Net gain but at a personal loss

“PISTOL” is one of the sadder books about a sports hero to come along in a while.

“Pistol Pete” Maravich -- the nickname itself was a sportswriter’s invention -- had everything a star basketball player needed except balance. He had great talent and a ruthlessly ambitious father who drove him to develop it. He had a certain personal charm. He was a white athlete at a time when basketball was beginning to be dominated by astonishingly skilled black players.

But the sports icon had too much fame and too much money too soon, author Mark Kriegel writes in “Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich.” He couldn’t handle either. His life ended at 40 when he suffered a massive heart attack on the basketball court of the First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena. He was playing a pickup game with some friends, including James Dobson, founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family.

An autopsy showed that Maravich had a rare, undiagnosed congenital defect: He lacked one of two artery systems that supply blood to the heart. (Experts said they were mystified as to how he’d performed at the top of his game for so many years, given most people with that condition cannot perform strenuous activity and seldom reach age 20.)

By the time of his death on Jan. 5, 1988, Maravich had lived wildly, driven drunk, swallowed methamphetamines, given up eating grains, run through many diets of special beans, sworn off X-rays for fear of cancer and put a sign on his roof for extraterrestrials to take him away. He tried Hinduism and survivalism. Then he took up evangelical Christianity. He became a ferocious opponent of evolution. About that time, to his wife’s surprise, he began to devote more time to his two young sons. Just as suddenly, he died.

Whether Maravich’s mercurial and troubled life justifies his biographer’s consistently melodramatic prose is debatable: “Whatever doubts still lingered about Pete’s standing in the game or even his place in popular culture ended with this death,” Kriegel writes. “His image would be eternally consigned -- along with the likes of James Dean, Elvis, and at least a couple of Kennedys -- to a celebrity purgatory reserved for the young dead. In a generation’s collective memory, Peter would remain much like the sad-eyed wizard of his rookie card.”

Prose aside, Kriegel (who also wrote a biography of Joe Namath) does tell an interesting tale of that heady mixture of skill and ambition that marks the lucky few who prevail in sports.

Maravich’s father, Press, is the key to the story and to the son. The hard-driving child of Serbian immigrants, Press was raised in the western Pennsylvania steel town of Aliquippa, where just about everyone worked for -- and usually was in debt to -- the Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. It was a rough life offering little hope for improvement but for a relatively new diversion called basketball. Invented in the late 1800s, basketball offered fast action in a small space. It caught on in Pennsylvania’s grimy steel towns, in the towns of Indiana and the Carolinas, and eventually in many of the nation’s black ghettos, Kriegel writes.

Basketball had Press Maravich in its grip in the 1930s and never let go. A high school and college standout, he became a professional player and eventually a coach, starting him down a road that took him to the Carolinas and into the basketball whirlpool of the South. Ultimately, he would coach his son at Louisiana State University.

These days, the elder Maravich’s pushing of his son to the heights of basketball might be viewed as child abuse. If the boy thought of it that way, he never let on. Pete was devoted to his single-minded father and, in fact, he died not long after Press did. It was said, of course, that he died of a broken heart.

Besides his two sons and his wife, Pete Maravich left behind records at Louisiana State -- most points in 83 games, most field goals made and attempted, most free throws made and attempted, most games scoring at least 50 points.

He played for the Atlanta Hawks, the Jazz in New Orleans and Utah and the Boston Celtics. In 1996, he was inducted, posthumously, into the NBA’s team of the 50 greatest players of all time.

Maravich, Kriegel writes, was “a creature of contradictions, ever alone: the white hope of a black sport, a virtuoso stuck in an ensemble, an exuberant showman who couldn’t look you in the eye.”

He was something to see, wrote Bob Dylan in “Chronicles” in a passage Kriegel uses as a foreword: “[M]op of brown hair, floppy socks, the holy terror of the basketball world -- high flyin’ -- magician of the court.... He could have played blind.”

Anthony Day is a former editor of the The Times’ editorial pages.