Fathers & Sons & Sports (11 page)

By then Robinson had an idea of how good the kid was; they would play one-on-one most Saturdays. But he had never seen Pete as he was that day: the way he taunted starters on an ACC championship team, teasing them with that high yo-yo dribble. And then, as soon as one of them leaned or lunged, he was embarrassed; Pete was gone.

Bradley was hypnotically economical. Pete was his stylistic antithesis. Everything about this boy’s game was funky and flagrant. He went behind the back, over the back, between his legs, between your legs. Then there was that pass with English on it, the one that bounced off the floor at an absurd angle. Years later a basketball writer would liken the ball’s movement to something that came off a pool hustler’s cue. But the sense of timing suggested an accomplished comedian.

As the game wound down, toward the end of its third hour, Pete invented a shot. He was fading to a corner. The stairs down to the dressing room were just beyond the court. “Going down,” Pete called as he threw up a high, arcing hook shot. He didn’t even break his stride, didn’t stop to watch it swish though the net. He just kept going, right on down to the locker room.

Coker and Robinson ambled over to the bench and sat, speechless, shaking their heads. Finally, Coker spoke: “Les, you ever see anything like that?”

Robinson shook his head no.

Coker said, “I think he might be …”

Robinson was nodding now.

“… might be the best who ever was.”

Working at the edge of art and science, father and son produced a kind of vaudeville. “Showtime,” they called it. They had come as a package deal to LSU, another football school, in 1966, and they toured the state of Louisiana, hitting towns like Shreveport and Alexandria, enticing the people, provoking their
gossip, selling them on Tigers basketball. Each LSU player had his own Homework Basketball drill to perform as a specialty. But the main attraction—nay, the only attraction—was Pete. “Pete was an advertising campaign,” says Bud Johnson, the LSU publicity man.

No one was more susceptible to the charms of his game than kids. Suddenly, in the heart of football country, sporting goods stores couldn’t stock enough basketballs, hoops, and nets. And back in North Carolina, teenagers like Charlotte’s M.L. Carr—one of the first blacks to attend the basketball camp at Campbell—were rehearsing Pete’s Homework Basketball routines until they could do them in their sleep. “I knew I couldn’t be like Pete,” says Carr. “But I did every drill religiously.”

At sixteen, Carr had a sense of the game and its stylistic antecedents. He knew about Earl (the Pearl) Monroe from Winston-Salem State Teachers College, author of the spin dribble. He knew of Providence’s Jimmy Walker and his famous crossover, a change-of-hands dribble that made the quickest defenders look slow. Then there was Archie Clark of Minnesota, who had perfected the stutter step, a hesitation move. “But Pete,” says Carr, “was the best I’d ever seen. He did things the Globetrotters couldn’t do yet.”

In fact, Pete was already being called “a bleached Globetrotter.” But unlike the Globetrotters, he made his moves in authentic game conditions. The competition was high level, high stakes, the expectations increasing at an exponential rate.

With his droopy socks and floppy hair, there was a growing sense that Pistol Pete would morph into something more iconic than just a basketball player. In anticipation of his varsity debut, in 1967, Press saw to it that LSU had a new pep band and a squadron of pom-pom girls. He arranged to videotape Pete’s games and the Homework Basketball drills. There would be a full record of exactly how he and his son had conspired to change the game.

By Press’s calculation Pete would have to shoot forty times a game for LSU to have a chance of winning. Not only did this theory violate every strategic principle of the game, but it also had never been put into practice. Shooting at such an absurdly rapid rate—better than a shot a minute—would be physically and psychologically grueling. “He’s got more pressure on him than any kid in America,” Press said.

Pete’s game became the subject of discussion among league officials. Coming down full stride on the break, he would wave his hand over the ball, then tip it with the other hand in the opposite direction. It looked like a magic trick. At one point a ref blew his whistle and signaled a traveling violation. “How can you make that call?” said an outraged Pete. “You’ve never even seen that move.”

In fact, the call forced SEC officials to hold a meeting. The refs examined the tape until, at long last, they shook their heads in grudging agreement with the kid.

Suddenly, calling LSU games had become a complicated proposition. Officials had to rethink the game as it pertained to
the league’s new sensation. “One thing you didn’t want to do was foul [Pete] out of the game,” says Charlie Bloodworth, a veteran SEC official. “Pete put more people in the seats than anybody.”

Fan mail arrived at the LSU athletic department by the sackful. Practices became targets of opportunity for groupies and autograph seekers. Pete’s practice socks were pilfered from the trainer’s laundry bags. That’s when Pete started washing them himself. Those socks were talismans; teenage boys began to abuse their own white hosiery until it was acceptably gray and droopy. And this was in football country. Reporters from Georgia and Mississippi who had never even been to a basketball game started making themselves seen. Suddenly, games in places like Oxford and Athens and Tuscaloosa were selling out.

Even the opposing players couldn’t take their eyes off Pete. “You were never supposed to look at your opponent during warmups,” says Johnny Arthurs, then a high-scoring forward for Tulane. “But there we were: watching Pete put on a show.”

Arthurs also recalls watching game film of Pete: “[He] had a move where he got out on the break and dribbled between his legs and then behind his back. We made the coach replay it again and again and again because no one believed he actually did it.”

Every so often an amazed Bud Johnson would ask, “Hey, Pete, how come I never saw you practice that one?”

“Oh, yes, I have,” Pete would say. “Many times.”

“When?”

“In my head.”

For Press these moments of basketball genius were the sacred seconds, a synthesis of conceptual art and performance art. As he told Time during that 1967-68 season, “I get to the point where I don’t coach him. I just watch.”

In Pete’s first season of varsity ball, LSU improved from 3-23 to 14-12 while violating the game’s every orthodoxy, not to mention the very principles that had made Press—proponent of ensemble basketball, erstwhile defensive guru—a great coach in the first place. Though Pete had long arms and great anticipation, the physical tools of a great defender, he couldn’t be bothered with defense. “Pete had to work so damn hard on offense,” says starting guard Rich Hickman, “he used defense to rest.”

Once again Wooden chalked it up to the enigma of Press. “If any of my players made a behind-the-back pass,” says Wooden, “he’d be sitting on the bench. Same thing with the dunk. I didn’t permit any of that.” (In fact, the NCAA voted to outlaw the dunk in 1967, a move considered a sanction against UCLA’s Lew Alcindor. But in a larger sense it was a sanction against a still-emerging black style of basketball.)

The Pistol was featured in
Time
and
Newsweek
. Around the same time there was a photo spread in
Life
and a cover story in
SI
that served as a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” for Bill Bradley and all he represented: The Prince is dead; long live the Pistol. Meanwhile, LSU basketball remained a one-man show. By the
end of Pete’s junior season—Saturday, March 8, 1969—the Tigers needed a win just to break even on the season.

They were in Athens, Georgia, down 59-44 with ten minutes to play. Then, without warning, a mere game became something “seldom matched in SEC basketball,” according to an account in the
Baton Rouge State-Times
. Pete scored thirteen straight points and twenty-four of his team’s last twenty-nine, most of them on outrageously long jumpers. The game went into overtime. “The crowd starts cheering,” says Les Robinson, who was watching from a seat near the LSU bench. “They don’t care who wins. They came to see a show.”

As the extra period ended, Georgia had a two-point lead and was trying to run out the clock. “Then I heard something I never heard before or since,” says Robinson. “The crowd started booing the home team. The players didn’t understand. It discombobulated them.”

Georgia took an ill-advised shot with twelve seconds remaining. Six ticks later, Maravich tied the game again.

The second overtime proved less competitive but even more memorable, with Pete scoring eleven of LSU’s twelve points as the Tigers took an insurmountable lead. “Our place sat, like, 11,000, but there must have been 13,000 in there,” says Georgia’s Herb White, who had already fouled out trying to guard Pete. “The fans were going nuts. You could not hear anything.” Pete might as well have been conducting a dribbling clinic. “Our guys are running around after him, falling down on the floor,” White continues.

“He’s going into his whole Marques Haynes Globetrotters act, and we can’t even catch the sumbitch to foul him.”

“They had fire in their eyes,” Pete would remember. “I thought they were going to kill me. I started dribbling to mid-court, then to my bench.” There were just seconds left. Pete never even broke stride as he threw up a shot for his fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth points on the night. “A thirty-foot hook shot over his head,” as it was described in one newspaper account. “The ball hit the bottom of the net without touching the rim of the basket.”

“Our cheerleaders started dancing,” says White, “then the fans came pouring out of the stands and carried him off the floor.”

“They were going after him like Elvis Presley,” Robinson remembers. “They just wanted to touch him.” Of course, Les had seen it before, the outrageously nonchalant parabola of his final shot: the going-down shot. Robinson caught up with Pete in the dressing room after the game. Middle of winter, and the kid came out in sunglasses.

He hugged Robinson. For once Pete was in awe of himself. “Les,” he whispered, “I think it’s the greatest game I’ve ever played.”

Soon after Pete Maravich collapsed during that pickup game in Pasadena in 1988, the phone rang in Covington, La. Joshua Maravich, then five years old, heard the maid let out a piercing howl. Then he was quickly ushered into another room.

He closed the door behind him and considered himself in the mirror. He had his father’s eyes. That’s what everyone said. The boy looked through himself, and he knew: My daddy’s dead.

Pete’s older son, eight-year-old Jaeson, knew something was amiss when a teacher found him in the school cafeteria. “You need to go home now,” she said. The living room was crowded with grown-ups by the time Jaeson arrived. His mother, who had been crying in the corner, got up as he came through the door. She hugged him tight. “I knew it was going to be real bad,” he says.

She told him; then he went to his room. He felt nothing. He pulled up the blinds and stared out the window. Five minutes passed. Or was it ten? He does not know. “When I finally figured out that he wasn’t coming back, I started to cry,” he says.

The next day, in an act that stretched the limits of an eight-year-old’s capacity for bravery and observance, Jaeson practiced with his rec league team, the Little Pistols.

In 1996, to celebrate its first fifty years, the NBA enlisted a panel to name the fifty greatest players in its history. A half century had passed since Press Maravich played for the Pittsburgh Ironmen. The NBA, under commissioner David Stern, was now held up as the ideal professional sports enterprise. Stern’s model, as he often stated, wasn’t another league but rather the savagely synergistic Disney Corporation. Instead of selling Mickey, Minnie and Snow White, the NBA was marketing the
greatest athletes in team sports, most of them Americans of African descent.

It was Pete Maravich, however, who had anticipated what the game would become: a hip-hop ballet, a rapper’s delight, and a cause for great celebration in the corporate suite. Pistol Pete anticipated the high-concept ballplayer. This was the star identifiable merely as Magic or Charles or, most of all, Michael, an athlete who could be reconstituted in a variety of media, who could play as easily with animated characters as he could on the street.

Of those fifty greatest, Pete was the only one who would have fared better in the contemporary game than when he actually played. This much was now accepted as gospel: Pete had been well ahead of his time. “If he was playing today” said Walt Frazier, one of the chosen fifty, “he’d be the most popular player in the league.”

He was also the only one of the 50 not still alive. In his place Jaeson and Josh attended the 1997 All-Star game in Cleveland, where they accepted the honor on their father’s behalf. As they awaited their introductions in the tunnel at Gund Arena, the game’s greatest fawned over the brothers Maravich. Isiah Thomas told them how much he had learned from watching their father. Magic Johnson, whose championship Los Angeles Lakers teams had appropriated the term Showtime, felt a need to correct the record.

“Your pops,” he gushed, “he was the original. He was the real Showtime.”