Profile: “Pistol” Pete Maravich

Play, at its best, often emulates work. “Pistol” Pete Maravich, one of the all-time great basketball players, took the sport of basketball and transformed it forever through hard work and tireless practice.

In the late 1960s, a gangly kid from the small steel town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, changed the game of basketball forever. Behind-the-back dribbling, over-the-head passes, circus shots, head fakes, long-range shots—everything you see in today’s NBA games is owed almost solely to one man: Pete Maravich.

Even before NBA stars like LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Julius Erving were executing highlight film shots and passes, there was Pete Maravich, the original basketball showman.

Born to a Serbian American family outside the city of Pittsburgh, Maravich grew up under the tutelage of his father and coach, Press Maravich, a former pro basketball player himself. Maravich lived and breathed basketball from an early age, often practicing eight hours a day. He became notorious for developing drills and tricks with the basketball that had never been done before. He would dribble the ball between his legs and around his back at dizzying speeds, and then do it again with his opposite hand or with two basketballs.

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Maravich would do anything he could think of to increase his ball handling skills and hand-eye coordination. He would dribble around the house, to school, and anywhere he could bounce a ball. His father would even drive the car while he leaned out the window practicing dribbling at different speeds!

In the eighth grade, Maravich played for the high school varsity team. He was always the best dribbler on the court, but he lacked the strength for long shots. In order to compensate, he would shoot straight from his hip, earning his famous nickname “Pistol.” After becoming a highly touted prospect in high school, Maravich followed his father to Louisiana State University where his father became the new head coach.

In the 1960s, college freshman were not allowed to play at the college varsity level in the NCAA. So Maravich spent his first year of college on the freshman team, which quickly surpassed the varsity team as the most popular game on campus. So many fans would come to watch the Pistol’s never-seen-before antics that the varsity games would often be nearly empty.

In 1967, Maravich joined the varsity team and took the world of college basketball by storm. For the next three years, he averaged an astronomical 44.2 points a game and led the NCAA in scoring each year. He is still the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer with 3,667 points. Don’t forget that Maravich played in an era when there was no three-point line. Basketball experts estimate that he could have averaged almost 57 points a game with the modern college rules.

After leaving LSU in 1970, Maravich was the third pick in that year’s NBA draft and signed a $1.9 million contract with the Atlanta Hawks, one of the highest salaries at that time. Maravich’s high salary and flashy style made his transition to the NBA tough. While the crowd loved him, his teammates and coach were irritated by his style. Maravich became one of the top five scorers in the league and an all-star selection, but he could never make it off losing teams. In 1980, Maravich retired from basketball after severe knee injuries kept sidelining him.

Stripped of basketball at an early age, Maravich was suddenly lost in the world. He said, “My life had no meaning at all. I found only brief interludes of satisfaction. It was as if my whole life had been about my whole basketball career.” Turning to alcohol and empty soul-searching, the next few years were a low point in Pistol Pete’s life. Then, in 1982, Pete found peace in Christianity.

Soon after, he became a lay pastor and traveled the country to teach basketball and relate his story. During a speech he delivered in 1982, Pete said, “There is nothing wrong with dedication and goals, but if you focus on yourself, all the lights fade away and you become a fleeting moment in life. I lived my life one way for thirty-five years, for me. And then the focus came in on who I really was.”

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On January 5, 1988, while playing a pickup game at a church in Pasadena, California, with a group of men, including Dr. James Dobson, Maravich collapsed and died at the age of forty from a sudden heart attack. An autopsy revealed that Maravich was born with a rare congenital defect and was missing his left coronary artery. For his entire life, his severely enlarged right coronary artery had been compensating for the defect. Dobson said that Maravich’s last words, only minutes before he died, were, “I feel great.”