We Should Be Grateful for Gift of Pete Maravich’s Time

For anyone looking for the positive side of the story in the tragic and intriguing life and death of Pete Maravich, there is this: Pistol Pete never knew he was doomed.

The tragedy would have been if his condition had been diagnosed when he was 8, or 18 or 28. Since nothing could be done to correct his rare heart defect, Maravich would have had two choices: Plunge ahead with his basketball obsession, knowing he might drop dead the next time he shot a layup, or cease all physical activity and resign himself to a short, unhappy life.

Instead, to oversimplify, Maravich had a full basketball career and life, died happy and never knew what the hell hit him.

Mysteries remain. Did Pete extend his life through his mania for conditioning and nutrition? What might he have accomplished had he been blessed with normal arterial plumbing? Why is his story so compelling?

There seems to be a strong public fascination with his death, well beyond what would be expected to follow the news of an ex-basketball star dying fairly young of an unfortunate heart deformity.

There was a magic about the guy, an aura. He was a brooding, mysterious character, with as many critics as fans. And he could do stuff with a basketball that boggled everyone’s mind but his own.

The day after he died, I went to my video file, which is a dusty pile of tapes in the corner of a closet, and dug out my Pete Maravich “Homework Basketball” videos.

Pete had been in Los Angeles a couple months before, promoting his autobiography and the instructional tapes, and he gave me a set of the four videos. He guaranteed me, in all seriousness, that they would improve my game.

I wasn’t impressed. Breaking a leg would improve my game. I filed the tapes for future viewing.

Then he died, and I decided to take a look. I popped the “ballhandling and ball-spinning” tape into my VCR.

The tape opens with eerie, suspenseful music. Into a darkened gymnasium walks a solitary, shadowy figure. Sound of footsteps echoing. The faceless figure in the dark--Pete--picks up a basketball from the floor by spinning it with his foot, up his leg, and proceeds to whip and spin the ball about his body. At the close of the opening scene, Maravich stands at the free-throw line, back to the basket, legs spread, and throws the ball down between his legs and against the floor. The ball bounces high and sails cleanly into the basket.

In the body of the video, in normal lighting, Pete demonstrates about a dozen of the creative drills he and his father invented when he was young. He is a preacher, selling hoop excellence. I’m positive the drills would improve someone’s skills, maybe even mine. But beyond that, they are a showcase of Pistol Pete’s magic. In a way, they are his legacy.

I intend just to watch, but the Pistol Pete on my screen nags me into getting my basketball and trying the drills. “Don’t just sit there!”

Most of the drills look simple, but none are. Some are difficult. Others are impossible. All, executed full speed by the Pistol, are incredible.

On the film, I’m watching the product of zillions of hours of work, of an entire youth spent in gyms and the privacy of his bedroom, driving himself toward perfection.

The drills could be dismissed as parlor tricks, something anyone could master in time. Maybe, but Maravich mastered them, then learned to execute them amid the chaos and pressure of big-time basketball games. He weaved the drills into an incredible playing style.

The drills are exhausting. On the screen, Pete is sweating and puffing. Knowing what we know now about his heart, it is a scary sight.

“He worked hard 12 hours a day when we were shooting,” says Frank Schroeder, who directed the films and was a close friend of Pete’s. “We filmed them last May, just after his father passed away. It took us six days, and we worked from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day.”

Was Pete out of shape then?

“Ever since he retired, he worked out every day,” Schroeder says. “He would work out in his attic, an hour a day, doing his ballhandling drills, because he was always doing clinics and wanted to stay sharp. To get ready for the taping, he intensified his workouts to several hours a day.

“You know,” Schroeder says, “I looked it up. Pete played 83 games in college. In three of those games he had to sit down part of the game with an injury. In the other 80 games he played all 40 minutes.”

I ask Schroeder how much time Pistol spent practicing his shooting.

“None. I remember one day, a year ago October. We were in a gym. He hadn’t shot a basketball for three months but he wanted to sharpen up because he had promised Meadowlark Lemon he would play a game with Meadowlark’s team. Pete told me, ‘Shooting is something I don’t have to practice. I did it all my life and you never lose your eye.’ He bet me he could shoot from 30 feet out, for a solid half hour, and never miss two shots in a row.

“We had two balls, I would rebound and feed him as soon as he would shoot the other ball. He shot for a half hour, never inside 30 feet, and never missed two in a row.”

I don’t know how good a judge of distance Schroeder is. But I believe he is honest, and allowing him an error factor of 10 feet, it’s still an amazing story.

After filming the videos last May, Maravich conducted his summer camp for nearly six weeks. “After a clinic one day, we went jogging,” Schroeder says. “He got a chest cold, and he ran a temperature of 105 for the next four days. Then, for 45 days straight, he had an extreme shooting pain in his neck. The doctor said it was neuritis, and Pete went to two or three other doctors, who said the same thing.

“Finally, he was starting to feel better. I was playing in that pickup game in Pasadena. Pete never played in pickup games. People would ask him all the time, and he would never play. But he had finally got to the point where the game had become fun for him again. He told me, ‘I really need to start doing this.’ That’s when he said how great he felt.”

And that’s when he died.