Finder: Maravich book a unique tale of basketball
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The morning after Valentine's Day, a guy with a Manhattan accent was inside the Aliquippa library autographing copies of a hardback that is equal parts love story and tragedy, hero worship and hoops nightmare, religious zeal and family dysfunction. Not something you'd rightly expect from a sports book, let alone a tale pieced together from the mother's house down Franklin Avenue and the father's high school up the hill and the missionary church underneath Jones & Laughlin's belching Bessemer furnaces back in the day. It is a uniquely local story, Beaver County's gift to the roundball world: Pistol Pete Maravich.
Mark Kriegel wrote the latest in the litany of attempts at Pistol forensics, the sixth book on the subject, going by the collection at the B.F. Jones Library. Alongside Mike Ditka and Hopewell's Tony Dorsett and composer Henry Mancini stand book after book about the boy Press Maravich raised in a basketball-god image. Yet none until now laid bare a life, a devotion, an intertwined relationship between father and son, coach and player, that no football Marinoviches, no tennis Pierces, no baseball Bondses could rival.
"Basketball became his God, his religion," Kriegel said at the library, one of the first stops in a book tour taking him through the Maravich dribbling grounds of Clemson, S.C., Raleigh, N.C., Baton Rouge, La., New Orleans and then Atlanta for the Final Four. The author spoke of the Presbyterian church in Logstown, the riverside ghetto to poor, mill-bound Eastern Europeans. It was at that church where a missionary lured the disadvantaged Press -- all four of his siblings died young and his father was killed in the mill -- and showed him the light that was not the Maker, but basketball. The church had a wooden floor and baskets at each end. That became Press' shrine, pulpit, belief, being. "And he gave back his son."
Kriegel used to be one of my kind, a sports typist who filed disposable memories for the Daily News in his native New York. Strangely, he has taken up Beaver County as something of a writing cause. His first book was about Joe Namath of Beaver Falls. Now comes "Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich" of Aliquippa.
Pistol's pulp isn't merely more ruined trees in a too-long line of sports pap. It is must reading for any parent with a child blessed athletically, academically, whatever. "It's a cautionary tale," said the author, now a virtual Dr. Benjamin Spock for jocks. The moral, to this hack: Let kids be kids. Don't live through them.
True and certain, Press Maravich entered parenthood differently than most. As put by Sharon Danovich of Edgewood, the daughter of a former Press teammate and player, a woman who is something of an Aliquippa hoops historian herself (and helped Kriegel in his detailed reporting), the Serb way of that day was to raise children who would later care for you. Here in the Logstown slum was Press, brought up by another family, saved spiritually by basketball, forged by the Bessemer's orange glow above and the black soot beneath him into a steely, determined man. He became a father figure as a coach at Aliquippa and Baldwin, at a couple of West Virginia colleges along with Clemson, North Carolina State, LSU and Appalachian State all without a father figure in his own life. He became the father of modern-day hoops.
Peter Press Maravich from his 1947 birth was forced by Coach Dad to change basketball. There were homework drills, daylong dribbling until his fingers bled, the constant thump-thump-thump of perfection's pursuit. It worked, but at such a price. Pistol never smiled, never seemed to enjoy a skill set that even Magic Johnson agreed was the NBA's original Showtime: blind passes, fancy ball-handling, through-the-legs fast-break passes, amazing drives, shots from beyond what now is a 3-point line. Kids of the '60s and '70s wore droopy socks like him. New Jersey's Jason Kidd still uses Maravich moves. Followers preach that Pistol could play today's game. Danovich called him "the catalyst of the revolution."
His emotionally troubled mother committed suicide with, of all things, a pistol. His father died of prostate cancer in the arms of the son, having moved into Pete's Louisiana home, having followed Pete post-career into the passion that ultimately saved them both: religion. The reticent star who once painted the UFO alert "Take Me" atop his condo wound up a headliner on Billy Graham's crusades and, Lord, could he transfix crowds with words.
In 1988, at age 40, after a rare court return for a pickup game, he died of a congenital arterial defect that kills most by 20. He followed his father in death by mere months, after whispering into Press' ear on dad's deathbed, "I'll see you soon."
"The more I looked into Press' life, the more sympathetic I found him to be," Kriegel said. "Even his excesses with Pete were infused with love. Even when they're both seething on the edge of violence, there's still love there. I'm glad because, in the end, they reach some safe place with each other."
Heaven's too far off a playground for a father and son to wait.
First Published February 18, 2007 12:00 am
