Somebody got me thinking about Pistol Pete tonight. If you don’t know who he is, well I almost feel sorry for you.
In college he averaged 44.2 points per game. That was without a three point line. He was unstoppable.
I recall once he was playing against Kentucky. They said Pete would not beat them, they’d stop him, so he went out and put up 68 points.
My favorite line is from Pat O’Riely. He said that Pete was “Showtime” before anybody had ever heard that word.
Below the fold, a wizard with a basketball.
Pete became a drunk. Fought many demons. He:
After the injury forced him to leave basketball in the fall of 1980, Maravich became a recluse for two years. Through it all, Maravich said he was searching "for life." He tried the practices of yoga and Hinduism, read Trappist monk Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and took an interest in the field of ufology, the study of unidentified flying objects. He also explored vegetarianism and macrobiotics. Eventually, he embraced evangelical Christianity. A few years before his death, Maravich said, "I want to be remembered as a Christian, a person that serves Him [Jesus] to the utmost, not as a basketball player."
He died on a basketball court of a heart attack at 40. The autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a rare congenital defect; he had been born with a missing left coronary artery, a vessel which supplies blood to the muscle fibers of the heart.
There are people like me likes to think he did all he did with only part of his heart.