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“What Pistol Pete was to
the no-look, 50-foot bounce pass Kriegel
may be to the sports biography: transcendent.”
—Booklist, Starred
Review
“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 Icarus
and Daedalus. 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
Too
young to have seen Pistol Pete Maravich
play?
Ponder this:
As it ended, Pete had 68 points, more
than any guard had ever scored in an NBA
game. Only Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor
had ever scored more. The line in the box
score read: 26 of 43 from the floor, 16
of 19 from the line. From the distances
recorded in the official running score,
he would have had 79 if there had been a
three-point line.
That's from Mark Kriegel's brilliant new
book, "Pistol", a biography of
the late floppy-socked genius whose life
was as tormented as it was poetic, as constrained
by family pull as it was free of earthly
bonds. The particular game described came
against the New York Knicks in 1977 (Pete
played for the New Orleans Jazz), and he
was guarded for most of the evening by Clyde
Frazier, who had made the NBA's All Defensive
team for seven consecutive years and is
considered one of the great guard defenders
of all time.
Didn't matter.
There
were times when nothing mattered at all
for Pete Maravich, when he was in a zone
that was impenetrable and without reason.
Pete could do things on a court that had
never been done before, and the fact he
was a white showman in an increasingly black
game made him stand like some kind of sideshow
freak. That he would believe aliens were
ready to land and take him to another planet,
that his childhood was at once resplendent
with basketball accomplishment and traumatized
by expectation and subservience -- Pete's
basketball coach dad Press Maravich never
let up on the boy -- only made the displays
on the hardwood that much more poignant.
You can see in the photo that there are
two manuscripts of the book, as well as
the advance reader's edition. Mark sent
me the first back in August, and we talked
for some time before I began reading. And
once I started reading, I couldn't stop.
But Mark was troubled. He wanted the book
to be called "Eyes of Mine", a
phrase from Press Maravich that embodied
the claustrophobic, contradictory father-son
relationship -- love and hate, fear and
joy, confidence and inadequacy -- that was
so intense it burned like a laser through
both men. "I don't know, you'll see
what I mean," Kriegel said with his
typical anguish. "But the publisher
doesn't like the title I want."
You can see the second ms. has the new and
permanent title Pistol stamped on it, and
so does the reader's review edition. Kriegel
is such an intense and exacting and wondrous
writer that it seems a pity he couldn't
have the title he wants. But Pistol is a
good title, simple, direct, easy to remember.
And it doesn't matter what the book is called,
it is a wonderful tale, reading like a page-turner
that couldn't be true.
I remember a couple years ago, after Mark
had written his outstanding, life-consuming
biography of Jets quarterback Joe Namath,
entitled simply, Namath, and Mark and I
were talking, and he was agonizing over
the choice for his next book. He bounced
topics off me, but he was torn with uncertainty.
There were a couple athletes he was pondering,
as well as dignitaries and, as I recall,
some Las Vegas character. It was not a frivolous
decision. Nothing is frivolous for this
author. When the former New York Daily News
sports columnist makes a plan to write about
a subject, that subject becomes his essence
for the unforeseeable future, and the immersion
is not unlike that of a mastodon lowering
itself into a tar pit.
I am ecstatic he finally chose Maravich
for his latest obsession. Mark Kriegel has
come up for air before his next immersion,
whatever that might be. You have to read
the product of his tumult, folks. You simply
must. It is that amazing.
-
Rick Telander's Heaven is a Playground blog
on ESPN.com
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