Pistol lived up in end to man called Peter
By: Mike Lupica
Daily Sports News

He died playing half-court basketball at a Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, Calif. If you know anything about the life of Pete Maravich, you know that it was more fitting that he died at a church than playing basketball.

Maravich, who was 40 when his heart gave out yesterday, will be remembered as Pistol Pete, the most incredible basketball magician of them all. He will be remembered for all the points, for all the moments when the ball went behind his back and between his legs and finally through a hoop. And he ought to be remembered for a distinctive flair, a genius, only he possessed.

But Maravich would have preferred to be remembered as a Christian.

The extraordinary basketball magician became an extraordinary lay preacher in the last years of his life, speaking at churches, at his own Bible/basketball camps, anywhere where people, mostly kids, wanted to hear the story of his life. Pistol Pete Maravich went around and told people that the man he became was more important then the alcoholic basketball player he had been from college on.

Basketball never made him happy, for all the thrills he brought to crowds at LSU, later with the Hawks and Jazz and, briefly at the end, with the Celtics. His own Christianity, the preaching, did. Maravich was probably happier playing ball yesterday in Pasadena than he had ever been in his life.

“I feel great, “he said to a friend an hour before he died.

Christian athletes, members of “The God Squad,” are an easy target in sports. But if you make fun of Christian athletes, then you never heard Pete Maravich speak.

I did. There is a tape I have. It was sent by Paul Westphal, the ex-NBA player. Maravich was Westphal’s friend and Westphal is my friend, and Westphal sent the tape.

Maravich spoke at the home of Phoenix businessman Jimmy Walker, to about 300 people. Christians and non-Christians alike. Westphal introduced him. It was the fall of 1985.

“In the South,” Westphal said, “there’s Elvis, and there’s Pistol Pete. That’s it. In basketball, Pistol might not be the greatest player ever. But the way he played transcended the game. He was an artist. His canvas was the basketball floor, and his brush was the basketball. He didn’t always do everything right, but then Elvis didn’t make all hit records.” Westphal paused. “Only one guy got to be Elvis, though. And only one guy got to be Pistol Pete.”

Maravich got up then, looking lean and ready as when he played, when he brought his own brand of Showtime to his sport. He wore a striped shirt and jeans, and before he started, a kid handed him a basketball and asked him to spin it on his finger.

He grinned. “I, uh, used to be able to spin the ball . . . “ Then he got it going on his right index finger, and spun it faster and faster with his left hand, and the crowd gasped, the way it used to, and then he brought the ball under his arm and the ball was still spinning on Pistol Pete’s finger. What he could do, you never lose that. You carry it all the way to the last game you play before a heart attack. Pistol probably did some things yesterday.

“The only thing I ever knew was basketball,” he said in Phoenix. “I was dedicated, possessed, obsessed by it.”

He dribbled 2 ½ miles to his boyhood playground in Clemson, S.C., the same distance back. He dribbled on his bicycle. He dribbled in thunder and lightning storms. One time with his father, Press Maravich (who later coached him at LSU) had him dribble out the side of the car.

“My father said, ‘Let’s see if you can really control that thing, Pistol.’” Pistol showed him that he could.

On the tape he said that when he did go to church as a boy, he ticked off the seconds in his head, worrying the whole time. “I felt that while I was spending that hour in church, “ he said, “there was some kid in Philadelphia or Boston or New York or Los Angeles who was out playing ball, and when it came down to getting that scholarship I needed to go to college, he was going to get it.”

Pistol Pete estimated once that between the ages of 5 and 17, he spent 20,000 hours playing ball. It is an awfully sad story about youth and dreams.

When he was 12, and a local reporter gave him the nickname Pistol, he was asked what he wanted to do with his life.

“I want to play pro basketball, get a big diamond ring and make a million dollars, “the boy said. He was 4 feet, 9 inches tall.

He said when he was a teenager, he began drinking. His first beer, he said, was on the steps of a Methodist church in Clemson.

“I liked it a lot,” Maravich said.

Then: “Kids, don’t ever take that first drink, or that first drug. I’m not ashamed to stand up here and tell you I’m an alcoholic, even if I can’t get people to write that. All my friends drank like I did, and they were alcoholics too.”

Then: “It’s why I used to laugh inside at the fame I had in the ‘60s, and the wealth later on, and the way people idolized Pistol Pete, held me up as a role model. I wasn’t ever a role model. Never. None at all. Zero.” He told of ending up in a barroom fight while he was in college, having a girl finally stick a gun in his mouth and say, “You’re going to die Pistol Pete. “ And how he said to himself, “Yeah, kill me, at least I’ll have some peace.”

Through it all, he said, “I was searching for life.”

In the ‘70s, he tried yoga and TM and Hinduism and what he called UF-ology and vegetarianism and living on only fruits, finally getting into macrobiotics before becoming a recluse for two years after his basketball career ended in 1980.

“My life,” he said, “had no meaning at all. With everything I tried, I found only brief interludes of satisfaction. It was like what my whole life had been about, my whole basketball career, all of it: I found brief interludes of ego satisfaction.

He told all of this in a powerful voice, with clear eyes, to a quiet crowd in Jimmy Walker’s backyard in Phoenix, concluding with the story of his own religious awakening in 1982.

“I just said, ‘Lord, I got nowhere else to go,’” Pete Maravich said. “’If you don’t save me, I won’t last another two days.’”
He went from there, to the churches like the Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, to the North Lake Christian School back home in Louisiana, to the camps, bringing his unforgettable story to anyone who was lucky enough to listen.

“My life has never been the same,” he said in 1985. “I don’t have much time left, but the time I do have left I’m going to dedicate to the Lord.”

So he will be remembered today for 3,667 points at LSU and for things like scoring 68 points against the Knicks in 1977, for that 44.2 scoring average.

That was the Pistol.

It just wasn’t the Pete Maravich who died yesterday, who wanted to be remembered differently. I thought you might like to know him.