Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich
Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich book cover

Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich

Paperback – Illustrated, February 5, 2008

by
Price
$11.86
Format
Paperback
Pages
393
Publisher
Free Press
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0743284981
Dimensions
5.5 x 1.3 x 8.44 inches
Weight
14.9 ounces

Description

"I grew up possessed by the legend of 'Pistol' Pete Maravich. I've marveled at the supernatural skills of Michael Jordan, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Jerry West, Kobe Bryant -- all of them were greater basketball players than the 'Pistol'. Yet none of them could touch the magical, otherworldly qualities he brought to the court, the genius and wizardry and breathtaking creativity. He could light up a crowd like a match set to gasoline. His game was lordly, inimitable and he should have been the greatest player to ever play the game. This great book by Mark Kriegel will explain why he was not. I never saw a greater or more electrifying basketball player and the 'Pistol's' is one of the saddest stories ever told. What a book!" -- Pat Conroy, bestselling author of My Losing Season and The Prince of Tides "Pistol is a classic American tale wonderfully told. With deep research and a vivid narrative style, Mark Kriegel brings us the joy and sorrow of Pete Maravich, an inimitable basketball player who was both timeless and before his time, an original talent haunted by demons -- his father's and his own." -- David Maraniss, author of Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero "Pistol is not just a biography of a transcendent, doomed athlete; it is a mesmerizing tale of a striving, grasping American family as dramatic as myth, of a father and son as intertwined as Daedalus and Icarus. Kriegel has written the rarest of sports books: a fast-paced, through-the-night page-turner. This isn't a slam dunk, it's a tomahawk glass-shatterer. Pistol is nothing but sensational." -- Rick Telander, author of Heaven Is a Playground and senior sports columnist, Chicago Sun-Times "Pistol Pete's moves on the basketball court defied the laws of physics. He did things you can't even film. He deserves a biographer with magic powers of his own, and he's found one in Mark Kriegel." -- Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever "This is the best sports book I've read in years. The research, the writing, the pace -- it's All-Pro material." -- Terry Pluto, The Akron Beacon Journal "Mark Kriegel has written the sport's bio equivalent of Maravich on a fast break: dazzling and smart, and, even at 381 pages, over before you knew it." -- The Wall Street Journal " Pistol skillfully pulls off the balancing act required of good sports biography. It plays large historical forces (segregation, the rise of televised sports) against the individual magic of its subject." -- New York Magazine "A remarkable book that is the best researched biography yet of this revolutionary basketball player." -- The Raleigh News and Observer "Like the best journalists, Kriegel has the ability to get out of the way and let a good story tell itself." -- The Atlanta Journal Constitution "Pistol is a beautifully written book that captures the soul and inner turmoil of this son and father." -- The Tennessean Mark Kriegel is the author of two critically acclaimed bestsellers, Namath: A Biography and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich . He is a veteran columnist and a commentator for the NFL Network. He lives with his daughter, Holiday, in Santa Monica, California. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Pistol The Life of Pete Maravich By Mark Kriegel Free Press Copyright © 2008 Mark KriegelAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780743284981 Prologue January 5, 1988. They cannot see him, this slouched, ashen-faced man in their midst. To their oblivious eyes, he remains what he had been, unblemished by the years, much as he appeared on his first bubblegum card: a Beatlesque halo of hair, the fresh-faced, sad-eyed wizard cradling a grainy, leather orb. One of the regulars, a certified public accountant, had retrieved this very artifact the night before. He found it in a shoebox, tucked away with an old train set and a wooden fort in a crawlspace in his parents' basement. He brought it to the gym this morning to have it signed, or perhaps, in some way, sanctified. The 1970 rookie card of Pete Maravich, to whom the Atlanta Hawks had just awarded the richest contract in professional sport, notes the outstanding facts: that Maravich had been coached by his father, under whose tutelage he became "the most prolific scorer in the history of college basketball." Other salient statistics are provided in agate type: an average of 44.2 points a game, a total of 3,667 (this when nobody had scored 3,000). The records will never be broken. Still, they are woefully inadequate in measuring the contours of the Maravich myth. Even the CPA, for whom arithmetic is a vocation, understands the limitation in mere numbers. There is no integer denoting magic or memory. "He was important to us," the accountant would say. Maravich wasn't an archetype; he was several: child prodigy, prodigal son, his father's ransom in a Faustian bargain. He was a creature of contradictions, ever alone: the white hope of a black sport, a virtuoso stuck in an ensemble, an exuberant showman who couldn't look you in the eye, a vegetarian boozer, the athlete who lived like a rock star, a profligate, suicidal genius saved by Jesus Christ. Still, it's his caricature that evokes unqualified affection in men of a certain age. Pistol Pete, they called him. The Pistol is another relic of the seventies, not unlike bongs or Bruce Lee flicks: the skinny kid who mesmerized the basketball world with Globetrotter moves, floppy socks, and great hair. Pistol Pete was, in fact, his father's vision, built to the old man's exacting specifications. Press Maravich was a Serb. Ideas and language occurred to him in the mother tongue, and so one imagines him speaking to Pistol (yes, that's what he called him, too) as a father addressing his son in an old Serbian song: Cuj me sine oci moje, Cuvaj ono sto je tvoje...Listen to me, eyes of mine, guard that which is thine... The game in progress is a dance in deference to this patrimony. The Pistol is an inheritance, not just for the Maraviches, but for all the American sons who play this American game. The squeak of sneakers against the floor produces an oddly chirping melody. Then there's another rhythm, the respiration of men well past their prime, an assortment of white guys: the accountant, insurance salesmen, financial planners, even a preacher or two. "Just a bunch of duffers," recalls one. "Fat old men," smirks another. But they play as if Pistol Pete, or what's left of him, could summon the boys they once were. They acknowledge him with a superfluous flourish, vestigial teenage vanity -- an extra behind-the-back pass or an unnecessary between-the-legs dribble. The preacher, a gentle-voiced man of great renown in evangelical circles, reveals a feverishly competitive nature. After hitting a shot, he is heard to bellow, "You get that on camera?" The Parker Gymnasium at Pasadena's First Church of the Nazarene could pass for a good high school gym -- a clean, cavernous space with arching wooden rafters and large windows. At dawn, fully energized halogen lamps give off a glow to the outside world, a beacon to spirits searching for a game. As a boy, Maravich would have considered this a kind of heaven. Now, it's a way station of sorts. Pete begins wearily. He hasn't played in a long time and moves at one-quarter speed, if that. He does not jump; he shuffles. The ball seems like a shotput in his hands, his second attempt at the basket barely touching the front of the rim. But gradually, as the pace of his breath melds with the others' and he starts to sweat, Pete Maravich recovers something in himself. "The glimpse of greatness was in his ballhandling," recalls the accountant. "Every once in a while the hands would flicker. There would just be some kind of dribble or something. You could see a little of it in his hands, the greatness. Just the quickness of the beat." There was genius in that odd beat, the unexpected cadence, a measure of music. The Pistol's talent, now as then, was musical. He was as fluent as Mozart -- his game rising to the level of language -- but he was sold like Elvis, the white guy performing in a black idiom. And for a time, he was mad like Elvis, too. Once, in an attempt to establish contact with extraterrestrial life, he painted a message on his roof: "Take me." Deliver me, he meant. Now the accountant tries to blow past Pete with a nifty spin move. Pete tells him not to believe his own hype. The Pistol wears an easy grin. The men in this game are avid readers of the Bible. But perhaps the truth of this morning is to be found in the Koran: "Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime." Pete banks one in. That smile again. What a goof. The game ends. Guys trudge off to the water fountain. Pete continues to shoot around. And now, you wonder what he sees. Was it as he used to imagine? "The space will open up," he once said. "Beyond that will be heaven and when you go inside, then the space closes again and you are there...definitely a wonderful place...everyone you ever knew will be there." Back on earth, the preacher asks Pete Maravich how he feels. "I feel great," he says. Soon the phone will ring in Covington, Louisiana. A five-year-old boy hears the maid let out a sharp piercing howl. Then big old Irma quickly ushers the boy and his brother into another room. The boy closes the door behind him and considers himself in the mirror. He has his father's eyes. That's what everyone says. Eyes of mine, guard that which is thine. Guard that which fathers give to their sons to give to their sons. The boy looks through himself, and he knows: "My daddy's dead." Copyright © 2007 by Mark Kriegel Continues... Excerpted from Pistol by Mark Kriegel Copyright © 2008 by Mark Kriegel. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • The
  • New York Times
  • bestselling
  • Pistol
  • is more than the biography of a ballplayer. It's the stuff of classic novels: the story of a boy transformed by his father's dream—and the cost of that dream. Even as Pete Maravich became Pistol Pete—a basketball icon for baby boomers—all the Maraviches paid a price. Now acclaimed author Mark Kriegel has brilliantly captured the saga of an American family: its rise, its apparent ruin, and, finally, its redemption.
  • Almost four decades have passed since Maravich entered the national consciousness as basketball's boy wizard. No one had ever played the game like the kid with the floppy socks and shaggy hair. And all these years later, no one else ever has. The idea of Pistol Pete continues to resonate with young people today just as powerfully as it did with their fathers. In averaging 44.2 points a game at Louisiana State University, he established records that will never be broken. But even more enduring than the numbers was the sense of ecstasy and artistry with which he played. With the ball in his hands, Maravich had a singular power to inspire awe, inflict embarrassment, or even tell a joke. But he wasn't merely a mesmerizing showman. He was basketball's answer to Elvis, a white Southerner who sold Middle America on a black man's game. Like Elvis, he paid a terrible price, becoming a prisoner of his own fame. Set largely in the South, Kriegel's
  • Pistol,
  • a tale of obsession and basketball, fathers and sons, merges several archetypal characters. Maravich was a child prodigy, a prodigal son, his father's ransom in a Faustian bargain, and a Great White Hope. But he was also a creature of contradictions: always the outsider but a virtuoso in a team sport, an exuberant showman who wouldn't look you in the eye, a vegetarian boozer, an athlete who lived like a rock star, a suicidal genius saved by Jesus Christ. A renowned biographer
  • —People
  • magazine called him “a master”—Kriegel renders his subject with a style that is, by turns, heartbreaking, lyrical, and electric. The narrative begins in 1929, the year a missionary gave Pete's father a basketball. Press Maravich had been a neglected child trapped in a hellish industrial town, but the game enabled him to blossom. It also caused him to confuse basketball with salvation. The intensity of Press's obsession initiates a journey across three generations of Maraviches. Pistol Pete, a ballplayer unlike any other, was a product of his father's vanity and vision. But that dream continues to exact a price on Pete's own sons. Now in their twenties—and fatherless for most of their lives—they have waged their own struggles with the game and its ghosts.
  • Pistol
  • is an unforgettable biography. By telling one family's history, Kriegel has traced the history of the game and a large slice of the American narrative.

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Most Helpful Reviews

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A Better Rock

Along with countless other boys from the 1970s, I wore floppy hair and droopy socks as a nod to Pistol Pete Maravich. But even with my socks pulled down, Maravich was never my favorite basketball player. What he represented was coolness. Maravich was an unrepentant showboat and gunner whose teams generally lost. But he had a trump card to cover these sins that America accepted, Pistol Pete was never boring. Not once.

Washington Post movie critic Stephen Hunter has argued that Quentin Tarentino in his movies defines sin as boredom. Murder is acceptable as long as you are not boring. Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, which came out when Maravich was at the height of his fame, manipulated the audience to embrace greed and corruption. William Holden and his despicable crew became the ones the audience rooted for because they were fun. Maravich wasn't evil on the court in the same manner, but he opened the way for new definitions that were contra Herm Edwards, "YOU PLAY TO WIN THE GAME!" Maravich's desire was to be the show, and in what would be both his exaltation and damnation, he knew it. Like the culture around him, he wanted every eye on him, he needed every eye on him, and yet he couldn't handle every eye on him.

Mark Kriegel's great book, PISTOL, chronicles how Maravich was crashing off the floor while amazing people on it. Kriegel's genius, however, is weaving in the story of Pete's father and college basketball coach, Press. The story of the son can only be understood in relationship to the story of the father. As Kriegel puts it, "The father worshipped basketball; the son worshipped the father."

Petar "Press" Maravich was the only child of five that survived past six months born to Sara and Vajo Maravich. They were Serbians who lived in Aliquippa near Pittsburgh when steel mills and soot so dominated the area that it was depicted as "hell with the lid taken off." H.L. Mencken bluntly described Pittsburgh's surrounding cities as "unbroken and agonizing ugliness," which created the "most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye."

The greater Pittsburgh area, however, was not only known for its steel mills; it also had the highest percentage of Presbyterians per capita in the world. Ernest Anderton, an insurance agent who lived in nearby Beaver Falls, was also a lay worker for the Presbytery of Beaver County who converted a deserted Lutheran church in Aliquippa into the Logstown Mission. Anderton had a standing deal: go to Sunday school and you could play on the Missions' basketball court. Teenager Press Maravich eagerly put forth what was needed in this exchange. He read his Bible, sang Psalms and attended Sunday School, but the ultimate prize Anderton sought, a confession of faith, was not recorded. There was also no push to join the Presbyterian Church. Press and his friends who played on the Mission's basketball team, The Daniel Boys, never left the Serbian Orthodox Church. Kriegel puts the impact of the Mission on Press simply, "A Savior he had found. But it wasn't Jesus Christ."

That basketball became Press's religion through the evangelistic efforts of a Presbyterian was somewhat ironic considering that basketball inventor James Naismith graduated from Montreal's Presbyterian Theological Seminary. (Who knew Naismith had Presbyterian roots? Who knew Montreal had a Presbyterian seminary?) The gospel of basketball has spread in the late 1920s to Aliquippa through Geneva College and its star player, Nate Lippe. Turned down by the Pitt Medical School because he was Jewish, Lippe settled for coaching the Aliquippa high school team, and his star player in the mid-30s was Press Maravich.

It appeared that Maravich would play in college for Geneva or Duke (almost assuredly the last recruit the two schools battled over) but eventually he attended Davis and Elkins in West Virginia. After college, he played professionally before and after WWII, but his life changed in 1946 when he married a young Serbian widow with a son. Within a year, Peter Press Maravich was born.

By the early 50s, Press was back in Aliquippa coaching. Young Pete always wanted to be around his father, but his father was always around basketball. Consequently, Pete became all basketball. When the Aliquippa team would leave in the afternoon for away games, the father would turn the lights on the home court and give the son the one word instruction, "play." When the team returned usually around mid-night, they would be greeted by the son still shooting.

The son's ball handling skills amazed everyone. He was a prodigy and the father knew it. At the same time that he was spreading the gospel of Pete to close friends like UCLA coach John Wooden, Press also began climbing the coaching ladder. Clemson called, and then NC State which Press led to an improbable ACC championship in 1965. Meanwhile, Pete was creating his own legend dazzling everyone with his scoring feats and playmaking ability. The problem was that Press would only allow Pete to play for him in college, but Pete didn't have the board exam scores to enter NC State.

One school that didn't see that fact as problematic was LSU. Father and son were taken as a package in 1966 and the cult of Pistol Pete was born. Playing with teammates that were limited in talent, the Pistol started firing as soon as he walked on the court. He led the nation in scoring three consecutive years and walked away from LSU as the all-time leading scorer in NCAA history. John McPhee's 1965 A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE extolling Bill Bradley as the model student-athlete had been replaced by Curry Kirkpatrick's 1968 Sport Illustrated cover story on Maravich, "The Coed Boppers' Top Cat." Kirkpatrick wrote, "Everybody in the world, the world that really counts, will know Pistol Pete Maravich. He will make a million dollars playing the game of basketball." The difference to basketball purists, however, was that Bradley made everyone around him better and lifted his Princeton squad to the Final Four. Maravich teammates watched Pete shoot as LSU barely won fifty percent of its games during his tenure.

The Pistol got his million dollars from the Atlanta Hawks, but the superstar who lit up the college game stopped smiling. Turnover prone and often injured, Maravich struggled mightily with both the pro game and his teammates. The worst blow, however, was personal. His mother, who was perpetually drunk the last decade of her life, committed suicide during this time.

After four disappointing and disillusioned years in Atlanta, Pete was traded to the New Orleans Jazz where he blossomed into an NBA superstar. Natives wouldn't say, "Are you going to see the Jazz?" Rather, they would say "Are you going to see Pete?" But, despite otherworldly adoration, Pete never smiled. Finally making his signature between the legs pass late in a game the Jazz was winning, he blew out his knee. He would never be the same and within two years he retired from the game.

The year that followed he rarely left his home, became obsessive about pills and drugs, and played with his two infant sons. He also considered suicide. Then, in the midst of his despair, he accepted Christ. Pete believed Christ died for his sins and had set him free from guilt and shame. He joined a Baptist Church and started holding a summer basketball camp at Clearwater Christian College. He also started to smile for the first time in years.

His wife, Jackie, at first was skeptical about Pete's conversion to Christianity. He had collected many "isms" -vegetarianism, Hinduism, and extraterrestrialism. What she found was that her husband was a changed man, that this was not a fad. She commented, "He was a different person. I saw how happy he was, how he was at peace with everything."

One person that Pete had to tell was his father Press. After Helen Maravich's death, Press had stopped coaching and devoted himself to caring for Diana, the daughter that his stepson Ronnie had abandoned. The confession that Press did not make at the Logstown Mission occurred when he joined the First Baptist Church and was baptized.

Two years later Press learned that he had inoperative cancer. Father and son once more were inseparable, only this time the bond was Christ. They would read the Bible and pray together. Pete would carry his father up and down the stairs and stay with him in his bedroom until he fell asleep. Press died with Pete at his side.

By this time, Pete was garnering attention again, but now it was for his devotion to Christ. Just as his playing basketball had an event, now his testimony was an event. He joined Billy Graham in his evangelistic campaigns. He appeared on television. On the day that he was going to conduct an interview with Focus on the Family's James Dobson, Pete accepted an invitation from Dobson to join in a morning basketball game, something that he hadn't done in years. Talking to Dobson during a break when the other players were getting a drink, Pete collapsed on the court. Dobson and former UCLA player Ralph Drollinger were able to revive him.

The autopsy determined that Pete was born without a complete artery system, a condition that almost universally causes sudden death in young athletes. Of Pete's legacy, Kriegel writes, "Whatever doubts still lingered about Pete's standing in the game or even his place in popular culture ended with his death. His image would be eternally consigned--along with the likes of James Dean, Elvis, and at least a couple of Kennedys--to a celebrity purgatory reserved for the young dead." It could be argued, however, that the more powerful legacy was the joy and peace that marked Pete Maravich as a Christian living in obscurity and quietly serving others.
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Too much Press, not enough Pistol

Press is Pistol's dad, and he received more pages in Mr. Kreigel's biography of Pistol then Pistol's professional career and the players, coaches, staff and execs he played with. Mark Kriegel is the author of one of my favorite sports biographies, Namath.

"Lost amid the celebration of Pete's game was the fact that LSU, suffering from overconfidence and sunburn, somehow managed to lose to Yale in the tournaments championship round. Then again, by now, championships seemed almost pedestrian in relation to this real-life myth. All anyone would remember was the Pistol, a boy who transformed mere headlines into encomiums. Consider the January 6, 1970, edition of America's newspaper of record, the New York Times: 'Maravich Is Hailed as Basketball Artist.'" From Pistol, the Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kreigel.

This would have been a great start to this book, but it was page 162. The beginning was a chore. If you want to read a hilarious and interesting book about 1970's professional basketball, check out Terry Pluto's Loose Balls. Pistol Pete Maravich was cut from the ABA cloth of crazy personalities, even though he payed in the NBA, although an expansion team, the Jazz of New Orleans. Pistol believed in UFO's, he drank a lot despite having an organic diet filled with vitamins. Pete drove fast, really fast, he was into karate, and above all else, the creator of Showtime. I would have liked volumes on this Pistol, and the people around him.

Pistol Pete Maravich lived a short, influential, exciting and charmed life.

I like that Mr. Kreigel included Pete's sons, Jaeson and Josh. I found the REAL tragedy in the lack of respect Josh received from Coach John Brady as a 4 year LSU walk-on. Coach John Brady sat Josh for no other reason then his name being Maravich. This egomaniac Brady illustrated his character on Senior Day when LSU hosted Vandy at the P-Mac (the stadium named after Josh's father). In the game LSU easily defeats Vanderbilt 81-69. The only senior that did not play was Josh Maravich. I cannot imagine how a mentor, coach, leader of young men could handle a boy and team like this, but it helps explain why he is no longer coaching SEC basketball. I would NEVER let my son play for a, using the word loosely "man" with the character of John Brady. And if there was a reason the young Maravich should not have been allowed to play, then he should not have been shamed by dressing and riding the bench for four years.

Mr. Kriegel is a wonderful writer and reporter. Pistol is very well researched with a few dozen pages of notes and references in the back.

I loved the grit and emotion in Mr. Kriegel's novel Bless Me, Father. It also captures NYC basketball as well as the violence of boxing and the complex relationship between a father and son. I highly recommend it.
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More Than a Sports Biography

When I was 12 a lot of girls my age had Donny Osmond posters on their bedroom walls, but I had a poster of Pete Maravich driving toward the basket. My dad called Maravich a hot-dogger, but I loved watching his exciting play and felt drawn to his sad-dog eyes and run-your-fingers-through-it hair. (I promise this review will get less girly in a minute.) I moved on to other things and it barely registered when he died of congenital heart failure in 1988.

I saw his name on a list of the 50 greatest basketball players in history a few of years ago coupled with a report of his untimely death and became interested in learning more about him. I started with articles on the Internet, then looked for a biography. I did not necessarily want an "authorized" biography, fearing hagiography. "Pistol" author Mark Kriegel clearly had cooperation from the Maravich family, but seems to be telling an independent story.

Kriegel has more on his mind than a blow-by-blow account of every game Pete Maravich ever played, though there are plenty of sports page type summaries of games and scoring for readers who like that sort of thing. Far beyond mere sport, "Pistol" seeks to tell a story of the immigrant experience, sports as a way out of a harsh blue-collar world, sports as big business, sports as show business, American black-white race relations from the 1950s through the 1970s, and above all, fathers and sons.

Whatever else Pete Maravich might have been, he was, in Kriegel's account, his father's creation. Pete's father Press, the son of a Serbian immigrant steel worker who had settled in the bleak industrial community of Aliquippa, PA, was an early professional basketball player who ultimately made his career as a prep school and university basketball coach. From infancy Press had Pete holding a basketball, bouncing a basketball, sleeping with a basketball as other toddlers might sleep with a favorite blanket or stuffed animal. Certainly Pete had talent and enough interest that he did not rebel, even giving up his dream of playing college basketball at West Virginia to follow Press when Press was hired to develop a basketball program at Louisiana State.

Press no doubt meant well. The story of how he raised his stepson's child as his own daughter and played Mr. Mom when his wife's alcoholism and depression left her incapacitated is very sweet. Still, one can't help wondering how Pete might have developed, if he would have become more well-rounded and less isolated, odd and prone to zealot's enthusiasms, had Press not tried so hard to keep him in a windowless, doorless basketball box from the day he was born. One can't help wondering if other members of Pete's family might have lived happier lives if relationships other than Press-Pete had received equal attention. Pete's mother committed suicide and his older half-brother drifted into crime.

Sometimes I found "Pistol" rather heavy going. I was mainly interested in learning about Pete, so did not need quite so much detail about the teams Press coached, or quite so many blow-by-blow game reports, though your mileage may vary depending on what you like in sports bios. I did like Kriegel's writing for the most part, and appreciated the effort to fulfill the book title's promise to tell the story not only of Pete Maravich's life, but the world in which he lived. I would have rated the book even higher had it given me more insight into what Pete Maravich thought and felt and what motivated him, though in fairness to Kriegel I'm not sure there's a lot of material available.
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Federman's book is much better. Even the autobiography is better.

A quick note on some of the negative reviews here: please rate the BOOK. Do not "rate" a human being and give your opinions of Pete Maravich himself.

Back to the book -- I've read this book in addition to Wayne Federman's bio of Pete. Federman's book is better, hands down.

Is Kriegel even a fan of Maravich? He writes about Maravich in the way that I imagine a typical Millennial, fresh out of majoring in English at a lib arts college, would write a bio. Everything seems to be filtered through a lens of race and typical modern jaded aloofness.

For example, Mark seems to have an obsession with race. I get it, Mark -- Pete was white. When he died, it was with a group of wheezing, old, white men. Pete's white, everyone. Basketball is played predominantly by black people. Apparently no white boys could stop Pete when he was in high school. Black. White. Race. White. Got it, yet? You are reminded of Pete's "unbearable whiteness" (yes, that is the name of an entire chapter) throughout the book. A couple sentences here and there would've hammered it home.

Throw in the tone of the book, which (for the most part) paints Pete is a spoiled daddy's boy who was a bit of an airhead, and you've got Kriegel's bio.

I am glossing over the parts of the book where Kriegel does occasionally describe Pete as a magician with the ball -- a great, innovative player who was one of the best offensive players ever.
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Excellent

I have read many sports bios, and have actually read a couple other books on Maravich. This is my favorite by far and actually in my top 5 books to date! The story is fleshed out from top to bottom. Sadly we won't ever truly understand Pistol Pete but this brings any fan close. The details on his parents give such a brilliant backdrop. I was moved to tears several times, and I don't think any person reading this book can end it without wishing a little wistfully that somehow, some way, you could have known him.
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I Couldn't Help But Feel Sad For This Superstar Athlete

I felt sad after finishing this excellent biography; sad for "The Pistol." I don't think he ever got his due as a basketball player, despite his notoriety.

Some know exactly how good he was; ask Magic Johnson about Maravich and his eyes will light up. However, this isn't just another sports book; it's a very human look at a sports phenom and his overly-ambitious dad and how the kid dealt with tremendous pressures. You try being "the Great White Hope" of pro basketball, a kid driven to succeed like few others, and see how you handle life. Maravich certainly didn't help himself in some areas, so it's a two-way street concerning wheter his basketball legacy is what it deserves to be.

Whatever, this is a good read about a very, very interesting player, who could do things with a basketball at the age of nine that no adult could do. "The Pistol" was one-of-a-kind and author Mark Kriegel does a great job of presenting Pete and those surrounding him over the years in a very objective light.

There is very little bias in this book: you get all the good and all the bad. Highly recommended.
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Misleading Title. Should be Titled: Troubled Soul

Why is Pete Maravich a legend? Why is he, to this day, one of the most celebrated athletes of all time? Why did kids have photos and posters of him all over their bedroom walls? In short, why was Pete Maravich a significant figure? He was not celebrated and he does not go down in history because he was troubled off the court.

You will learn from this book that Pete was profoundly troubled, and you will learn why. Is that what you want from a book about Pete Maravich? I’m not suggesting that Pete’s demons should be off limits. I just think that they are too central to this book. If Pete had been President or something, this examination of his inner turmoil might have been fascinating. But he wasn’t. It’s a book that sacrifices the story in order to tell a great deal of backstory, on the false assumption that this backstory is valuable and interesting merely because it hasn’t been told before.

For millions, Pete was a magical figure. You’ll struggle to understand why after reading this book.
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too complicated / bad language

This booked should be rated "R", as it uses bad language.
Also too complicated to read and keep up with for teenagers.
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Great Book On A Scoring Genius!

Terrific book about the ups and downs of one of the best offensive basketball stars of all time. A lot of time is spent on the Maravich father and son team, which is very interesting. And after finishing the book — it’s fair to say that Pistol Pete was ahead of his time as far as how he played the game. Had Pete played in the 90s (the golden-age of basketball) — he would’ve given Jordan a run for his money!
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The Lives of Several Maraviches

I’ve read lots of biographies that warm up with a family background. This book starts with Press Maravich as a 14 year old. He’s in Pennsylvania fighting to stay out of the mining tunnel high school graduates or dropouts always faced. There is no athleticism in his basketball. The set-shots Mark Kriegel describes make basketball seem like a still-life picture. But he planned ahead to a dream of a different game, black players seeping in about the time Mike Ditka would have been in high school, and the dream included the fast break. I got to page 37, then 50, then page 100, still waiting for the story to shift from Press Maravich to Pete Maravich, high school prodigy and greatest college basketball scorer ever. The name is Serbian, and Press was raised as an outcast half-brother. Either Kriegel didn’t have enough about Pete or he tried too hard to meld one man’s life into a patriarchy of basketball tradition, even dragging on the book for twenty extra pages with the nondescript stories of Josh and Jaeson struggling to play meaningful games beyond high school.
The draw for me is Maravich the wandering spirit first, basketball legend second. Showtime never really meant much, LSU’s competition was primarily white, and Maravich was below average at vertical basketball, not average as Kriegel claims. The NBA stories are as exciting as the NBA of the 1970s, when the ABA stole some of its thunder and race was still unsorted in discovering the way the game was supposed to be played as it was in its pinnacle year of 1992. The author is fairly adept at stringing the reader along emotionally, on one page detailing the exploits of a fifty plus point game and on the next a disappointing loss with the prodigal son and his turnovers the problem. There were girls; none of this is detailed but his wife. There was drinking, but this isn’t an alcoholics testimony. Again, it’s beer and there are words and fights but hardly anything beyond vague paragraphs that could be chronologically dated by the tournament LSU was about to lose. As Pete becomes the star, Press is still important because he lost his coaching skill, sacrificed for the glory of his son’s prowess where “football was king” in the burgeoning SEC.
The book speeds up in the NBA because Press isn’t a coach there anymore. Press goes to Appalachian State, and his wife Helen commits suicide over the phone. But for every 10 pages on Press, there is one sentence on her. Kriegel’s terminology is crude; while fitting into the vernacular of 1970s playgrounds and locker rooms, he loses touch with where to stop, such as on page 108: “As Helen went off to one nuthouse, Ronnie [half-brother] went to another, a place called Vietnam.” There are also all the “white boy” comments about Pete, when a more responsible biographer would separate himself from the likes of Cotton Fitzsimmons or Coach Richie Guerin, who broke Pete Maravich in to the real, integrated world of basketball by reminding him that dads don’t coach in the NBA. Larry Merchant, writer out of New York. Jim Huber, before CNN. Peter Vecsey, called by Kriegel the game’s “cruelest critic”. On page 199, Wilt Chamberlain calls a short white player named Herbie White the best dunker he had ever seen. Rich Kelley is another blast from the past, another figure from the days when all levels of talents were considered coachable and practicable. Basketball has such a thin lineage, and the old names seem to go back to the peach basket days, to dirt and hours of practice on how to set a good screen. And that leaves Pete Maravich, a white player who will never stand at the top of the game because the game was so retarded by Jim Crow. But Clyde Frazier does go from taunting the LSU star in 1970 to respect for the NBA’s scoring champion of 1977. Just as Chamberlain’s teammates manipulated the actual game during the 100 point legend, it seems as though much of Maravich’s exploits were marketing endeavors, and the NBA was right not to be ready for Showtime in the hands of this selfish a player. Most Showtimes since, after all, such as Allen Iverson and Kenny Anderson and now Ricky Rubio, don’t help the game as much as they help the league.
As always the case, the revisiting of the final hours is riveting. Maravich was out of shape, gaunt, light, and his shoulder pain most likely a sign of his fatal heart problem. It’s strange to imagine regular guys trying to keep up with Pete Maravich, and then seeing that they mixed him into their crowd. My morbid review of that morning in LA is that Maravich was not a truly singular legend of the game because he did not dominate the scrimmage played minutes before his collapse. I am torn by race, trying not to believe his legend could be true, hoping that there will be a sequel.
The book is wrong. “Dunking was something else [Maravich] had never done in a game.” YouTube proves this quote on page 303 incorrect.
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