Book Review: Pistol

Pistol is a darkly beautiful study of one of America’s quintessential 1970s athletes, “Pistol” Pete Maravich. Brilliantly flashy and groundbreaking on the court, Maravich was also eccentric and self-destructive off of it. Haunted by expectations from his father, his teammates, and his fans, Maravich had a tragically truncated career and life. Thus, in keeping consistent with the tradition of modern sports biographies (ushered in by Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life), Pistol's author Mark Kriegel does not shy away from documenting the bad (alcoholism, depression, self-centeredness, family abandonment) equitably with the good.

However, anyone expecting a straightforward biography will be surprised to find themselves roughly 100 pages into the book before our hero makes his proper appearance. This is because Pistol rightfully serves as a dual biography: Pete’s father Press is every bit as engrossing a protagonist as his prodigious son. Further, as the reader comes to find, the two were entwined in life, basketball, and possibly even death. Accordingly, Press’s rise to prominence comprises the book’s opening act. A first generation Serbian-American, Press Maravich fell in love with the fledgling sport of basketball as a child and used it as a vehicle to escape the near-inevitability of a grim life in the West Virginia mines. One of the early barnstormers, Press played, promoted, and coached the game in front of a postwar nation in need of a winter pastime, and the pleasure he took from the sport was often his only meaningful remuneration. Moving from the coach of Western Virginia high schools to Clemson to one of the premiere jobs in the country, NC State, Press established himself as one of sport’s great founding fathers.

And then along came Pete.

Dribbling just about as soon as he could walk, Pete was the prototypical savant, and the book dutifully chronicles the conflicts often posed by child prodigies. Though this topic has been explored before in movies such as Searching For Bobby Fischer and Little Man Tate, the difference in Maravich’s case is that the child shows ability in an area about which one of the parents is already passionate. Predictably, therefore, Press threw himself into molding Pete’s skills, often to the detriment of his own career, the other kids he coached, his wife, and Pete’s brother Ronnie. Press also made it clear to Pete at an early age that anything was acceptable except failure on the basketball court. As perspicacious as Press was about Pete’s long-term basketball potential, he seemed just as oblivious to the rest of Pete’s development, including his educational and emotional needs. Meanwhile, Press’s wife Hannah failed to supplement Press’s parenting shortcomings by lapsing into alcoholism and, eventually, suicide.

Nevertheless, Maravich forged ahead, fully aware of his talents and the stakes Press had placed on him. The two of them went to LSU, obscure in the college basketball world at the time, as something of a packaged duo: Pete the star player and Press the coach. Maravich then became a national sensation for his scoring exploits and his unique ball-handling showmanship, as well as a box office smash at LSU's Cow Palace. He graduated in 1970 as the all-time collegiate scoring leader, albeit without an NCAA championship to his name. Pete's presence also had a detrimental effect on Press's professional reputation, as the man formerly renowned for his basketball intellect began receiving scorn over the gross favoritism he showed his son.

Basketball is unique in that one player’s success necessarily detracts from the opportunities of his or her teammates. It is a dynamic that followers of today’s NBA certainly recognize with stars such as Allen Iverson. Thus in college began Maravich’s eventual mixed professional legacy as a sort of double-edged sword: his entertaining style of play and his requirement to be the offensive linchpin ensured ticket sales and fan interest but not collective team success. For Maravich, first with the nascent Atlanta Hawks and then the expansion New Orleans Jazz, his teams’ definitive lack of talent and experience amplified his own shortcomings. Further, his lucrative, highly-publicized contracts, his frailty and propensity for injury, and his reckless off-court habits (I actually lost count of the number of DUI’s he accumulated), only exacerbated his problems and his teammates' perception of him. All too often Maravich bred resentment from teammates who felt underutilized and unappreciated.

Sometimes it seems as if an alarmingly high rate of humans are ill-equipped emotionally and physically to handle the realities of the world—even if we do not suffer true catastrophes, such as the loss of limb or eyesight. Instead, many of us succumb to intangible stimuli, such as pressure, disappointment, and failure. I have always found this fascinating, considering that these are artificial constructs, and yet the suffering they cause is very real. The Pistol was no exception, as the psychological impact of not being able to score enough points so that his basketball team could win a championship—seemingly trivial maladies in the grand scheme of things—took its toll. Alcohol was his escape, as were paranoia and passionate infatuations with karate, vegetarianism, and aliens (he referred to his various manias as his “isms”). But they all failed to adequately sublimate his anxiety and depression: after a brief stint with the Celtics, Maravich was out of basketball in 1980, physically crumbling and emotionally spent.

His story didn’t quite end there, though. In fact, Maravich recovered enough to reconcile his marriage and raise two fine sons. He also discovered God and became a somewhat prominent evangelist, much to the bemusement and occasional aggravation of his faithful wife, Jackie. Coincidentally (or was it?), his life ended in 1988, just months after he made peace with and buried his father.

Those looking for detailed, season-by-season recaps of Maravich’s play might be dissatisfied with Kriegel’s book, though the key statistics are dutifully relayed (5 All-Star appearances, 2 First Team All-NBA and 2 Second Team All-NBA honors, 1 scoring championship). As with Maravich’s game, Pistol’s strength exists outside and between the facts and figures. Kriegel concerns himself mostly with Maravich’s influence on the game and the fans. As such, Kriegel’s extensive interviews vividly recapture Pistol’s complex relations with his teammates and (especially) his father, his spreading of the game’s gospel to new frontiers (Pete one-upped Babe Ruth and “built” two arenas, the Omni in Atlanta and the Superdome in New Orleans), and his legacy as one of basketball’s all-time unique superstars. Kriegel astutely points out that Maravich’s closest parallel was not another basketball player, it was an entertainer: Elvis Presley. Both southerners popularized a predominantly black art form for consumption by the white masses with bombastic style and controversy. And both died young. Nevertheless, Pistol’s beauty is demonstrating that the significance and mystique of Maravich, the man whose game was built for highlights before there was such a thing, is everlasting.