how to score. And man oh man, could this guy score.
Back when Pete played college ball, freshmen in college could not play on the varsity and could only play freshmen ball. The same thing happened to Lew Alcindor, now more commonly known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, another player who played at that same time, who also HAD to play freshmen ball his first year. So, all Pete did as a freshman was to average 43.6 points per game and over 10 rebounds a game, even though he was the equivalent of a point guard. But he was just getting warmed up.
As an LSU sophomore, he averaged 43.8 points, 7 rebounds and 4 assists per game. As a junior, he averaged 44.2 points, 6.5 rebounds and 4.9 assists a game. And as a senior, he averaged 44.5 points, 5.3 rebounds and 6.2 assists per game. That is averaging OVER 44 points a game for his whole career! That’s not just scoring over forty points a couple of times in his career, which would be good. I repeat, it is AVERAGING over 44 points per game for an 83 game career. And there were many games where he was either double teamed a lot of the game, or his opposition threw various zones and box and one defenses to try to slow him down. And he STILL was able to maintain that amazing average.
And in the era when Pete played, there was NO three point shot. This is notable because Maravich probably hit a half dozen or more shots a game from close to 25 feet out or easy three point distance, which under today’s scoring rules might have pushed his career average closer to 50 per game. Pistol Pete still remains as the all time leading scorer in NCAA history, even though he compiled his totals in only three seasons (compared to others who had four seasons). 44 points a game! (let’s see one of Dick Vitale’s diaper dandies beat THAT record) There are teams that barely average that.
He also was a very good professional player. His professional career scoring average over his ten year career was a tick over 24 points per game. He once scored 68 points in an NBA game and had 35 games where he went for 40 or more. (by the way, the NBA did not have a three point line until the 79-80 season, Maravich’s last). He made a few All-NBA first or second teams, five all star games, and showed enough basketball playing excellence that his election to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame was an easy first ballot decision. He was also named on the NBA’s list of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History.
But just as impressive as Maravich’s scoring records were, his dazzling passing skills, his creative ballhandling sorcery, and his ability to beat defenses with one on one moves and spectacular, off balance shots that only a creative genius could come up with — they were just as memorable. He knew how to put spin on the ball during a shot or a pass in ways that defied logic. He was truly one of the first great showmen of the sport, a one man Harlem Globetrotter of a basketball playing savant. He was Magic Johnson-like excitement before Magic hit the scene. If you went to a game where Pete Maravich was playing, you were almost guaranteed to see some kind of move, pass or shot that was so dazzling, so spectacular, it would blow your mind. The mind’s eye looks back at Pete Maravich plays the same way it looks back at Gale Sayers’ runs, Sandy Koufax’s pitches and Bobby Orr’s rushes up the ice.
And then, after he retired from basketball due to his bad knees, Maravich went on a search for the identity of who he was going to be after basketball. He searched and searched and searched to try to find himself. One day he found himself and became an evangelical Christian. And then, just as quickly, it all ended. In 1988, at the age of 40, he collapsed on a basketball court during a pickup game and died from heart failure. It turns out he had a rare heart defect that could have killed him at any time during his earlier basketball career but had waited until that fateful day to give out. The basketball genius, that seemed to have been born on a basketball court, turned out to have died there too. As it was in the beginning. How it ended. The Circle of Life. Sometimes, that’s how legends go out.
It always seems to happen that way. The brilliant, one of a kind, meteoric talents, the geniuses of the world, they always seem to die young. They accomplish so much in such a short time, unleashing so much amazing talent and achievement onto the world that it staggers the mind. They are like the bright star. At first it flashes so brightly, and you stare in amazement at its brightness. Then, when it burns out and is gone, we are only left to remember how brilliant and dazzling it once was.
Our society and the byte by byte nature of information being consumed every minute of the day sometimes makes people think the only things that matter are that which happens now and what will happen in the very near future. As if this world all began when they were born and why should they care about what happened before they were born. Some things are worth the effort of looking back. The legend of Pistol Pete Maravich should not be forgotten.
