Product Description

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.

A renowned biographer -- People magazine called him "a master" -- Kriegel renders his subject with a style that is, by turns, heartbreaking, lyrical, and electric.

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.

Pistol is an unforgettable biography. By telling one family's history, Kriegel has traced the history of the game and a large slice of the American narrative.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32414 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.com
Book Description
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.

A renowned biographer--People magazine called him "a master"--Kriegel renders his subject with a style that is, by turns, heartbreaking, lyrical, and electric.

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.

Pistol is an unforgettable biography. By telling one family's history, Kriegel has traced the history of the game and a large slice of the American narrative.

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"Why Pistol?"
An Exclusive Essay by Mark Kriegel
"Why Pistol?" I'm asked that all the time.Pete Maravich became famous in the late 1960s, while setting scoring records at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I'm not a son of the South. Nor, at 44, do I have any meaningful recollection of basketball's boy wizard in his floppy-socked prime. I grew up in the Seventies, on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, a few blocks from Madison Square Garden. I was a fan of the Knicks and their star guard, Walt "Clyde" Frazier. In terms of basketball style, Clyde and Pistol were antithetical. Frazier's flamboyance--I recall committing his "wardrobe stats" to memory--was not apparent on the court. Rather, he was celebrated as a dogged defender. His game was wise, economical, his gaze expressionless. Maravich, by contrast, was considered a head-case. His eyes were sad--even a kid could see that. Still, there was a distinct exuberance in the way he moved. No one moved like that, before or since.

Continue reading "Why Pistol?"

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From Publishers Weekly
As he did for another larger-than-life sports star whose achievements in his game were always shadowed by his demons outside of it, Kriegel (Namath) offers a rounded, insightful look at one of basketball's enigmatic icons. Kriegel presents Pete Maravich (1947–1988) as a "child prodigy, prodigal son, his father's ransom in a Faustian bargain." His father, Press Maravich, was the poor son of Serbian immigrants to Pennsylvania, a man obsessed with basketball as a means of personal and financial redemption. His rise as a coach loomed over Pete, who described himself as a boy as "a basketball android." A veteran sportswriter, Kriegel is more than up to the task of eliciting Pete's on-court greatness and describing basketball action in a fluid, dramatic fashion (Pete's deadeye shot earned him the nickname "Pistol"). But the book is more notable for how Kriegel evokes Press's support turning into suffocation, and the effect of the impossible expectations on Pete (he played for Louisiana State, then later for the New Orleans Jazz). In the end, Kriegel's portrait is a sad celebration of a gifted player whose collegiate legend never quite blossomed into professional greatness as he battled alcoholism, sought solace in religion and left a troubled legacy that's still felt by his children and those who knew him. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Mark Kriegel argues, in this interesting if badly written biography, that Pete Maravich was a -- perhaps the -- seminal figure in the development of professional basketball as we know it. He was a white player in what has become a black man's game, yet his "funky and flagrant" "Showtime" style has become the signature of the National Basketball Association. He was, "as one black NBA executive said admiringly, 'A white boy with flavor,' " and his has been the NBA's flavor ever since he left the league in 1980.

Maybe so, maybe not. At his best, Maravich was an incomparably gifted, hugely entertaining player, but that's not the whole story. For one thing, there were other gifted players whose influence was at least as great, if not greater: Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Julius Erving, Earl Monroe, Walt Frazier, Larry Bird and, of course, Michael Jordan. Kriegel tends to treat these players in terms of how they admired and were influenced by Maravich rather than how they altered the game themselves. Then there is the issue that Kriegel does raise, at times thoughtfully and provocatively: Maravich was a superlative individual player, but a lousy team player. Lou Hudson, who played with him on the Atlanta Hawks, got it right:

"This man has been quicker and faster than Jerry West or Oscar Robertson. He gets the ball up the floor better. He shoots as well. Raw-talent-wise, he's the greatest who ever played. The difference comes down to style. He will be a loser, always, no matter what he does. That's his legacy. It never looked easy being Pete Maravich."

Indeed it didn't. He seemed to have everything going for him, but he was an artificial man, constructed by his father, Petar "Press" Maravich, to fulfill his father's dreams. He adored his father and did just about everything his father commanded, yet the life he had beyond the basketball court was narrow, unfulfilling and sad. He had no interest in education at the schools and colleges where he played; he partied and drank too much in a desperate attempt "to relieve immense pressure"; and though he eventually found a measure of happiness in marriage, fatherhood and religion, he was only 40 years old when, in January 1988, he died suddenly of a rare heart condition.

Sad stories are often the most interesting ones, and Maravich's is no exception. He was born in 1947 near Pittsburgh, into a family of tough Serbian Americans. His grandfather, Vajo, had worked in the huge Jones & Laughlin factory, but his father managed to avoid it. As a boy Press fell in love with basketball, and it became his ticket out of the steel mill. In a time and place where almost nobody went to college, he found his way to one in West Virginia called Davis and Elkins, "became Big Man on Campus," played pro basketball before reporting for service in World War II ("Then Japan had to go bomb Pearl Harbor," Kriegel writes in a typically infelicitous turn of phrase) and turned to coaching at war's end at the suggestion of his wife, who was unhappy with his plan to become a commercial airline pilot.

Eventually he became successful and widely respected. He was a terrific coach who "inspired enormous allegiance and affection" from his players and who got more out of them than they may have realized was there. At both Clemson and North Carolina State, his teams played over their heads, and he seemed to have a chance of becoming one of the great coaches in the history of the college game.

But then his son, Pete, came of college age, and everything changed. Since Pete was a small boy, his father had trained him constantly, obsessively "to cultivate and harvest every bit of Pete's talent," of which there was plenty. He was barely into his teens when he discovered that he was something of a magician:

"Little Pete had a big smile -- though never when he played. His expression belied the joy he derived from performing, pleasing, mesmerizing. He was energized by the awe of an audience, whether it be men watching him dribble blindfolded or the kids in the drugstore gaping as he spun the ball on his fingertips. But the effect was multiplied in front of a proper crowd. He first felt it as a seventh-grader, already playing for the junior varsity. . . . There were fewer than ninety people in the stands, but he was wired to them, each fan nourishing a strange, adrenalized sensation at his core. 'Out in front of a crowd for the first time,' he would recall, 'I just wanted to do everything and be everything. . . . I wanted to put on a show.' "

He was a great showman but a lousy, indifferent student. The plan was that he would play for his father at N.C. State, but the Atlantic Coast Conference required a minimum SAT score of 800, and Pete couldn't hit even that. So eventually Press was hired by Louisiana State University, and Pete came along as part of the deal. If LSU is now a basketball power, the Maraviches get all the credit -- or the blame. Pete was the hottest thing to hit Baton Rouge since Huey Long. In three years there, he set a national collegiate scoring record of 44.2 points per game, a record that may well never be broken. But he wasn't just a scoring machine; he was a one-man show, with his hair flopping all over the place and his sagging socks and his incredible moves: passing between his legs, behind his back, hitting shots from half-court without looking at the basket -- he was a one-man Harlem Globetrotters, except that he was white.

He was a great player, but his teams ranged from slightly better than average to mediocre. LSU never went to the NCAA tournament in his three years there, and the one year it got into the consolation prize, the National Invitational Tournament in New York, Pete laid an egg. LSU was wasted by Marquette, 101-79, and he scored only 20 points, less than half his average. John Wooden, the great coach at UCLA and one of Press's best friends in basketball, said that Pete would make a million dollars in the pros, "but he'll never win a championship."

That proved precisely right. Maravich played in the pros for a decade, the 1970s, and he managed to score a lot of points (15,948) as well as give the fans plenty of "Showtime," but his pro years were unhappy for him and for the teams he played on. The Atlanta Hawks, a predominantly black team in a city that at the time still was deeply divided racially, knew that he would bring white fans into the arena, but his fellow players resented the disproportionate attention he received and his me-first playing style. There, as in New Orleans, his next stop on the NBA tour, "Pete -- unlike any other player in the league -- was bigger than his team." His career ended with the Boston Celtics, at the time the league's most successful franchise, where he was essentially a bit player on a team that came up just short of a championship.

The remaining eight years of his life were strange. He "became as devotional about religion as he had once been about basketball," he founded a successful basketball camp at a Christian college, he was a loving husband to his patient wife, Jackie, and a good father to their two sons. But like many other once-brilliant athletes, he gave substance to F. Scott Fitzgerald's dubious assertion that there are no second acts in American lives. He seems to have sensed that his own life would be short -- his death followed his father's by less than a year -- and he doesn't seem to have had much real pleasure in what little time remained to him.

His story, Kriegel understands, is about fathers and sons, winners and losers, individuals and teams. These are all significant themes, and Kriegel addresses them thoughtfully, but ultimately Pistol bogs down in his boilerplate sports-page prose. At one point, he sneers at the "hyperbole" of a 1930s Pennsylvania sportswriter, but he employs more than enough of it himself. Too bad: good story, mediocre book.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

Well researched, very readable
Mr. Kriegel provides an insightful, interesting, serious study of the background to the life of Pete Maravich. I recommend the book, not only to sports' fans, but to anyone who enjoys well-written biography. For thoses readers who wish to understand Maravich's conversion to Christianity and the course of his post-conversion life, the book disappoints as Kriegel seems to understand the conversion as a retreat into religion rather than a confrontation with reality.

great, not-so-great
I admire the fact that Mark Kriegal had the guts to devote about a third of the book to Press Maravich, Pete's father. But it got tedious to hear the endless details about who scored what during which game, and so on. Perhaps that's common to most sports books, I don't know. I understand why the author wrote this book: Pete Maravich's life is a fascinating story. Unfortunately, I had mixed feelings about Pistol overall. Yes, I got bored with the first third of the book about Press Maravich, although it did give you a nice overview of the origins of pro basketball, if you can call it that. I also felt that the last 30 pages devoted to Pete's sons was overkill. Just my opinion. The middle part of the book about Pete was superb, though. There were so many touchstones that were handled exceptionally well----on race, the marketing and growing popularity of basketball (college and professional), the complexity of Pete's relationship to Press, Pete's various obsessions with UFOs, vegetarianism, martial arts, etc., plus his alcohol abuse. Pistol, for all its stylistic virtuosity, was a little too sentimental sometimes. Nonetheless, I'm glad I read it.

A sad, sad tale
As others have stated, this is an extremely well-written book. But it is also the first book I ever remember reading that had a dark cloud hang over every page. The quotation by Magic Johnson to Pete's children at the All-Star game naming the Pistol as one of the top 50 in NBA history is memorable. "Your father was Showtime before there was a showtime." You always hope sports heroes have happy endings. I wish Pete could have experienced more of it.

It is a must read.