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Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich
Mark Kriegel
Free Press
February 2007
On Sale: February 6, 2007
400 pages
ISBN: 0743284976
EAN: 9780743284974
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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.
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