Gabcast! A Book Buzz #15 - "Maravich" book signing at LSU vs. Florida game on Feb. 24
This Saturday, the "Maravich" team will sign books in the Pete Maravich pass before, during and after the Feb. 24 game at LSU. Jackie, Jaeson & Joshua Maravich, as well as authors Marshall Terrill and Wayne Federman, will sign copies of "Maravich." The book retails for $25.
Friday, February 23, 2007
"Maravich" in the Livingston Parish News
Pee Wee Day: Maravich book brings back memories of showtime
PETE'S PALACE - This time forty years ago on a football farm in Tigertown, a basketball seed suddenly sprouted out of the turf.
Back then, freshmen were not eligible to participate on the varsity squad, so all eyes were focused on the LSU Baby Bengals basketball team.
Actually, all eyes were zeroed in on one particular player, a skinny 6-foot-5 mop-top phenomenon, who was about to change basketball forever at LSU.
Pete Maravich took Louisiana by storm during the 1966-67 season and proceeded to cultivate a new fan base that spread far beyond Baton Rouge.
Four decades later and 19 years following his untimely death at age 40, the "Pistol" remains firmly planted in the hearts of his fans, whom he inspired both on and off the court.
Bringing "Showtime" to a cow barn, which laid down a hardwood on top of the dirt floor to house basketball for four months a year, Pistol Pete dazzled the crowds with an array of basketball skills that one could only see before when the Harlem Globetrotters came to town.
Three years later, Maravich had become the NCAA all-time leading scorer, while at the same time, leading the Tigers to their first post-season action in 15 years.
Far from a fluke, Maravich went on to have a very successful professional basketball career, where he was a multiple All-Star selection and scoring leader. Following his retirement in 1980, Maravich was named one of the "NBA's 50 Greatest Players" of all time. He was also enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Many books have been written on Maravich, beginning with a pair while he was still at LSU. Maravich himself joined in with an autobiography entitled "Heir to a Dream," which paralleled his entire of life in basketball with his father Peter "Press" Maravich, who was also his coach during his tenure at LSU.
But none of the books come close to documenting his incredible story of trials and tribulations like the current "Maravich," written by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill. What even authenticates the book to the utmost, is the fact it's the first book written with collaboration of Maravich's widow, Jackie.
Not to be confused with yet another current book on the racks, "Pistol," by Mark Kreiegel, the 400-plus page "Maravich" is practically a play-by-play of his life. Not only is the book packed with incredible detail and statistics, but the eight-year project by the authors unveil some stunning facts that even a diehard Pistol Pete fan like myself never knew, including one mystery never revealed before.
Even though they interviewed some 300 people who, in some way or another, crossed paths with Maravich, I'm living proof that the number of lives Maravich actually touched, is countless.
I was fortunate enough to be at the ideal age, 11-13-years-old during his playing days at LSU. I stood in line for hours to buy one of those "standing-room-only" general admission tickets for the student section. I was fortunate enough to have mid-court tickets for the night he broke Oscar Robertson's all-time scoring record and I can still watch myself on the highlight reel dashing on the court with a friend moments after he made the milestone bucket.
But I must confess, I also snuck into the sold-out home finale his senior year against Kentucky. But well-worth the risk.
Although I still treasure the autographs and memorabilia I've collected over his entire career, the memories of watching Maravich play are still etched in my mind to this day.
"Pete would always make the comment, 'when you die, they forget about you. You're last week's news,'" said Jackie Maravich McLachian.
How wrong he was.
Pete's "Homework Basketball" video series, which he filmed at the Albany High School gym in four days back in the late 1980's is still widely sold to help youngsters learn the fundamentals of the game.
And Pete's basketball camp at Clearwater Christian College in Florida is thriving as well.
Or just type "Pete Maravich" into the ebay search engine and one will finds trading cards, replica jerseys and various other memorabilia up for auction day-in and day-out ... and garnering top dollars.
Fans won't need a computer to get a signed copy of "Maravich," however, as Jackie, her and Pete's two sons, Jaeson and Josh, along with author Marshall Terrill, will all be on hand at none other than the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on Saturday afternoon to sign copies of the book prior to and at halftime of the LSU-Florida game.
Both Jaeson and Josh played roundball at St. Paul's in their hometown of Covington, with both trying their hand at college basketball as well. Josh followed in his father's footsteps as a member of the Tiger squad from 2002-2005.
The two were just eight and five years old when their father died of a heart condition while playing a pickup game of basketball at the First Church of Nazarene in Pasadena, Calif.
Although the average fan may have known of Maravich's struggles on the court, battling both injuries and acceptance as a pro player, those were overshadowed by his many off-the-court struggles in life.
Just days before the beginning of his first season with the New Orleans Jazz, Maravich had to deal with the suicide of his mother.
Maravich gave his life to the Lord a little more than five years prior to his death and proceeded to coach his father into reborn Christianity. Press Maravich died of cancer just months prior to Pete's death.
"What was surprising was that as fun as he was to watch, there was the dichotomy that he was tortured and unhappy in his personal life because of so many factors," said co-author Terrill. "He was the highest paid player in pro sports, but he didn't get respect by his teammates. He was an all-star, but he never played on a winning team. He was so expressive on the court, but was a very private person.
"I think any baby boomer who loved basketball gravitated to the 'Pistol,'" said Terrill. His game was not only innovative, but fun to watch. Every kid on the playground wanted to be "Pistol Pete."
Me included.
(P.S. - If you're not able to attend the LSU-Florida game on Saturday to obtain an autograph copy of "Maravich", Jackie Maravich is finalizing dates to sign books at various Livingston Parish libraries in March.)
Sam Muffoletto is a sportswriter for the News and long-time newspaper and radio figure on sports in the Baton Rouge area.
PETE'S PALACE - This time forty years ago on a football farm in Tigertown, a basketball seed suddenly sprouted out of the turf.
Back then, freshmen were not eligible to participate on the varsity squad, so all eyes were focused on the LSU Baby Bengals basketball team.
Actually, all eyes were zeroed in on one particular player, a skinny 6-foot-5 mop-top phenomenon, who was about to change basketball forever at LSU.
Pete Maravich took Louisiana by storm during the 1966-67 season and proceeded to cultivate a new fan base that spread far beyond Baton Rouge.
Four decades later and 19 years following his untimely death at age 40, the "Pistol" remains firmly planted in the hearts of his fans, whom he inspired both on and off the court.
Bringing "Showtime" to a cow barn, which laid down a hardwood on top of the dirt floor to house basketball for four months a year, Pistol Pete dazzled the crowds with an array of basketball skills that one could only see before when the Harlem Globetrotters came to town.
Three years later, Maravich had become the NCAA all-time leading scorer, while at the same time, leading the Tigers to their first post-season action in 15 years.
Far from a fluke, Maravich went on to have a very successful professional basketball career, where he was a multiple All-Star selection and scoring leader. Following his retirement in 1980, Maravich was named one of the "NBA's 50 Greatest Players" of all time. He was also enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Many books have been written on Maravich, beginning with a pair while he was still at LSU. Maravich himself joined in with an autobiography entitled "Heir to a Dream," which paralleled his entire of life in basketball with his father Peter "Press" Maravich, who was also his coach during his tenure at LSU.
But none of the books come close to documenting his incredible story of trials and tribulations like the current "Maravich," written by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill. What even authenticates the book to the utmost, is the fact it's the first book written with collaboration of Maravich's widow, Jackie.
Not to be confused with yet another current book on the racks, "Pistol," by Mark Kreiegel, the 400-plus page "Maravich" is practically a play-by-play of his life. Not only is the book packed with incredible detail and statistics, but the eight-year project by the authors unveil some stunning facts that even a diehard Pistol Pete fan like myself never knew, including one mystery never revealed before.
Even though they interviewed some 300 people who, in some way or another, crossed paths with Maravich, I'm living proof that the number of lives Maravich actually touched, is countless.
I was fortunate enough to be at the ideal age, 11-13-years-old during his playing days at LSU. I stood in line for hours to buy one of those "standing-room-only" general admission tickets for the student section. I was fortunate enough to have mid-court tickets for the night he broke Oscar Robertson's all-time scoring record and I can still watch myself on the highlight reel dashing on the court with a friend moments after he made the milestone bucket.
But I must confess, I also snuck into the sold-out home finale his senior year against Kentucky. But well-worth the risk.
Although I still treasure the autographs and memorabilia I've collected over his entire career, the memories of watching Maravich play are still etched in my mind to this day.
"Pete would always make the comment, 'when you die, they forget about you. You're last week's news,'" said Jackie Maravich McLachian.
How wrong he was.
Pete's "Homework Basketball" video series, which he filmed at the Albany High School gym in four days back in the late 1980's is still widely sold to help youngsters learn the fundamentals of the game.
And Pete's basketball camp at Clearwater Christian College in Florida is thriving as well.
Or just type "Pete Maravich" into the ebay search engine and one will finds trading cards, replica jerseys and various other memorabilia up for auction day-in and day-out ... and garnering top dollars.
Fans won't need a computer to get a signed copy of "Maravich," however, as Jackie, her and Pete's two sons, Jaeson and Josh, along with author Marshall Terrill, will all be on hand at none other than the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on Saturday afternoon to sign copies of the book prior to and at halftime of the LSU-Florida game.
Both Jaeson and Josh played roundball at St. Paul's in their hometown of Covington, with both trying their hand at college basketball as well. Josh followed in his father's footsteps as a member of the Tiger squad from 2002-2005.
The two were just eight and five years old when their father died of a heart condition while playing a pickup game of basketball at the First Church of Nazarene in Pasadena, Calif.
Although the average fan may have known of Maravich's struggles on the court, battling both injuries and acceptance as a pro player, those were overshadowed by his many off-the-court struggles in life.
Just days before the beginning of his first season with the New Orleans Jazz, Maravich had to deal with the suicide of his mother.
Maravich gave his life to the Lord a little more than five years prior to his death and proceeded to coach his father into reborn Christianity. Press Maravich died of cancer just months prior to Pete's death.
"What was surprising was that as fun as he was to watch, there was the dichotomy that he was tortured and unhappy in his personal life because of so many factors," said co-author Terrill. "He was the highest paid player in pro sports, but he didn't get respect by his teammates. He was an all-star, but he never played on a winning team. He was so expressive on the court, but was a very private person.
"I think any baby boomer who loved basketball gravitated to the 'Pistol,'" said Terrill. His game was not only innovative, but fun to watch. Every kid on the playground wanted to be "Pistol Pete."
Me included.
(P.S. - If you're not able to attend the LSU-Florida game on Saturday to obtain an autograph copy of "Maravich", Jackie Maravich is finalizing dates to sign books at various Livingston Parish libraries in March.)
Sam Muffoletto is a sportswriter for the News and long-time newspaper and radio figure on sports in the Baton Rouge area.
"Maravich" in the Livingston Parish News
Pee Wee Day: Maravich book brings back memories of showtime
PETE'S PALACE - This time forty years ago on a football farm in Tigertown, a basketball seed suddenly sprouted out of the turf.
Back then, freshmen were not eligible to participate on the varsity squad, so all eyes were focused on the LSU Baby Bengals basketball team.
Actually, all eyes were zeroed in on one particular player, a skinny 6-foot-5 mop-top phenomenon, who was about to change basketball forever at LSU.
Pete Maravich took Louisiana by storm during the 1966-67 season and proceeded to cultivate a new fan base that spread far beyond Baton Rouge.
Four decades later and 19 years following his untimely death at age 40, the "Pistol" remains firmly planted in the hearts of his fans, whom he inspired both on and off the court.
Bringing "Showtime" to a cow barn, which laid down a hardwood on top of the dirt floor to house basketball for four months a year, Pistol Pete dazzled the crowds with an array of basketball skills that one could only see before when the Harlem Globetrotters came to town.
Three years later, Maravich had become the NCAA all-time leading scorer, while at the same time, leading the Tigers to their first post-season action in 15 years.
Far from a fluke, Maravich went on to have a very successful professional basketball career, where he was a multiple All-Star selection and scoring leader. Following his retirement in 1980, Maravich was named one of the "NBA's 50 Greatest Players" of all time. He was also enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Many books have been written on Maravich, beginning with a pair while he was still at LSU. Maravich himself joined in with an autobiography entitled "Heir to a Dream," which paralleled his entire of life in basketball with his father Peter "Press" Maravich, who was also his coach during his tenure at LSU.
But none of the books come close to documenting his incredible story of trials and tribulations like the current "Maravich," written by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill. What even authenticates the book to the utmost, is the fact it's the first book written with collaboration of Maravich's widow, Jackie.
Not to be confused with yet another current book on the racks, "Pistol," by Mark Kreiegel, the 400-plus page "Maravich" is practically a play-by-play of his life. Not only is the book packed with incredible detail and statistics, but the eight-year project by the authors unveil some stunning facts that even a diehard Pistol Pete fan like myself never knew, including one mystery never revealed before.
Even though they interviewed some 300 people who, in some way or another, crossed paths with Maravich, I'm living proof that the number of lives Maravich actually touched, is countless.
I was fortunate enough to be at the ideal age, 11-13-years-old during his playing days at LSU. I stood in line for hours to buy one of those "standing-room-only" general admission tickets for the student section. I was fortunate enough to have mid-court tickets for the night he broke Oscar Robertson's all-time scoring record and I can still watch myself on the highlight reel dashing on the court with a friend moments after he made the milestone bucket.
But I must confess, I also snuck into the sold-out home finale his senior year against Kentucky. But well-worth the risk.
Although I still treasure the autographs and memorabilia I've collected over his entire career, the memories of watching Maravich play are still etched in my mind to this day.
"Pete would always make the comment, 'when you die, they forget about you. You're last week's news,'" said Jackie Maravich McLachian.
How wrong he was.
Pete's "Homework Basketball" video series, which he filmed at the Albany High School gym in four days back in the late 1980's is still widely sold to help youngsters learn the fundamentals of the game.
And Pete's basketball camp at Clearwater Christian College in Florida is thriving as well.
Or just type "Pete Maravich" into the ebay search engine and one will finds trading cards, replica jerseys and various other memorabilia up for auction day-in and day-out ... and garnering top dollars.
Fans won't need a computer to get a signed copy of "Maravich," however, as Jackie, her and Pete's two sons, Jaeson and Josh, along with author Marshall Terrill, will all be on hand at none other than the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on Saturday afternoon to sign copies of the book prior to and at halftime of the LSU-Florida game.
Both Jaeson and Josh played roundball at St. Paul's in their hometown of Covington, with both trying their hand at college basketball as well. Josh followed in his father's footsteps as a member of the Tiger squad from 2002-2005.
The two were just eight and five years old when their father died of a heart condition while playing a pickup game of basketball at the First Church of Nazarene in Pasadena, Calif.
Although the average fan may have known of Maravich's struggles on the court, battling both injuries and acceptance as a pro player, those were overshadowed by his many off-the-court struggles in life.
Just days before the beginning of his first season with the New Orleans Jazz, Maravich had to deal with the suicide of his mother.
Maravich gave his life to the Lord a little more than five years prior to his death and proceeded to coach his father into reborn Christianity. Press Maravich died of cancer just months prior to Pete's death.
"What was surprising was that as fun as he was to watch, there was the dichotomy that he was tortured and unhappy in his personal life because of so many factors," said co-author Terrill. "He was the highest paid player in pro sports, but he didn't get respect by his teammates. He was an all-star, but he never played on a winning team. He was so expressive on the court, but was a very private person.
"I think any baby boomer who loved basketball gravitated to the 'Pistol,'" said Terrill. His game was not only innovative, but fun to watch. Every kid on the playground wanted to be "Pistol Pete."
Me included.
(P.S. - If you're not able to attend the LSU-Florida game on Saturday to obtain an autograph copy of "Maravich", Jackie Maravich is finalizing dates to sign books at various Livingston Parish libraries in March.)
Sam Muffoletto is a sportswriter for the News and long-time newspaper and radio figure on sports in the Baton Rouge area.
PETE'S PALACE - This time forty years ago on a football farm in Tigertown, a basketball seed suddenly sprouted out of the turf.
Back then, freshmen were not eligible to participate on the varsity squad, so all eyes were focused on the LSU Baby Bengals basketball team.
Actually, all eyes were zeroed in on one particular player, a skinny 6-foot-5 mop-top phenomenon, who was about to change basketball forever at LSU.
Pete Maravich took Louisiana by storm during the 1966-67 season and proceeded to cultivate a new fan base that spread far beyond Baton Rouge.
Four decades later and 19 years following his untimely death at age 40, the "Pistol" remains firmly planted in the hearts of his fans, whom he inspired both on and off the court.
Bringing "Showtime" to a cow barn, which laid down a hardwood on top of the dirt floor to house basketball for four months a year, Pistol Pete dazzled the crowds with an array of basketball skills that one could only see before when the Harlem Globetrotters came to town.
Three years later, Maravich had become the NCAA all-time leading scorer, while at the same time, leading the Tigers to their first post-season action in 15 years.
Far from a fluke, Maravich went on to have a very successful professional basketball career, where he was a multiple All-Star selection and scoring leader. Following his retirement in 1980, Maravich was named one of the "NBA's 50 Greatest Players" of all time. He was also enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Many books have been written on Maravich, beginning with a pair while he was still at LSU. Maravich himself joined in with an autobiography entitled "Heir to a Dream," which paralleled his entire of life in basketball with his father Peter "Press" Maravich, who was also his coach during his tenure at LSU.
But none of the books come close to documenting his incredible story of trials and tribulations like the current "Maravich," written by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill. What even authenticates the book to the utmost, is the fact it's the first book written with collaboration of Maravich's widow, Jackie.
Not to be confused with yet another current book on the racks, "Pistol," by Mark Kreiegel, the 400-plus page "Maravich" is practically a play-by-play of his life. Not only is the book packed with incredible detail and statistics, but the eight-year project by the authors unveil some stunning facts that even a diehard Pistol Pete fan like myself never knew, including one mystery never revealed before.
Even though they interviewed some 300 people who, in some way or another, crossed paths with Maravich, I'm living proof that the number of lives Maravich actually touched, is countless.
I was fortunate enough to be at the ideal age, 11-13-years-old during his playing days at LSU. I stood in line for hours to buy one of those "standing-room-only" general admission tickets for the student section. I was fortunate enough to have mid-court tickets for the night he broke Oscar Robertson's all-time scoring record and I can still watch myself on the highlight reel dashing on the court with a friend moments after he made the milestone bucket.
But I must confess, I also snuck into the sold-out home finale his senior year against Kentucky. But well-worth the risk.
Although I still treasure the autographs and memorabilia I've collected over his entire career, the memories of watching Maravich play are still etched in my mind to this day.
"Pete would always make the comment, 'when you die, they forget about you. You're last week's news,'" said Jackie Maravich McLachian.
How wrong he was.
Pete's "Homework Basketball" video series, which he filmed at the Albany High School gym in four days back in the late 1980's is still widely sold to help youngsters learn the fundamentals of the game.
And Pete's basketball camp at Clearwater Christian College in Florida is thriving as well.
Or just type "Pete Maravich" into the ebay search engine and one will finds trading cards, replica jerseys and various other memorabilia up for auction day-in and day-out ... and garnering top dollars.
Fans won't need a computer to get a signed copy of "Maravich," however, as Jackie, her and Pete's two sons, Jaeson and Josh, along with author Marshall Terrill, will all be on hand at none other than the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on Saturday afternoon to sign copies of the book prior to and at halftime of the LSU-Florida game.
Both Jaeson and Josh played roundball at St. Paul's in their hometown of Covington, with both trying their hand at college basketball as well. Josh followed in his father's footsteps as a member of the Tiger squad from 2002-2005.
The two were just eight and five years old when their father died of a heart condition while playing a pickup game of basketball at the First Church of Nazarene in Pasadena, Calif.
Although the average fan may have known of Maravich's struggles on the court, battling both injuries and acceptance as a pro player, those were overshadowed by his many off-the-court struggles in life.
Just days before the beginning of his first season with the New Orleans Jazz, Maravich had to deal with the suicide of his mother.
Maravich gave his life to the Lord a little more than five years prior to his death and proceeded to coach his father into reborn Christianity. Press Maravich died of cancer just months prior to Pete's death.
"What was surprising was that as fun as he was to watch, there was the dichotomy that he was tortured and unhappy in his personal life because of so many factors," said co-author Terrill. "He was the highest paid player in pro sports, but he didn't get respect by his teammates. He was an all-star, but he never played on a winning team. He was so expressive on the court, but was a very private person.
"I think any baby boomer who loved basketball gravitated to the 'Pistol,'" said Terrill. His game was not only innovative, but fun to watch. Every kid on the playground wanted to be "Pistol Pete."
Me included.
(P.S. - If you're not able to attend the LSU-Florida game on Saturday to obtain an autograph copy of "Maravich", Jackie Maravich is finalizing dates to sign books at various Livingston Parish libraries in March.)
Sam Muffoletto is a sportswriter for the News and long-time newspaper and radio figure on sports in the Baton Rouge area.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
"Maravich" reaches its highest ranking ever on Amazon
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #14 - "Maravich" reaches its highest ranking ever on Amazon
Three months after its initial release, "Maravich" by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill has reached its highest ranking ever by Amazon.com. The book is currently the sixth-ranked sports book in the U.S. according to the bookseller.
Three months after its initial release, "Maravich" by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill has reached its highest ranking ever by Amazon.com. The book is currently the sixth-ranked sports book in the U.S. according to the bookseller.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
NY Times calls "Maravich" essential biography
Crowd Pleaser
By JAY JENNINGS
Published: February 11, 2007
On May 3, 1989, I popped a VHS tape into my machine and recorded an entire game of the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan to save for posterity. It was an ordinary first-round playoff game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, admittedly a team Jordan often torched, but I had no idea what would happen. Jordan ended with 44 points and delivered a few signature moments — a steal and a breakaway dunk, a series of fadeaway jumpers, an end-to-end rebound, sprint and layup. In an ESPN world of quick-cut highlights where a player’s dunk dissolves into the next clip before he hits the ground, I wanted to preserve what snippet-sports often denies us: context. While the most sensational exploits of our athlete gods become as luminescent in public consciousness as stained glass (Julius Erving’s behind-the-backboard layup, Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch), the proof of greatness often lies in their ability to amaze every day. Arguably, no basketball player, not even Jordan, met that test as regularly as Pete Maravich, whose between-the-legs assists and next-ZIP-code jumpers still defy belief. Too bad he played mostly pre-VCR.
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Pete Maravich
MARAVICH
By Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill in collaboration with Jackie Maravich.
Illustrated. 422 pp. Sport Classic Books. $24.95.
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Even a casual fan may know of Maravich’s trademark floppy socks and hair and his college scoring average of 44.2 points per game during his three years at Louisiana State University, a record as seemingly unassailable as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. The more ardent will know Maravichiana like his idiosyncratic ball-handling drills, an obsessive practice ethic that found him sitting in aisle seats at movie theaters so he could dribble while he watched, and a checkered pro career marked by injury, coaching turmoil, frequent drinking and, most of all, losing. After retiring from the pros, he embraced evangelical Christianity and died unexpectedly in 1988 at the age of 40, owing to a genetic heart ailment.
A pair of recent biographies — one by Mark Kriegel, the author of “Namath,” and the other a team effort from the actor and comedian Wayne Federman and the journalist Marshall Terrill, with an assist from Maravich’s widow, Jackie Maravich — cover this material baseline to baseline, with admirable thoroughness. In “Maravich,” Federman et al. assay a more exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) approach, dutifully summarizing statistics in parentheses, front-loading each chapter with not one but two epigraphs and stacking up repetitive encomiums. Once you’ve had the Hall of Famer and onetime Maravich coach Elgin Baylor say, “Pete is the best I’ve ever seen,” do we really need to hear the same from a dozen others? But its labor-of-love enthusiasm is infectious, and it’s essential for Maravich completists, especially for the reassessment of his pro career and for anecdotal feats of basketball wizardry, like his delivering on a boast to hit 100 jumpers from beyond 25 feet without missing two in a row. It also contains the single most convincing statistical refutation of the charge that Maravich was a selfish gunner: in the N.B.A., when he scored more than 40 points, his team won 82 percent of its games, compared with Jordan’s 69 percent and Allen Iverson’s 68.
Kriegel’s prose is flashier but often errant. A young Maravich is described as having “a big head mounted on a wispy frame, dense as a wafer”; the Maravich-as-Elvis theme is hammered ad nauseam; and one chapter in “Pistol” has the truly awful title “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Pete.” But Kriegel does uncover some nuggets otherwise lost to history, as when he traces one inspiration for Maravich’s dribbling drills to a ball-handling sensation named Ah Chew Goo, whom Pete’s father, Press, had seen when stationed in Hawaii in the service.
Kriegel also tries to situate Maravich in his times, particularly in relation to the era’s racial dynamics. Despite the precedent of Bob Cousy’s legerdemain, Maravich’s crowd-pleasing style was identified with that of the urban playground and its black stars. Marvin Turner, a black player from Baton Rouge who competed against Maravich in the summer, tells Kriegel, “There had never been a white guy who played like that — he had a soul game.” The growing National Basketball Association was beginning to be dominated by African-Americans, and the mantle of “great white hope” thrust upon Maravich, along with the accompanying rich contract, didn’t help his transition to the league; when he joined the Atlanta Hawks, black veterans like Lou Hudson and Joe Caldwell, who’d toiled for years for a fraction of the money Maravich commanded, were understandably annoyed. In time, the tempest blew over, but over a 10-year career that saw enough success for him to be named one of the N.B.A.’s 50 greatest players, a complementarity of teammates and coach failed to materialize, and he never came close to showcasing his skills in the service of a championship.
Over the 800 pages in these books, despite tales of drinking, vegetarianism and interest in extraterrestrials, Pete Maravich the man remains something of a mystery. Perhaps that’s because he was a mystery to himself, constantly searching before his post-career embrace of Christianity. His innate basketball talent was manifest so early in life — he once said, “There isn’t anything I did at L.S.U. or in the N.B.A. I couldn’t do at 13” — that the young man was the sum of his basketball feats, which he all but admitted late in life when he described that earlier self as “a basketball android.”
What may be a revelation here is the portrait that emerges of Press Maravich, who might stereotypically be viewed as merely riding his son’s remarkable skills to the L.S.U. head coaching job. Kriegel is particularly good at offering a corrective, and the most successful part of his book describes the elder Maravich’s hardscrabble upbringing in the Serbian immigrant enclave of Aliquippa, Pa., a company town where nearly everyone worked for the steel producer Jones & Laughlin. These vivid pages follow Press as he masters basketball in a church gym, stars in college and in the fledgling pro game, serves as a Navy flier, and works his way up the high school and college coaching ranks by forming teams of players as hard-nosed and hardheaded as he was. “Press didn’t recruit ability,” Kriegel writes. “He recruited desire. He wanted guys who loved the game as much as he did, who shared his confusion of basketball with salvation.”
At basketball backwaters like Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia and the football powerhouse Clemson, his undersize teams became so well drilled in his theories of tenacious defense and meticulous execution that the legendary U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden often sought him out for advice. “They were an odd couple,” Kriegel writes, “Wooden measured and modest while Press was loud and profane.” In both books, Press emerges as a full, flawed but appealing man, driven and tender, boastful and loving. “Press was one of the greatest, most entertaining guys I’ve ever met,” an L.S.U. administrator says in “Maravich.” But Press’s formidable basketball mind became mush when his son was involved. “He had ... become obsessed with Pete’s numbers,” a former assistant coach says in “Pistol.” “He had gone from being one of the greatest coaches in the game to the coach of the greatest player in the game.”
In the end, reading about Maravich the son is like reading about Gale Sayers, the incomparable Chicago Bears running back: it mostly makes you want to watch those precious old films, to witness with your own eyes the impossible moves. That’s why the most exciting part of either of these books for me was in an appendix to “Maravich” under the “Selected References” section, titled “Video”: “Games: 1967 L.S.U. at Tennessee; 1968 L.S.U. at Georgia,” and so on. Out there somewhere is Maravich in context.
Jay Jennings, a former college basketball reporter for Sports Illustrated, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
By JAY JENNINGS
Published: February 11, 2007
On May 3, 1989, I popped a VHS tape into my machine and recorded an entire game of the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan to save for posterity. It was an ordinary first-round playoff game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, admittedly a team Jordan often torched, but I had no idea what would happen. Jordan ended with 44 points and delivered a few signature moments — a steal and a breakaway dunk, a series of fadeaway jumpers, an end-to-end rebound, sprint and layup. In an ESPN world of quick-cut highlights where a player’s dunk dissolves into the next clip before he hits the ground, I wanted to preserve what snippet-sports often denies us: context. While the most sensational exploits of our athlete gods become as luminescent in public consciousness as stained glass (Julius Erving’s behind-the-backboard layup, Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch), the proof of greatness often lies in their ability to amaze every day. Arguably, no basketball player, not even Jordan, met that test as regularly as Pete Maravich, whose between-the-legs assists and next-ZIP-code jumpers still defy belief. Too bad he played mostly pre-VCR.
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Pete Maravich
MARAVICH
By Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill in collaboration with Jackie Maravich.
Illustrated. 422 pp. Sport Classic Books. $24.95.
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Even a casual fan may know of Maravich’s trademark floppy socks and hair and his college scoring average of 44.2 points per game during his three years at Louisiana State University, a record as seemingly unassailable as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. The more ardent will know Maravichiana like his idiosyncratic ball-handling drills, an obsessive practice ethic that found him sitting in aisle seats at movie theaters so he could dribble while he watched, and a checkered pro career marked by injury, coaching turmoil, frequent drinking and, most of all, losing. After retiring from the pros, he embraced evangelical Christianity and died unexpectedly in 1988 at the age of 40, owing to a genetic heart ailment.
A pair of recent biographies — one by Mark Kriegel, the author of “Namath,” and the other a team effort from the actor and comedian Wayne Federman and the journalist Marshall Terrill, with an assist from Maravich’s widow, Jackie Maravich — cover this material baseline to baseline, with admirable thoroughness. In “Maravich,” Federman et al. assay a more exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) approach, dutifully summarizing statistics in parentheses, front-loading each chapter with not one but two epigraphs and stacking up repetitive encomiums. Once you’ve had the Hall of Famer and onetime Maravich coach Elgin Baylor say, “Pete is the best I’ve ever seen,” do we really need to hear the same from a dozen others? But its labor-of-love enthusiasm is infectious, and it’s essential for Maravich completists, especially for the reassessment of his pro career and for anecdotal feats of basketball wizardry, like his delivering on a boast to hit 100 jumpers from beyond 25 feet without missing two in a row. It also contains the single most convincing statistical refutation of the charge that Maravich was a selfish gunner: in the N.B.A., when he scored more than 40 points, his team won 82 percent of its games, compared with Jordan’s 69 percent and Allen Iverson’s 68.
Kriegel’s prose is flashier but often errant. A young Maravich is described as having “a big head mounted on a wispy frame, dense as a wafer”; the Maravich-as-Elvis theme is hammered ad nauseam; and one chapter in “Pistol” has the truly awful title “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Pete.” But Kriegel does uncover some nuggets otherwise lost to history, as when he traces one inspiration for Maravich’s dribbling drills to a ball-handling sensation named Ah Chew Goo, whom Pete’s father, Press, had seen when stationed in Hawaii in the service.
Kriegel also tries to situate Maravich in his times, particularly in relation to the era’s racial dynamics. Despite the precedent of Bob Cousy’s legerdemain, Maravich’s crowd-pleasing style was identified with that of the urban playground and its black stars. Marvin Turner, a black player from Baton Rouge who competed against Maravich in the summer, tells Kriegel, “There had never been a white guy who played like that — he had a soul game.” The growing National Basketball Association was beginning to be dominated by African-Americans, and the mantle of “great white hope” thrust upon Maravich, along with the accompanying rich contract, didn’t help his transition to the league; when he joined the Atlanta Hawks, black veterans like Lou Hudson and Joe Caldwell, who’d toiled for years for a fraction of the money Maravich commanded, were understandably annoyed. In time, the tempest blew over, but over a 10-year career that saw enough success for him to be named one of the N.B.A.’s 50 greatest players, a complementarity of teammates and coach failed to materialize, and he never came close to showcasing his skills in the service of a championship.
Over the 800 pages in these books, despite tales of drinking, vegetarianism and interest in extraterrestrials, Pete Maravich the man remains something of a mystery. Perhaps that’s because he was a mystery to himself, constantly searching before his post-career embrace of Christianity. His innate basketball talent was manifest so early in life — he once said, “There isn’t anything I did at L.S.U. or in the N.B.A. I couldn’t do at 13” — that the young man was the sum of his basketball feats, which he all but admitted late in life when he described that earlier self as “a basketball android.”
What may be a revelation here is the portrait that emerges of Press Maravich, who might stereotypically be viewed as merely riding his son’s remarkable skills to the L.S.U. head coaching job. Kriegel is particularly good at offering a corrective, and the most successful part of his book describes the elder Maravich’s hardscrabble upbringing in the Serbian immigrant enclave of Aliquippa, Pa., a company town where nearly everyone worked for the steel producer Jones & Laughlin. These vivid pages follow Press as he masters basketball in a church gym, stars in college and in the fledgling pro game, serves as a Navy flier, and works his way up the high school and college coaching ranks by forming teams of players as hard-nosed and hardheaded as he was. “Press didn’t recruit ability,” Kriegel writes. “He recruited desire. He wanted guys who loved the game as much as he did, who shared his confusion of basketball with salvation.”
At basketball backwaters like Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia and the football powerhouse Clemson, his undersize teams became so well drilled in his theories of tenacious defense and meticulous execution that the legendary U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden often sought him out for advice. “They were an odd couple,” Kriegel writes, “Wooden measured and modest while Press was loud and profane.” In both books, Press emerges as a full, flawed but appealing man, driven and tender, boastful and loving. “Press was one of the greatest, most entertaining guys I’ve ever met,” an L.S.U. administrator says in “Maravich.” But Press’s formidable basketball mind became mush when his son was involved. “He had ... become obsessed with Pete’s numbers,” a former assistant coach says in “Pistol.” “He had gone from being one of the greatest coaches in the game to the coach of the greatest player in the game.”
In the end, reading about Maravich the son is like reading about Gale Sayers, the incomparable Chicago Bears running back: it mostly makes you want to watch those precious old films, to witness with your own eyes the impossible moves. That’s why the most exciting part of either of these books for me was in an appendix to “Maravich” under the “Selected References” section, titled “Video”: “Games: 1967 L.S.U. at Tennessee; 1968 L.S.U. at Georgia,” and so on. Out there somewhere is Maravich in context.
Jay Jennings, a former college basketball reporter for Sports Illustrated, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
"Maravich" video featured on Yahoo.com
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #13 - "Maravich" video of Pistol Pete featured on Yahoo.com
Yahoo.com's feature of "The Ultimate Pistol Pete Maravich Mix," a six-minute video compilation of the "Maravich" book, has been viewed by approximately a half-million people in one day.
Yahoo.com's feature of "The Ultimate Pistol Pete Maravich Mix," a six-minute video compilation of the "Maravich" book, has been viewed by approximately a half-million people in one day.
"Maravich" is reviewed by the New York Times
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #12 - "Maravich" gets reviewed by the New York Times
New York Times writer Jay Jennings Feb. 10 review of "Maravich" is now available on podcast. Go to www.newyorktimes.com or www.digitalpodcast.com
New York Times writer Jay Jennings Feb. 10 review of "Maravich" is now available on podcast. Go to www.newyorktimes.com or www.digitalpodcast.com
"Maravich" reviewed by columnist Buck Harvey
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #11 - "Maravich" reviewed by columnist Buck Harvey
In the Feb. 19 issue of the San Antonio Express-News, columnist Buck Harvey calls "Maravich" a thorough account of the basketball superstar's life.
In the Feb. 19 issue of the San Antonio Express-News, columnist Buck Harvey calls "Maravich" a thorough account of the basketball superstar's life.
Monday, February 19, 2007
TNT anaylist Doug Collins featured in HoopDaddy
The NBA All-Star game broadcast was a huge success for TNT, including analyst Doug Collins, one of the many fathers featured in the book HoopDaddy.
Collins, a star at Illinois State who played on the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that was robbed of a gold medal, is the father of Chris Collins. Chris, now an assistant to Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, was a star player himself for the Blue Devils before going into coaching. Doug Collins had a long NBA career as both a player and coach.
The Collins' story is one of many featuring famous fathers and sons featured in HoopDaddy whose lives are intertwined by basketball, including Hall of Famers Bill Walton, (UCLA, Portland Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics) the late Ray Meyer (DePaul) and John Thompson (Boston Celtics, Georgetown University).
HoopDaddy by Lee Feinswog, is a compelling read for any father, son or sports fan, and is only available at www.HoopDaddy.net.
Collins, a star at Illinois State who played on the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that was robbed of a gold medal, is the father of Chris Collins. Chris, now an assistant to Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, was a star player himself for the Blue Devils before going into coaching. Doug Collins had a long NBA career as both a player and coach.
The Collins' story is one of many featuring famous fathers and sons featured in HoopDaddy whose lives are intertwined by basketball, including Hall of Famers Bill Walton, (UCLA, Portland Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics) the late Ray Meyer (DePaul) and John Thompson (Boston Celtics, Georgetown University).
HoopDaddy by Lee Feinswog, is a compelling read for any father, son or sports fan, and is only available at www.HoopDaddy.net.
TNT anaylist Doug Collins featured in HoopDaddy
The NBA All-Star game broadcast was a huge success for TNT, including analyst Doug Collins, one of the many fathers featured in the book HoopDaddy.
Collins, a star at Illinois State who played on the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that was robbed of a gold medal, is the father of Chris Collins. Chris, now an assistant to Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, was a star player himself for the Blue Devils before going into coaching. Doug Collins had a long NBA career as both a player and coach.
The Collins' story is one of many featuring famous fathers and sons featured in HoopDaddy whose lives are intertwined by basketball, including Hall of Famers Bill Walton, (UCLA, Portland Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics) the late Ray Meyer (DePaul) and John Thompson (Boston Celtics, Georgetown University).
HoopDaddy by Lee Feinswog, is a compelling read for any father, son or sports fan, and is only available at www.HoopDaddy.net.
Collins, a star at Illinois State who played on the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that was robbed of a gold medal, is the father of Chris Collins. Chris, now an assistant to Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, was a star player himself for the Blue Devils before going into coaching. Doug Collins had a long NBA career as both a player and coach.
The Collins' story is one of many featuring famous fathers and sons featured in HoopDaddy whose lives are intertwined by basketball, including Hall of Famers Bill Walton, (UCLA, Portland Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics) the late Ray Meyer (DePaul) and John Thompson (Boston Celtics, Georgetown University).
HoopDaddy by Lee Feinswog, is a compelling read for any father, son or sports fan, and is only available at www.HoopDaddy.net.
Wayne Federman on Fox Sports.com
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #10 - Wayne Federman on Fox Sports.com
Wayne Federman, co-author of "Maravich" gives a highly entertaining interview to Kevin Hench of Fox Sports.com during All-Star Break weekend.
Wayne Federman, co-author of "Maravich" gives a highly entertaining interview to Kevin Hench of Fox Sports.com during All-Star Break weekend.
Wayne Federman at Harrah's during All-Star Week
A look at Pistol Pete and more
Story Tools:
Kevin Hench / Special to FOXSports.com
Feb. 18, 2007
Hanging out at the free carbs media brunch at the MGM Grand on Sunday morning, I caught up with Wayne Federman, the world's foremost Pete Maravich biographer/comedian.
After a week of slaying 'em at Harrah's, Federman, co-author of Maravich, fielded questions about Vegas, All-Star weekend and his favorite NBA subject, Pistol Pete.
1. The big question surrounding this weekend's festivities is should the NBA make a permanent home in Las Vegas. What do you think?
I don't know if this is such a great idea. Every time a guy goes 3-for-17 you'll wonder if he's shaving points. They'll be surrounded by strippers, hookers, pimps, gamblers and gangsters — and that's just at the buffet line at Treasure Island — but the players will still have a dress code. No jeans! And now that they all have at least a semester of college under their belt, the NBA doesn't have to worry if they're mature enough to handle Vegas. I mean, how could a 19-year-old millionaire get into trouble here? Impossible.
If the NBA has a team in Vegas, the so-called "fifth quarter" will be extended to three overtimes. And there will be a whole bunch of new proposition bets. You'll be able to bet the over-under on positive paternity tests or get odds on Tim Hardaway and Elton John co-hosting a charity event.
2. If Bird and Magic through Jordan was basketball's Golden Age, where do you see the league right now?
I think the league is in great shape. The globalization of the game is incredible. I mean, just 10 years ago could you imagine that the two best players in the league would be Canadian and German? Not after the Leo Rautins and Uwe Blab flameouts. Like any era, there are only about eight teams you care about, but that's to be expected. I mean, does anybody really want to watch the Milwaukee Bucks? Or did they fold? Are they still in the league?
3. It's the 30th anniversary of Pete Maravich leading the NBA in scoring and the 10th anniversary of his being named to the Top 50 all-time team. Where do you see the Pistol's influence?
Well, Pete only had the moustache for a couple of years, the ancient mariner look, but it's great to see young Adam Morrison picking up the mantle. It just gives you that moment of hesitation, is that a basketball player or an arms dealer?
You see Pete's influence everywhere in the league. Steve Nash goes between his legs three times just bringing the ball up the court. What is common now was extraordinary when Pete was doing it. Nobody was making behind the back passes. Pete used to say that there was a method behind throwing a behind the back pass, that it gave another option for the defender to think about. Pete was all about misdirection, like a great close-up magician. Not like David Copperfield who makes entire airplanes disappear.
4. Bird won three MVPs and Nash has won two, but there hasn't been a white scoring champ since Maravich. Do you root for Pete to maintain this legacy?
Wow, I hadn't thought about that. I guess I'm just color blind when it comes to the NBA. I just see ballplayers. But now that you mention it, I guess Pete was white.
5. A young Dick Bavetta made a dubious charge call that led to Maravich fouling out of his career-high 68-point game in 1977. Do you feel a measure of satisfaction with Bavetta's loss to Charles Barkley on Saturday?
Bavetta still can't keep up with the speed of the league, even if the league is a 44-year-old, 300-pound, hungover TV commentator. Tom McMillan still hasn't gotten set on the one charge call where Bavetta waved off a Maravich basket. The bucket should have counted and Pete should have gone to the line. That would have been 71 right there.
6. Pete must have loved the All-Star game, the one game every year where nobody else played any defense either.
He was playing zone defense when the rest of the league was playing man-to-man. It's just another example of his artistry. Of course there are a couple of people, including Pat Riley, who had their career highs against Pete.
7. Doesn't the All-Star skills competition look like something right out of a Maravich instructional video?
It's almost like it was designed by his dad Press Maravich, except he would make Pete do it blindfolded hanging out a moving car.
8. Wouldn't Pete have owned the 3-point contest?
He loved the idea of the 3-point shot. Anything that made the game more exciting to the fans, he liked. Pete said, "The game is entertainment for the fans. It's not for the coaches, it's not for the players, it's for the fans. If you don't have the product that's marketed right, that's out there, that's entertaining, nobody will show up." In his one NBA season with the 3-pointer Pete went 10-for-15 from behind the arc as a part-time player for the Celtics, so the mind boggles at what might have been had he had the 3-pointer for his whole career.
9. Is it just me or has the All-Star game lost a little of its luster?
It's just you, you've lost a little of your luster. Pete had an idea for the All-Star game. Instead of teams of 12, he wanted to go five-on-five for the whole game. That's a game you wouldn't forget. There's always a point in the second quarter of the All-Star game where the subs come in and the game loses some juice. Pete's idea would have solved that. Not sure what his contingency plan was for guys getting hurt.
10. What can the hoop world learn about Pete Maravich that it doesn't already know by reading your book?
Well, one thing people don't know is that Pete's teams won 82 percent of the games in which he scored 40 or more points. What that tells me is Pete should have shot more. Also, Pete is the only player in NBA history to score 50 points on Super Bowl Sunday, which he did in 1972 against the Sixers. But you probably knew that.
Story Tools:
Kevin Hench / Special to FOXSports.com
Feb. 18, 2007
Hanging out at the free carbs media brunch at the MGM Grand on Sunday morning, I caught up with Wayne Federman, the world's foremost Pete Maravich biographer/comedian.
After a week of slaying 'em at Harrah's, Federman, co-author of Maravich, fielded questions about Vegas, All-Star weekend and his favorite NBA subject, Pistol Pete.
1. The big question surrounding this weekend's festivities is should the NBA make a permanent home in Las Vegas. What do you think?
I don't know if this is such a great idea. Every time a guy goes 3-for-17 you'll wonder if he's shaving points. They'll be surrounded by strippers, hookers, pimps, gamblers and gangsters — and that's just at the buffet line at Treasure Island — but the players will still have a dress code. No jeans! And now that they all have at least a semester of college under their belt, the NBA doesn't have to worry if they're mature enough to handle Vegas. I mean, how could a 19-year-old millionaire get into trouble here? Impossible.
If the NBA has a team in Vegas, the so-called "fifth quarter" will be extended to three overtimes. And there will be a whole bunch of new proposition bets. You'll be able to bet the over-under on positive paternity tests or get odds on Tim Hardaway and Elton John co-hosting a charity event.
2. If Bird and Magic through Jordan was basketball's Golden Age, where do you see the league right now?
I think the league is in great shape. The globalization of the game is incredible. I mean, just 10 years ago could you imagine that the two best players in the league would be Canadian and German? Not after the Leo Rautins and Uwe Blab flameouts. Like any era, there are only about eight teams you care about, but that's to be expected. I mean, does anybody really want to watch the Milwaukee Bucks? Or did they fold? Are they still in the league?
3. It's the 30th anniversary of Pete Maravich leading the NBA in scoring and the 10th anniversary of his being named to the Top 50 all-time team. Where do you see the Pistol's influence?
Well, Pete only had the moustache for a couple of years, the ancient mariner look, but it's great to see young Adam Morrison picking up the mantle. It just gives you that moment of hesitation, is that a basketball player or an arms dealer?
You see Pete's influence everywhere in the league. Steve Nash goes between his legs three times just bringing the ball up the court. What is common now was extraordinary when Pete was doing it. Nobody was making behind the back passes. Pete used to say that there was a method behind throwing a behind the back pass, that it gave another option for the defender to think about. Pete was all about misdirection, like a great close-up magician. Not like David Copperfield who makes entire airplanes disappear.
4. Bird won three MVPs and Nash has won two, but there hasn't been a white scoring champ since Maravich. Do you root for Pete to maintain this legacy?
Wow, I hadn't thought about that. I guess I'm just color blind when it comes to the NBA. I just see ballplayers. But now that you mention it, I guess Pete was white.
5. A young Dick Bavetta made a dubious charge call that led to Maravich fouling out of his career-high 68-point game in 1977. Do you feel a measure of satisfaction with Bavetta's loss to Charles Barkley on Saturday?
Bavetta still can't keep up with the speed of the league, even if the league is a 44-year-old, 300-pound, hungover TV commentator. Tom McMillan still hasn't gotten set on the one charge call where Bavetta waved off a Maravich basket. The bucket should have counted and Pete should have gone to the line. That would have been 71 right there.
6. Pete must have loved the All-Star game, the one game every year where nobody else played any defense either.
He was playing zone defense when the rest of the league was playing man-to-man. It's just another example of his artistry. Of course there are a couple of people, including Pat Riley, who had their career highs against Pete.
7. Doesn't the All-Star skills competition look like something right out of a Maravich instructional video?
It's almost like it was designed by his dad Press Maravich, except he would make Pete do it blindfolded hanging out a moving car.
8. Wouldn't Pete have owned the 3-point contest?
He loved the idea of the 3-point shot. Anything that made the game more exciting to the fans, he liked. Pete said, "The game is entertainment for the fans. It's not for the coaches, it's not for the players, it's for the fans. If you don't have the product that's marketed right, that's out there, that's entertaining, nobody will show up." In his one NBA season with the 3-pointer Pete went 10-for-15 from behind the arc as a part-time player for the Celtics, so the mind boggles at what might have been had he had the 3-pointer for his whole career.
9. Is it just me or has the All-Star game lost a little of its luster?
It's just you, you've lost a little of your luster. Pete had an idea for the All-Star game. Instead of teams of 12, he wanted to go five-on-five for the whole game. That's a game you wouldn't forget. There's always a point in the second quarter of the All-Star game where the subs come in and the game loses some juice. Pete's idea would have solved that. Not sure what his contingency plan was for guys getting hurt.
10. What can the hoop world learn about Pete Maravich that it doesn't already know by reading your book?
Well, one thing people don't know is that Pete's teams won 82 percent of the games in which he scored 40 or more points. What that tells me is Pete should have shot more. Also, Pete is the only player in NBA history to score 50 points on Super Bowl Sunday, which he did in 1972 against the Sixers. But you probably knew that.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Motortrend hails "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile"
The Last Mile: Steve McQueen bio shows his other side
Posted by Matt Stone
Filed under: Editorial, Maximum Strength Car Talk
The Last Mile
I'm a huge Steve McQueen fan, plain and simple. I admired him as an actor, and even more as one of Hollywood's most legitimate car guys. He owned great cars, several of which I've driven and/or written about. He raced great cars (ditto). He was a superb motorcycle rider and racer. And it's obvious that he worked double overtime to weave cars, bikes, and motorsport into many of the more significant movies he starred in or co-produced. But there's another side of Steve McQueen that few people saw; the side known only to his family and a small circle of friends during the last four-or-so years of his all too short life.
Now you can see that side too. McQueen’s third wife and widow, Barbara Minty McQueen Brunsvold, has partnered with several-time McQueen biographer Marshall Terrill, to author The Last Mile. Simply put, it’s a book no McQueen fan should be without. Prior to meeting and marrying the King of Cool, she was a fashion model of considerable note, appearing in Cosmo and numerous other magazines and ad layouts. As her modeling career wound down, the saw fashion photography as her next step, and thus was never without her cameras. She told McQueen this was part of the deal of their relationship, and he agreed.
Thank goodness, because the images she captured show us Steve McQueen, late in his game, in so many lights. Car and bike types will appreciate numerous shots of McQueen’s machines, such as his Hudson Wasp, Indian bikes, his beloved Jag XK-SS, an old 911, a bunch of wonderfully weathered trucks, and his vintage airplanes. Some of the shots are casual, others more particular. Some are downright funny. Many will bring tears.
The Last Mile was first published late last fall in a limited edition, slipcover volume that is virtually sold out, but there is a mass-market version that will be on sale in March. It’s priced at $50, and can be purchased directly from the publisher, Dalton Watson Fine Books (daltonwatson.com) or at major bookstores and other online booksellers.
Don’t think of this book as another movie star coffee table piece. It’s a much more personal look at a very complex individual, at a time in his life when he was more out of the public eye than in it. All the car, motorcycle, and airplane shots are just a bonus. Thanks, Barbara and Marshall, for sharing.
Posted by Matt Stone
Filed under: Editorial, Maximum Strength Car Talk
The Last Mile
I'm a huge Steve McQueen fan, plain and simple. I admired him as an actor, and even more as one of Hollywood's most legitimate car guys. He owned great cars, several of which I've driven and/or written about. He raced great cars (ditto). He was a superb motorcycle rider and racer. And it's obvious that he worked double overtime to weave cars, bikes, and motorsport into many of the more significant movies he starred in or co-produced. But there's another side of Steve McQueen that few people saw; the side known only to his family and a small circle of friends during the last four-or-so years of his all too short life.
Now you can see that side too. McQueen’s third wife and widow, Barbara Minty McQueen Brunsvold, has partnered with several-time McQueen biographer Marshall Terrill, to author The Last Mile. Simply put, it’s a book no McQueen fan should be without. Prior to meeting and marrying the King of Cool, she was a fashion model of considerable note, appearing in Cosmo and numerous other magazines and ad layouts. As her modeling career wound down, the saw fashion photography as her next step, and thus was never without her cameras. She told McQueen this was part of the deal of their relationship, and he agreed.
Thank goodness, because the images she captured show us Steve McQueen, late in his game, in so many lights. Car and bike types will appreciate numerous shots of McQueen’s machines, such as his Hudson Wasp, Indian bikes, his beloved Jag XK-SS, an old 911, a bunch of wonderfully weathered trucks, and his vintage airplanes. Some of the shots are casual, others more particular. Some are downright funny. Many will bring tears.
The Last Mile was first published late last fall in a limited edition, slipcover volume that is virtually sold out, but there is a mass-market version that will be on sale in March. It’s priced at $50, and can be purchased directly from the publisher, Dalton Watson Fine Books (daltonwatson.com) or at major bookstores and other online booksellers.
Don’t think of this book as another movie star coffee table piece. It’s a much more personal look at a very complex individual, at a time in his life when he was more out of the public eye than in it. All the car, motorcycle, and airplane shots are just a bonus. Thanks, Barbara and Marshall, for sharing.
Hoop Daddy a must read for basketball fans
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #9 - "Hoop Daddy" a must read for basketball fans
Author Lee Feinswog captures the emotions of fathers and sons whose lives are intertwined by basketball and all the game has mean to them in Hoop Daddy. Go to HoopDaddy.net to purchase a copy of this great book.
Author Lee Feinswog captures the emotions of fathers and sons whose lives are intertwined by basketball and all the game has mean to them in Hoop Daddy. Go to HoopDaddy.net to purchase a copy of this great book.
Hoop Daddy sneak preview
Author Lee Feinswog offer's sneak preview of Hoop Daddy
“A lot of men would say, ‘I don’t know if I want to coach my son.’ And I would tell them it’s the greatest experience in the world but you’re going to die two deaths every time he plays.
“Or you’re going to have a consolation every time he plays.
“Or you’re going to have an incredible celebration every time he plays.
“Because if he plays well and you win, whatever cloud is next to Cloud Nine you’re there. If he plays badly and you win, OK, you’re never as happy but at least you can live with it. And if he plays well and you lose, selfish as it sounds, the sting of the defeat is not so great. But if he plays badly and you lose, that is, I would say, a hell on earth.
“That is the worst of times. I had them all, but with Tony I had a lot more of the Cloud Nine game-type experiences, for sure.”
-- Washington State head coach Dick Bennett, whose son Tony was his best player at Wisconsin-Green Bay and is now his associate head coach
I’m not a coach. But as a sportswriter, I’d like to think I watched my son play sports, especially basketball, with a discerning eye and a healthy perspective.
For as long as he can remember basketball was our bond. Not that there weren’t the usual father-son things. But because I was divorced from his mother, he lived away from me through most of the time he was in elementary school and all of junior high and high school.
There were a lot of flights, long drives, hotel nights and rental cars to see Kirk and his sister, Stacey. For a while they lived in New England and later north Alabama, and I’ve been in Baton Rouge since 1984. I’ve always thought that today’s long-distance dads must have things a lot better with the advent of cell phones and e-mail, not that it’s any easier to be away from your children. You miss a lot of things when you’re apart and they’re growing up.
Our conversations about the game elevated when Kirk was in the 7th grade and playing for Priceville Middle School in some dark gym somewhere in the middle of nowhere Alabama between Decatur and Huntsville. He stood at midcourt to inbound the ball as the second quarter began. As he bounced it to one of his teammates, Kirk stopped and scanned the other team. They had changed defenses.
Quickly, without consulting the coach, he alerted his teammates and called a new offense.
We were on to something. Maybe he was paying attention all those years when I took him with me to LSU practices. Or when I took him to the Final Four. Or when we watched games on TV, sometimes together or other times sharing the moment on the telephone.
Kirk went on to become a pretty good player at Brewer High School, a Class 6A school in north Alabama. At 6-foot-1, the smallest male on my side of the family in three generations, he could dunk with both hands, play both guard positions and small forward. He was a tremendous defensive player.
But no one was breaking down his door to play college basketball. Alabama-Huntsville, which competed in the NCAA’s Division II, offered a full ride.
The UAH coach, Lennie Acuff, was a former coach at Berry College, a small NAIA school in Rome, Georgia. While recruiting Kirk earlier that year, Acuff told me as we watched a game in a gym in Huntsville, “You know your son is a white kid in a black kid’s body.”
Indeed. The kid had hops, a 35-inch vertical leap that was certainly an anomaly, especially since his father had the proverbial “credit-card jump.”
Kirk ultimately told UAH he wasn’t interested. So Acuff contacted Todd Brooks, then the coach at Berry, and told him about Kirk. One thing led to another and soon Kirk had signed on to be a Viking.
I was in for quite an awakening.
I cover LSU basketball. I’ve been to almost every Final Four for 20 years. I’ve joked that I taught Shaquille O’Neal, whom I’ve known since he was only 6-foot-11, how to do interviews. The Southeastern Conference from the early 1990s on was as good as any league in the country and covering it night in and night out was a thrill. Simply put, it was sobering to suddenly watch NAIA basketball where you might see zero dunks in a game, officials who are calling NAIA games in the middle of nowhere for a reason, and sit with 30 or 40 of your closest friends in some gym that doesn’t even have a concession stand. Don’t even get me started about the cheerleaders.
But I knew I was about to enter into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see my son play college basketball and have his education paid for at the same time. I love hoops and I love my son, so I knew I would make every opportunity to see him play. One of the reasons I left the daily newspaper business in 1998 was to create more flexibility in my life so I could see him play in high school.
Kirk made the TranSouth Conference all-freshman team in 2001. His Berry team finished 9-23 after losing in the first round of the TranSouth Conference Tournament.
“That was the worst team I ever played on,” Kirk said.
But the Vikings showed promise. Kirk averaged 7.5 points, 2.6 rebounds and 3.2 assists.
The next season, 2001-02, Berry ended 16-17, getting blown out in the first round of the conference tournament at Lee, a little school in Cleveland, Tennessee. Kirk averaged 13.9 points, 3.9 rebounds and 3.4 assists. But a month before the season ended, en route to making the All-TranSouth second team, Kirk gave me a shock.
He told me that was it. He’d had enough basketball. No more off-season conditioning. No more long bus rides, like that nine-hour jaunt to Lyons, Arkansas. No more getting yelled at. He didn’t want to go to school at Berry anymore; rather he longed for the big-time college atmosphere of a place like Florida State or LSU.
I had a big dad dilemma: Happy kid or a kid on full scholarship. The thought of paying for college was right up there with getting hemorrhoids.
By the time the semester ended I realized there was no substitute for having a happy kid. So he gave up his scholarship and came to Baton Rouge and became a student at LSU.
“I couldn’t have played,” he said. “The next year if I had tried to play again, well, I couldn’t. I just wouldn’t have been any good. All my friends were graduating, I wasn’t going to have a good group of friends there anymore, and I just thought I was ready to do something else.”
I implored him to become a positive member of society: Get good grades, don’t get in any fights with LSU football players at the bars he and his friends frequented, don’t drink and drive and get used to manual labor around our house.
That fall, he coached an 8th-grade girls basketball team and got a technical in his first game.
“Hell, I got thrown out of my first game,” Kirk said, still blaming the second technical on his assistant. “I still hate that referee.”
Later that winter, he coached a 7th-grade boys team. And he was good. Great demeanor. He could teach the game. And the kids played hard for him and he got lots of presents at season’s end, always a good barometer. What’s more, I enjoyed watching him coach almost as much as watching him play. I have to admit I didn’t miss the traveling to Rome and it was fun to have him around all the time.
One day in February, however, he called the house and told me and my wife, Brenda, that he had a lot on his mind, that he had to come see us, because he was “all stressed out.” We had no idea what it could be, but it wasn’t like him.
Kirk came to the house and started babbling and pacing about the kitchen. So I stopped him and asked him to get to the point. By now I was a bit concerned, especially after Brenda’s crack before he arrived about hoping no one was pregnant.
“I’m thinking of going back to Berry,” he blurted out.
“Is that all?” I asked, laughing.
I hopped off the counter and jumped in the air with both fists over my head and yelled.
“Full scholarship!”
We all laughed. He was obviously relieved.
“You think that’s all right?” he asked.
Hell, yeah, it was! I told him he had one chance in life to play college sports and that’s when you’re in college. We also pointed out that he had a passion for the game that he was wasting.
“If I had never coached that year I was at LSU I probably never would have gone back,” Kirk said. “If I had never picked up a ball and never been around the game, I’d have been fine. But getting into coaching and being so involved, basically I was wrapped up in the game all year. It was like I never took a break. It was just different.”
It didn’t hurt, however, that he got constant phone calls from his old Berry teammates trying to get him to return. And the new coach, Jeff Haarlow, Todd Brooks’ former assistant who got the job when Brooks decided to concentrate on being Berry’s athletic director, had kept in touch and assured Kirk that his scholarship was still there if he wanted it.
Haarlow finished 21-13 in his first year as head coach. He and I agreed that if he could put Kirk back into the mix, Berry could be really good.
“I knew his love for the game would come back. I knew he wanted to play some more,” Haarlow told me.
And a bell went off in this sportswriter’s head that there was a book in all of this. I wasn’t sure exactly what at the time, but I knew what basketball had meant to us and what his going back would mean for the next couple of years. For me, at least, writing this book was a chance to not only chronicle Kirk’s career, but also give it special meaning for me and him.
After kicking it around, I realized that there were so many great examples out there of fathers and sons whose lives were intertwined by basketball and that their stories were worth getting. In five minutes I had a list that was a Who’s Who of fathers and sons in basketball.
Even Haarlow fit the bill, since his dad, Bob, played at Princeton with Bill Bradley. And Bob’s father, the late William “Bill” Haarlow, was once head of officials for the Big Ten.
There were stories out there and I was going to get them. And it was all going to tie in with Kirk’s senior year, one made even more significant because of something really stupid he did at LSU right after he decided to return to Berry.
To order a copy of Lee Feinswog's Hoop Daddy, go to www.HoopDaddy.net
“A lot of men would say, ‘I don’t know if I want to coach my son.’ And I would tell them it’s the greatest experience in the world but you’re going to die two deaths every time he plays.
“Or you’re going to have a consolation every time he plays.
“Or you’re going to have an incredible celebration every time he plays.
“Because if he plays well and you win, whatever cloud is next to Cloud Nine you’re there. If he plays badly and you win, OK, you’re never as happy but at least you can live with it. And if he plays well and you lose, selfish as it sounds, the sting of the defeat is not so great. But if he plays badly and you lose, that is, I would say, a hell on earth.
“That is the worst of times. I had them all, but with Tony I had a lot more of the Cloud Nine game-type experiences, for sure.”
-- Washington State head coach Dick Bennett, whose son Tony was his best player at Wisconsin-Green Bay and is now his associate head coach
I’m not a coach. But as a sportswriter, I’d like to think I watched my son play sports, especially basketball, with a discerning eye and a healthy perspective.
For as long as he can remember basketball was our bond. Not that there weren’t the usual father-son things. But because I was divorced from his mother, he lived away from me through most of the time he was in elementary school and all of junior high and high school.
There were a lot of flights, long drives, hotel nights and rental cars to see Kirk and his sister, Stacey. For a while they lived in New England and later north Alabama, and I’ve been in Baton Rouge since 1984. I’ve always thought that today’s long-distance dads must have things a lot better with the advent of cell phones and e-mail, not that it’s any easier to be away from your children. You miss a lot of things when you’re apart and they’re growing up.
Our conversations about the game elevated when Kirk was in the 7th grade and playing for Priceville Middle School in some dark gym somewhere in the middle of nowhere Alabama between Decatur and Huntsville. He stood at midcourt to inbound the ball as the second quarter began. As he bounced it to one of his teammates, Kirk stopped and scanned the other team. They had changed defenses.
Quickly, without consulting the coach, he alerted his teammates and called a new offense.
We were on to something. Maybe he was paying attention all those years when I took him with me to LSU practices. Or when I took him to the Final Four. Or when we watched games on TV, sometimes together or other times sharing the moment on the telephone.
Kirk went on to become a pretty good player at Brewer High School, a Class 6A school in north Alabama. At 6-foot-1, the smallest male on my side of the family in three generations, he could dunk with both hands, play both guard positions and small forward. He was a tremendous defensive player.
But no one was breaking down his door to play college basketball. Alabama-Huntsville, which competed in the NCAA’s Division II, offered a full ride.
The UAH coach, Lennie Acuff, was a former coach at Berry College, a small NAIA school in Rome, Georgia. While recruiting Kirk earlier that year, Acuff told me as we watched a game in a gym in Huntsville, “You know your son is a white kid in a black kid’s body.”
Indeed. The kid had hops, a 35-inch vertical leap that was certainly an anomaly, especially since his father had the proverbial “credit-card jump.”
Kirk ultimately told UAH he wasn’t interested. So Acuff contacted Todd Brooks, then the coach at Berry, and told him about Kirk. One thing led to another and soon Kirk had signed on to be a Viking.
I was in for quite an awakening.
I cover LSU basketball. I’ve been to almost every Final Four for 20 years. I’ve joked that I taught Shaquille O’Neal, whom I’ve known since he was only 6-foot-11, how to do interviews. The Southeastern Conference from the early 1990s on was as good as any league in the country and covering it night in and night out was a thrill. Simply put, it was sobering to suddenly watch NAIA basketball where you might see zero dunks in a game, officials who are calling NAIA games in the middle of nowhere for a reason, and sit with 30 or 40 of your closest friends in some gym that doesn’t even have a concession stand. Don’t even get me started about the cheerleaders.
But I knew I was about to enter into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see my son play college basketball and have his education paid for at the same time. I love hoops and I love my son, so I knew I would make every opportunity to see him play. One of the reasons I left the daily newspaper business in 1998 was to create more flexibility in my life so I could see him play in high school.
Kirk made the TranSouth Conference all-freshman team in 2001. His Berry team finished 9-23 after losing in the first round of the TranSouth Conference Tournament.
“That was the worst team I ever played on,” Kirk said.
But the Vikings showed promise. Kirk averaged 7.5 points, 2.6 rebounds and 3.2 assists.
The next season, 2001-02, Berry ended 16-17, getting blown out in the first round of the conference tournament at Lee, a little school in Cleveland, Tennessee. Kirk averaged 13.9 points, 3.9 rebounds and 3.4 assists. But a month before the season ended, en route to making the All-TranSouth second team, Kirk gave me a shock.
He told me that was it. He’d had enough basketball. No more off-season conditioning. No more long bus rides, like that nine-hour jaunt to Lyons, Arkansas. No more getting yelled at. He didn’t want to go to school at Berry anymore; rather he longed for the big-time college atmosphere of a place like Florida State or LSU.
I had a big dad dilemma: Happy kid or a kid on full scholarship. The thought of paying for college was right up there with getting hemorrhoids.
By the time the semester ended I realized there was no substitute for having a happy kid. So he gave up his scholarship and came to Baton Rouge and became a student at LSU.
“I couldn’t have played,” he said. “The next year if I had tried to play again, well, I couldn’t. I just wouldn’t have been any good. All my friends were graduating, I wasn’t going to have a good group of friends there anymore, and I just thought I was ready to do something else.”
I implored him to become a positive member of society: Get good grades, don’t get in any fights with LSU football players at the bars he and his friends frequented, don’t drink and drive and get used to manual labor around our house.
That fall, he coached an 8th-grade girls basketball team and got a technical in his first game.
“Hell, I got thrown out of my first game,” Kirk said, still blaming the second technical on his assistant. “I still hate that referee.”
Later that winter, he coached a 7th-grade boys team. And he was good. Great demeanor. He could teach the game. And the kids played hard for him and he got lots of presents at season’s end, always a good barometer. What’s more, I enjoyed watching him coach almost as much as watching him play. I have to admit I didn’t miss the traveling to Rome and it was fun to have him around all the time.
One day in February, however, he called the house and told me and my wife, Brenda, that he had a lot on his mind, that he had to come see us, because he was “all stressed out.” We had no idea what it could be, but it wasn’t like him.
Kirk came to the house and started babbling and pacing about the kitchen. So I stopped him and asked him to get to the point. By now I was a bit concerned, especially after Brenda’s crack before he arrived about hoping no one was pregnant.
“I’m thinking of going back to Berry,” he blurted out.
“Is that all?” I asked, laughing.
I hopped off the counter and jumped in the air with both fists over my head and yelled.
“Full scholarship!”
We all laughed. He was obviously relieved.
“You think that’s all right?” he asked.
Hell, yeah, it was! I told him he had one chance in life to play college sports and that’s when you’re in college. We also pointed out that he had a passion for the game that he was wasting.
“If I had never coached that year I was at LSU I probably never would have gone back,” Kirk said. “If I had never picked up a ball and never been around the game, I’d have been fine. But getting into coaching and being so involved, basically I was wrapped up in the game all year. It was like I never took a break. It was just different.”
It didn’t hurt, however, that he got constant phone calls from his old Berry teammates trying to get him to return. And the new coach, Jeff Haarlow, Todd Brooks’ former assistant who got the job when Brooks decided to concentrate on being Berry’s athletic director, had kept in touch and assured Kirk that his scholarship was still there if he wanted it.
Haarlow finished 21-13 in his first year as head coach. He and I agreed that if he could put Kirk back into the mix, Berry could be really good.
“I knew his love for the game would come back. I knew he wanted to play some more,” Haarlow told me.
And a bell went off in this sportswriter’s head that there was a book in all of this. I wasn’t sure exactly what at the time, but I knew what basketball had meant to us and what his going back would mean for the next couple of years. For me, at least, writing this book was a chance to not only chronicle Kirk’s career, but also give it special meaning for me and him.
After kicking it around, I realized that there were so many great examples out there of fathers and sons whose lives were intertwined by basketball and that their stories were worth getting. In five minutes I had a list that was a Who’s Who of fathers and sons in basketball.
Even Haarlow fit the bill, since his dad, Bob, played at Princeton with Bill Bradley. And Bob’s father, the late William “Bill” Haarlow, was once head of officials for the Big Ten.
There were stories out there and I was going to get them. And it was all going to tie in with Kirk’s senior year, one made even more significant because of something really stupid he did at LSU right after he decided to return to Berry.
To order a copy of Lee Feinswog's Hoop Daddy, go to www.HoopDaddy.net
Vanity Fair selects "The Last Mile" as hot pick
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #8 - Vanity Fair selects "The Last Mile" as hot pick
Vanity Fair has selected "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile" as a great new book for the month of March in its "Hot Type" column, written by Elissa Shappell.
Vanity Fair has selected "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile" as a great new book for the month of March in its "Hot Type" column, written by Elissa Shappell.
Vanity Fair selects "The Last Mile" as hot pick
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #7 - Barbara McQueen helps raise $250,000 for cancer
Barbara McQueen, author of "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile," along with other celebrities, helped raise $250,000 on behalf of mesothelioma research.
Barbara McQueen, author of "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile," along with other celebrities, helped raise $250,000 on behalf of mesothelioma research.
Vanity Fair selects "The Last Mile" as hot pick
Fanfair
Hot Type
A monthly overview of great new books.
by Elissa Schappell March 2007
What is the key to an artist's creative success? Joan Acocella's rich and brilliantly wrought trove of essays, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon), proves it's "patience, courage, and the ability to survive disappointment."
Hold on to your helmet: In Leni (Knopf), Steven Bach unspools the dark truth about Nazi-friendly filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, proving her to be anything but apolitical. Conservative, patriotic soldier Joshua Key's allegiance to the U.S. government was decimated by the atrocities he witnessed in Iraq, and with the help of Lawrence Hill he tells The Deserter's Tale (Grove). In her harrowing memoir, Infidel (Free Press), Ayaan Hirsi Ali once again tempts the fury of fundamentalists. Senator Chuck Schumer comes out swinging for the middle class in Positively American (Rodale). Bambi vs. Godzilla (Pantheon) sees David Mamet spitting, growling, and batting his eyes at the business of making movies. Kevin Sessums's memoir is a portrait of the writer as a Mississippi Sissy (St. Martin's). Makeup maven Bobbi Brown (now 50 herself) shares midlife sleights of hand to achieve Living Beauty (Springboard).
Filmmaker Fritz Lang and photographer Martin Munkacsi at the copper bar in Lang's Berlin home, circa 1932.
L'amour! L'amour! L'amour! Daniel Jones, editor of the eponymous New York Times column, presents its loveliest and thorniest tales of "desire, deceit, and devotion" in Modern Love (Three Rivers). In Sally Wofford-Girand and Andrea Chapin's anthology, The Honeymoon's Over (Warner), writers such as Jane Smiley and Terry McMillan dish about why they split or stayed. From Dietrich to Streisand to Cher, Bronwyn Cosgrave shows how fashion and Oscar were always Made for Each Other (Bloomsbury). Life online goes off the hook in Walter Kirn's The Unbinding (Anchor). Forty years in the making, Clive James's Cultural Amnesia (Norton) recalls seminal moments in history and the arts. By Alec Wilkinson's account, Poppa Neutrino, a builder and sailor of trash rafts fit for one cross-Atlantic jaunt, is The Happiest Man in the World (Random House).
In short: Sara Davidson's advice for baby-boomers, Leap (Random House); Charlotte Chandler's Bergman bio, Ingrid (Simon & Schuster); Steidl's Martin Munkacsi; Charlie LeDuff's US Guys (Penguin Press); Barbara McQueen's Steve McQueen, The Last Mile (Dalton Watson); photographer Tierney Gearon's meditation on motherhood, Daddy, Where Are You? (Steidl); André Schiffrin's intellectual autobiography, A Political Education (Melville House); Lucinda Franks's memoir, My Father's Secret War (Miramax); Larry Brown's posthumous (sadly) novel, A Miracle of Catfish (Shannon Ravenel); Tara Ison's psycho-comic novel, The List (Scribner).
The insane, compassionate, balls-out genius William T. Vollmann traversed the globe asking Poor People (Ecco) the question, "Why are you poor?" And the answer is …
Elissa Schappell, author of the novel Use Me (Perennial) and editor-at-large of the literary magazine Tin House, has written Vanity Fair's Hot Type column for nearly a decade.
Hot Type
A monthly overview of great new books.
by Elissa Schappell March 2007
What is the key to an artist's creative success? Joan Acocella's rich and brilliantly wrought trove of essays, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon), proves it's "patience, courage, and the ability to survive disappointment."
Hold on to your helmet: In Leni (Knopf), Steven Bach unspools the dark truth about Nazi-friendly filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, proving her to be anything but apolitical. Conservative, patriotic soldier Joshua Key's allegiance to the U.S. government was decimated by the atrocities he witnessed in Iraq, and with the help of Lawrence Hill he tells The Deserter's Tale (Grove). In her harrowing memoir, Infidel (Free Press), Ayaan Hirsi Ali once again tempts the fury of fundamentalists. Senator Chuck Schumer comes out swinging for the middle class in Positively American (Rodale). Bambi vs. Godzilla (Pantheon) sees David Mamet spitting, growling, and batting his eyes at the business of making movies. Kevin Sessums's memoir is a portrait of the writer as a Mississippi Sissy (St. Martin's). Makeup maven Bobbi Brown (now 50 herself) shares midlife sleights of hand to achieve Living Beauty (Springboard).
Filmmaker Fritz Lang and photographer Martin Munkacsi at the copper bar in Lang's Berlin home, circa 1932.
L'amour! L'amour! L'amour! Daniel Jones, editor of the eponymous New York Times column, presents its loveliest and thorniest tales of "desire, deceit, and devotion" in Modern Love (Three Rivers). In Sally Wofford-Girand and Andrea Chapin's anthology, The Honeymoon's Over (Warner), writers such as Jane Smiley and Terry McMillan dish about why they split or stayed. From Dietrich to Streisand to Cher, Bronwyn Cosgrave shows how fashion and Oscar were always Made for Each Other (Bloomsbury). Life online goes off the hook in Walter Kirn's The Unbinding (Anchor). Forty years in the making, Clive James's Cultural Amnesia (Norton) recalls seminal moments in history and the arts. By Alec Wilkinson's account, Poppa Neutrino, a builder and sailor of trash rafts fit for one cross-Atlantic jaunt, is The Happiest Man in the World (Random House).
In short: Sara Davidson's advice for baby-boomers, Leap (Random House); Charlotte Chandler's Bergman bio, Ingrid (Simon & Schuster); Steidl's Martin Munkacsi; Charlie LeDuff's US Guys (Penguin Press); Barbara McQueen's Steve McQueen, The Last Mile (Dalton Watson); photographer Tierney Gearon's meditation on motherhood, Daddy, Where Are You? (Steidl); André Schiffrin's intellectual autobiography, A Political Education (Melville House); Lucinda Franks's memoir, My Father's Secret War (Miramax); Larry Brown's posthumous (sadly) novel, A Miracle of Catfish (Shannon Ravenel); Tara Ison's psycho-comic novel, The List (Scribner).
The insane, compassionate, balls-out genius William T. Vollmann traversed the globe asking Poor People (Ecco) the question, "Why are you poor?" And the answer is …
Elissa Schappell, author of the novel Use Me (Perennial) and editor-at-large of the literary magazine Tin House, has written Vanity Fair's Hot Type column for nearly a decade.
Barbara McQueen helps raise $250,000 for cancer
Benefit raises $250,000
Barbara McQueen helps raise money for mesothelioma research.
By BARBARA POTTER
Orange County Register
Twenty-six years ago actor and Hollywood legend Steve McQueen died from exposure to asbestos.
Each year up to 3,000 patients in the United States are diagnosed with the same form of aggressive cancer – mesothelioma. This slow growing cancer is linked to asbestos, a natural fiber that was once used in manufacturing industrial and household products. Medical studies show that men in their mid-60s are most often affected, but women have also been diagnosed with the disease.
For McQueen, it was contracted from his years stripping asbestos off hot pipes on U.S. Navy ships and from the flame retardant race car driver suits that he wore.
To raise funds for research for this rare cancer, Roger and Ann Worthington held an asbestos cancer benefit featuring Grammy-award winner and jazz musician Chris Botti. The event was held at the Worthington's beautiful Capistrano Beach home on Feb. 10. Barbara McQueen, wife of Steve McQueen, also made an appearance and autographed copies of her book, "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile," a publication of never before seen photos she took of Steve more than 25 years ago.
Roger Worthington, Barbara McQueen and Chris Botti also have in common that all three are from the same small community of Corvallis, Oregon.
Also gracing the stage was Jordan Zevon, a singer and songwriter, and Floyd Landis, winner of the 2006 Tour de France, who raised his voice for the need to end asbestos-related cancer.
"It was a smashing success. People had a whole lot of fun and it was great to have some of the best jazz artists performing in our front yard," Roger Worthington said.
By Monday evening, he said he had received many "hugs and kisses" via e-mail, thanking the couple for a wonderful evening.
More than $250,000 was raised at the event, which will go to the Punch Worthington Research Lab at the Pacific Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for research projects in finding a cure for mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases.
Roger Worthington's father, David "Punch" Worthington died from asbestos poisoning on Aug. 25, 2006. In August 2002, Warren Zevon, an acclaimed folk musician and father of Jordan Zevon, also died of the disease. Jordan, sang his father's classic song, "Werewolves of London," at the benefit. Chris Botti's drummer Billy Kilson also performed – his mother recently died from mesothelioma.
For the past 18 years Roger Worthington, an attorney, has taken on his clients' cause. In 1999, he founded The Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation to advance funding and research toward finding a cure.
"A lot of passion comes from personal experience," he said.
Worthington has helped more than 400 clients over the years in asbestos-related cases.
"We're very aggressive and we get the highest settlements," he said.
The Veterans Administration does not have a program to treat its patients diagnosed with mesothelioma.
"The government has not taken this (mesothelioma) seriously," Worthington said.
Jessica Like, executive director of Pacific Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Los Angeles, said the evening was a wonderful outpouring from the more than 350 people who attended the fundraiser.
"People connected with other mesothelioma patients, survivors and their families. Doctors also got to speak with each other and with patients, too. It was a great networking experience, a total success," she said.
Also among the guests was Sandy Hazen, whose husband Tom also died of the disease in 2000. She was instrumental in organizing the fundraiser, Worthington said.
"For eight months, my husband battled mesothelioma," she said.
"It isn't a blue collar disease. It doesn't respect job titles – judges, accountants, doctors, inventors, housewives, school children have had it – it's not a ship yard disease," Worthington said.
Funds raised included $15,000 from the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers Union, $60,000 from the estate of David "Punch" Worthington, $50,000 from the law firm of Simon, Eddins and Greenstone, $25,000 from Roger Worthington, $10,000 from John Markovich, $10,000 from the law firm of Simmons Cooper and $5,000 from Owens-Illinois. Auction items also raised $9,000, from sculptures by Eric Peltzer and Alex Pavlenko, paintings by local artist Rick Delanty and Thomas Schmidt and photographs of Steve McQueen and limited edition copies of Barbara McQueen's book.
Mesothelioma can take 20-40 years to develop tumors. Possible signs include shortness of breath, pain under the rib cage, pain or swelling in the abdomen, lumps in the abdomen and weight loss for no known reason. There is no cure, and treatments are limited. Until recently mesothelioma patients have lived only months after diagnosis, but advancements in research have extended some patients' lives by three to five years.
To make a donation for mesothlioma research go to www.phlbi.org/pages/make_gift.htm
Contact the writer: bpotter@ocregister.com or 949-492-5135
Barbara McQueen helps raise money for mesothelioma research.
By BARBARA POTTER
Orange County Register
Twenty-six years ago actor and Hollywood legend Steve McQueen died from exposure to asbestos.
Each year up to 3,000 patients in the United States are diagnosed with the same form of aggressive cancer – mesothelioma. This slow growing cancer is linked to asbestos, a natural fiber that was once used in manufacturing industrial and household products. Medical studies show that men in their mid-60s are most often affected, but women have also been diagnosed with the disease.
For McQueen, it was contracted from his years stripping asbestos off hot pipes on U.S. Navy ships and from the flame retardant race car driver suits that he wore.
To raise funds for research for this rare cancer, Roger and Ann Worthington held an asbestos cancer benefit featuring Grammy-award winner and jazz musician Chris Botti. The event was held at the Worthington's beautiful Capistrano Beach home on Feb. 10. Barbara McQueen, wife of Steve McQueen, also made an appearance and autographed copies of her book, "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile," a publication of never before seen photos she took of Steve more than 25 years ago.
Roger Worthington, Barbara McQueen and Chris Botti also have in common that all three are from the same small community of Corvallis, Oregon.
Also gracing the stage was Jordan Zevon, a singer and songwriter, and Floyd Landis, winner of the 2006 Tour de France, who raised his voice for the need to end asbestos-related cancer.
"It was a smashing success. People had a whole lot of fun and it was great to have some of the best jazz artists performing in our front yard," Roger Worthington said.
By Monday evening, he said he had received many "hugs and kisses" via e-mail, thanking the couple for a wonderful evening.
More than $250,000 was raised at the event, which will go to the Punch Worthington Research Lab at the Pacific Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for research projects in finding a cure for mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases.
Roger Worthington's father, David "Punch" Worthington died from asbestos poisoning on Aug. 25, 2006. In August 2002, Warren Zevon, an acclaimed folk musician and father of Jordan Zevon, also died of the disease. Jordan, sang his father's classic song, "Werewolves of London," at the benefit. Chris Botti's drummer Billy Kilson also performed – his mother recently died from mesothelioma.
For the past 18 years Roger Worthington, an attorney, has taken on his clients' cause. In 1999, he founded The Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation to advance funding and research toward finding a cure.
"A lot of passion comes from personal experience," he said.
Worthington has helped more than 400 clients over the years in asbestos-related cases.
"We're very aggressive and we get the highest settlements," he said.
The Veterans Administration does not have a program to treat its patients diagnosed with mesothelioma.
"The government has not taken this (mesothelioma) seriously," Worthington said.
Jessica Like, executive director of Pacific Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Los Angeles, said the evening was a wonderful outpouring from the more than 350 people who attended the fundraiser.
"People connected with other mesothelioma patients, survivors and their families. Doctors also got to speak with each other and with patients, too. It was a great networking experience, a total success," she said.
Also among the guests was Sandy Hazen, whose husband Tom also died of the disease in 2000. She was instrumental in organizing the fundraiser, Worthington said.
"For eight months, my husband battled mesothelioma," she said.
"It isn't a blue collar disease. It doesn't respect job titles – judges, accountants, doctors, inventors, housewives, school children have had it – it's not a ship yard disease," Worthington said.
Funds raised included $15,000 from the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers Union, $60,000 from the estate of David "Punch" Worthington, $50,000 from the law firm of Simon, Eddins and Greenstone, $25,000 from Roger Worthington, $10,000 from John Markovich, $10,000 from the law firm of Simmons Cooper and $5,000 from Owens-Illinois. Auction items also raised $9,000, from sculptures by Eric Peltzer and Alex Pavlenko, paintings by local artist Rick Delanty and Thomas Schmidt and photographs of Steve McQueen and limited edition copies of Barbara McQueen's book.
Mesothelioma can take 20-40 years to develop tumors. Possible signs include shortness of breath, pain under the rib cage, pain or swelling in the abdomen, lumps in the abdomen and weight loss for no known reason. There is no cure, and treatments are limited. Until recently mesothelioma patients have lived only months after diagnosis, but advancements in research have extended some patients' lives by three to five years.
To make a donation for mesothlioma research go to www.phlbi.org/pages/make_gift.htm
Contact the writer: bpotter@ocregister.com or 949-492-5135
"Maravich" authors on XM Public Radio
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #6 - "Maravich" authors on XM Public Radio
Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill, authors of "Maravich," can now be heard on the Bob Edwards Show on XM Public Radio. Go to www.xmradio.com to listen to the show.
Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill, authors of "Maravich," can now be heard on the Bob Edwards Show on XM Public Radio. Go to www.xmradio.com to listen to the show.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
"Maravich" author performs during All-Star Break
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #5 - Wayne Federman at Harrah's during All-Star Week
Comedian and "Maravich" author Wayne Federman will be performing at Harrah's Casino two nights a week until Feb. 18. His shows are at 8:30 and 19:30 p.m. Wayne is one of the most talented and funny comedians working the circuit today.
Comedian and "Maravich" author Wayne Federman will be performing at Harrah's Casino two nights a week until Feb. 18. His shows are at 8:30 and 19:30 p.m. Wayne is one of the most talented and funny comedians working the circuit today.
Slater, Mo. to host Steve McQueen Days in March
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #4 - Slater, Mo. to host Steve McQueen Days in March
The city of Slater, Mo. will host the first ever "Steve McQueen Days" on March 24 & 25 with a slate of events honoring the fallen superstar.
The city of Slater, Mo. will host the first ever "Steve McQueen Days" on March 24 & 25 with a slate of events honoring the fallen superstar.
Barbara McQueen to appear on David Letterman
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #3 - Barbara McQueen to appear on David Letterman
This broadcast announces that Barbara McQueen will be on the David Letterman Show in March to promote "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile."
This broadcast announces that Barbara McQueen will be on the David Letterman Show in March to promote "Steve McQueen: The Last Mile."
"Maravich" signing at Feb. 24 LSU game
Gabcast! A Book Buzz #2 - Pete Maravich book signing on Feb. 24
Booksigning for "Maravich" with Jackie, Jason and Joshua Maravich. Listen in for more details. Check back in on Feb. 25 for highlights.
Booksigning for "Maravich" with Jackie, Jason and Joshua Maravich. Listen in for more details. Check back in on Feb. 25 for highlights.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Rocky Mount Telegram on "Maravich"
New book on Maravich really details his short life
By Matt LaWell
Rocky Mount Telegram
Thursday, February 08, 2007
There remains something inherently cool about Pete Maravich, even now, nearly 20 years after he collapsed and died on a basketball court.
Maybe it's something purely cosmetic – like the shaggy hair or those thick floppy socks – or maybe it's something more.
Maybe it's all those Homework Basketball drills that Maravich's father, Press, taught his son and that Maravich passed on to thousands of children across the country both in person and on videos that still fetch a fair price on eBay.
Maybe it's all those points Maravich scored during his three historic seasons down at Louisiana State, where he set a new NCAA single-season scoring record each year and, by the time he left town, the career scoring record, too.
Or maybe it's the fact that he rose to the peak of the collective American consciousness at 19, fell into a rut of alcohol and drugs during his 10-season professional career, then reinvented himself as a born-again Christian and preacher, spreading Christ's love as easily as he had the fundamentals of the game he loved.
But Maravich's legend spread well before he hit the court for the Tigers for the first time in 1967. While Press coached at Clemson and N.C. State, Maravich built a reputation throughout the Carolinas. Determined was one word used often to describe the teenage Maravich. Dedicated was another. Good – that was a third.
The complete saga returned late last year when Marshall Terrill and Wayne Federman published "Maravich" ($24.95, Sport Classic Books), which includes such tireless research that any reader will become an expert on the man who shot so often and scored so much he is still referred to as "Pistol."
"When I do a book about someone," Terrill wrote in an e-mail, "I have to know everything. ... I read all the books, dig up all the newspaper articles, buy everything, make contact with almost everyone and, over the years, you dig up a treasure trove of stuff."
The details, which, at points during the narrative become somewhat dense, begin nearly from the first page, where Terrill and Federman trace back to Maravich's grandparents' immigration to the steel-driven Pennsylvania, to the last, where Maravich's widow, Jackie, and his sons Joshua and Jaeson discuss the man who meant so much to them – so much to everybody.
Even now, so many years after he last played, Maravich still means so much to so many people.
Maybe it's the points, or maybe it's just his legend. Or maybe it's something more, the fact that Maravich's game and personality were so far ahead of his time.
On the back cover of their book, Terrill and Federman quote eight of the NBA's greatest players and coaches of the last quarter-century. Among that group is former Detroit guard Isiah Thomas, who won two championships with the Pistons.
"He did things with the basketball that players – still today – can't do," Thomas said. "If Maravich was playing today, he'd be a god."
Just maybe.
Matt LaWell can be reached at 407-9952 or mlawell@coxnc.com
By Matt LaWell
Rocky Mount Telegram
Thursday, February 08, 2007
There remains something inherently cool about Pete Maravich, even now, nearly 20 years after he collapsed and died on a basketball court.
Maybe it's something purely cosmetic – like the shaggy hair or those thick floppy socks – or maybe it's something more.
Maybe it's all those Homework Basketball drills that Maravich's father, Press, taught his son and that Maravich passed on to thousands of children across the country both in person and on videos that still fetch a fair price on eBay.
Maybe it's all those points Maravich scored during his three historic seasons down at Louisiana State, where he set a new NCAA single-season scoring record each year and, by the time he left town, the career scoring record, too.
Or maybe it's the fact that he rose to the peak of the collective American consciousness at 19, fell into a rut of alcohol and drugs during his 10-season professional career, then reinvented himself as a born-again Christian and preacher, spreading Christ's love as easily as he had the fundamentals of the game he loved.
But Maravich's legend spread well before he hit the court for the Tigers for the first time in 1967. While Press coached at Clemson and N.C. State, Maravich built a reputation throughout the Carolinas. Determined was one word used often to describe the teenage Maravich. Dedicated was another. Good – that was a third.
The complete saga returned late last year when Marshall Terrill and Wayne Federman published "Maravich" ($24.95, Sport Classic Books), which includes such tireless research that any reader will become an expert on the man who shot so often and scored so much he is still referred to as "Pistol."
"When I do a book about someone," Terrill wrote in an e-mail, "I have to know everything. ... I read all the books, dig up all the newspaper articles, buy everything, make contact with almost everyone and, over the years, you dig up a treasure trove of stuff."
The details, which, at points during the narrative become somewhat dense, begin nearly from the first page, where Terrill and Federman trace back to Maravich's grandparents' immigration to the steel-driven Pennsylvania, to the last, where Maravich's widow, Jackie, and his sons Joshua and Jaeson discuss the man who meant so much to them – so much to everybody.
Even now, so many years after he last played, Maravich still means so much to so many people.
Maybe it's the points, or maybe it's just his legend. Or maybe it's something more, the fact that Maravich's game and personality were so far ahead of his time.
On the back cover of their book, Terrill and Federman quote eight of the NBA's greatest players and coaches of the last quarter-century. Among that group is former Detroit guard Isiah Thomas, who won two championships with the Pistons.
"He did things with the basketball that players – still today – can't do," Thomas said. "If Maravich was playing today, he'd be a god."
Just maybe.
Matt LaWell can be reached at 407-9952 or mlawell@coxnc.com
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
NY Times calls Maravich essential biography
MARAVICH
By Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill in collaboration with Jackie
Maravich.
Illustrated. 422 pp. Sport Classic Books. $24.95.
By JAY JENNINGS
Published: February 11, 2007
On May 3, 1989, I popped a VHS tape into my machine and recorded an
entire game of the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan to save for
posterity. It was an ordinary first-round playoff game against the
Cleveland Cavaliers, admittedly a team Jordan often torched, but I had
no idea what would happen. Jordan ended with 44 points and delivered a
few signature moments — a steal and a breakaway dunk, a series of
fadeaway jumpers, an end-to-end rebound, sprint and layup. In an ESPN
world of quick-cut highlights where a player’s dunk dissolves into the
next clip before he hits the ground, I wanted to preserve what
snippet-sports often denies us: context. While the most sensational
exploits of our athlete gods become as luminescent in public
consciousness as stained glass (Julius Erving’s behind-the-backboard
layup, Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch), the proof of greatness
often lies in their ability to amaze every day. Arguably, no basketball
player, not even Jordan, met that test as regularly as Pete Maravich,
whose between-the-legs assists and next-ZIP-code jumpers still defy
belief. Too bad he played mostly pre-VCR.
Even a casual fan may know of Maravich’s trademark floppy socks and
hair and his college scoring average of 44.2 points per game during his
three years at Louisiana State University, a record as seemingly
unassailable as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. The more ardent
will know Maravichiana like his idiosyncratic ball-handling drills, an
obsessive practice ethic that found him sitting in aisle seats at movie
theaters so he could dribble while he watched, and a checkered pro
career marked by injury, coaching turmoil, frequent drinking and, most
of all, losing. After retiring from the pros, he embraced evangelical
Christianity and died unexpectedly in 1988 at the age of 40, owing to a
genetic heart ailment.
A pair of recent biographies — one by Mark Kriegel, the author of
“Namath,” and the other a team effort from the actor and comedian Wayne
Federman and the journalist Marshall Terrill, with an assist from
Maravich’s widow, Jackie Maravich — cover this material baseline to
baseline, with admirable thoroughness. In “Maravich,” Federman et al.
assay a more exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) approach,
dutifully summarizing statistics in parentheses, front-loading each
chapter with not one but two epigraphs and stacking up repetitive
encomiums. Once you’ve had the Hall of Famer and onetime Maravich coach
Elgin Baylor say, “Pete is the best I’ve ever seen,” do we really need
to hear the same from a dozen others? But its labor-of-love enthusiasm
is infectious, and it’s essential for Maravich completists, especially
for the reassessment of his pro career and for anecdotal feats of
basketball wizardry, like his delivering on a boast to hit 100 jumpers
from beyond 25 feet without missing two in a row. It also contains the
single most convincing statistical refutation of the charge that
Maravich was a selfish gunner: in the N.B.A., when he scored more than
40 points, his team won 82 percent of its games, compared with Jordan’s
69 percent and Allen Iverson’s 68.
Kriegel’s prose is flashier but often errant. A young Maravich is
described as having “a big head mounted on a wispy frame, dense as a
wafer”; the Maravich-as-Elvis theme is hammered ad nauseam; and one
chapter in “Pistol” has the truly awful title “The Unbearable Whiteness
of Being Pete.” But Kriegel does uncover some nuggets otherwise lost to
history, as when he traces one inspiration for Maravich’s dribbling
drills to a ball-handling sensation named Ah Chew Goo, whom Pete’s
father, Press, had seen when stationed in Hawaii in the service.
Kriegel also tries to situate Maravich in his times, particularly in
relation to the era’s racial dynamics. Despite the precedent of Bob
Cousy’s legerdemain, Maravich’s crowd-pleasing style was identified
with that of the urban playground and its black stars. Marvin Turner, a
black player from Baton Rouge who competed against Maravich in the
summer, tells Kriegel, “There had never been a white guy who played
like that — he had a soul game.” The growing National Basketball
Association was beginning to be dominated by African-Americans, and the
mantle of “great white hope” thrust upon Maravich, along with the
accompanying rich contract, didn’t help his transition to the league;
when he joined the Atlanta Hawks, black veterans like Lou Hudson and
Joe Caldwell, who’d toiled for years for a fraction of the money
Maravich commanded, were understandably annoyed. In time, the tempest
blew over, but over a 10-year career that saw enough success for him to
be named one of the N.B.A.’s 50 greatest players, a complementarity of
teammates and coach failed to materialize, and he never came close to
showcasing his skills in the service of a championship.
Over the 800 pages in these books, despite tales of drinking,
vegetarianism and interest in extraterrestrials, Pete Maravich the man
remains something of a mystery. Perhaps that’s because he was a mystery
to himself, constantly searching before his post-career embrace of
Christianity. His innate basketball talent was manifest so early in
life — he once said, “There isn’t anything I did at L.S.U. or in the
N.B.A. I couldn’t do at 13” — that the young man was the sum of his
basketball feats, which he all but admitted late in life when he
described that earlier self as “a basketball android.”
What may be a revelation here is the portrait that emerges of Press
Maravich, who might stereotypically be viewed as merely riding his
son’s remarkable skills to the L.S.U. head coaching job. Kriegel is
particularly good at offering a corrective, and the most successful
part of his book describes the elder Maravich’s hardscrabble upbringing
in the Serbian immigrant enclave of Aliquippa, Pa., a company town
where nearly everyone worked for the steel producer Jones & Laughlin.
These vivid pages follow Press as he masters basketball in a church
gym, stars in college and in the fledgling pro game, serves as a Navy
flier, and works his way up the high school and college coaching ranks
by forming teams of players as hard-nosed and hardheaded as he was.
“Press didn’t recruit ability,” Kriegel writes. “He recruited desire.
He wanted guys who loved the game as much as he did, who shared his
confusion of basketball with salvation.”
At basketball backwaters like Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia
and the football powerhouse Clemson, his undersize teams became so well
drilled in his theories of tenacious defense and meticulous execution
that the legendary U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden often sought him out for
advice. “They were an odd couple,” Kriegel writes, “Wooden measured and
modest while Press was loud and profane.” In both books, Press emerges
as a full, flawed but appealing man, driven and tender, boastful and
loving. “Press was one of the greatest, most entertaining guys I’ve
ever met,” an L.S.U. administrator says in “Maravich.” But Press’s
formidable basketball mind became mush when his son was involved. “He
had ... become obsessed with Pete’s numbers,” a former assistant coach
says in “Pistol.” “He had gone from being one of the greatest coaches
in the game to the coach of the greatest player in the game.”
In the end, reading about Maravich the son is like reading about Gale
Sayers, the incomparable Chicago Bears running back: it mostly makes
you want to watch those precious old films, to witness with your own
eyes the impossible moves. That’s why the most exciting part of either
of these books for me was in an appendix to “Maravich” under the
“Selected References” section, titled “Video”: “Games: 1967 L.S.U. at
Tennessee; 1968 L.S.U. at Georgia,” and so on. Out there somewhere is
Maravich in context.
Jay Jennings, a former college basketball reporter for Sports
Illustrated, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
By Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill in collaboration with Jackie
Maravich.
Illustrated. 422 pp. Sport Classic Books. $24.95.
By JAY JENNINGS
Published: February 11, 2007
On May 3, 1989, I popped a VHS tape into my machine and recorded an
entire game of the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan to save for
posterity. It was an ordinary first-round playoff game against the
Cleveland Cavaliers, admittedly a team Jordan often torched, but I had
no idea what would happen. Jordan ended with 44 points and delivered a
few signature moments — a steal and a breakaway dunk, a series of
fadeaway jumpers, an end-to-end rebound, sprint and layup. In an ESPN
world of quick-cut highlights where a player’s dunk dissolves into the
next clip before he hits the ground, I wanted to preserve what
snippet-sports often denies us: context. While the most sensational
exploits of our athlete gods become as luminescent in public
consciousness as stained glass (Julius Erving’s behind-the-backboard
layup, Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch), the proof of greatness
often lies in their ability to amaze every day. Arguably, no basketball
player, not even Jordan, met that test as regularly as Pete Maravich,
whose between-the-legs assists and next-ZIP-code jumpers still defy
belief. Too bad he played mostly pre-VCR.
Even a casual fan may know of Maravich’s trademark floppy socks and
hair and his college scoring average of 44.2 points per game during his
three years at Louisiana State University, a record as seemingly
unassailable as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. The more ardent
will know Maravichiana like his idiosyncratic ball-handling drills, an
obsessive practice ethic that found him sitting in aisle seats at movie
theaters so he could dribble while he watched, and a checkered pro
career marked by injury, coaching turmoil, frequent drinking and, most
of all, losing. After retiring from the pros, he embraced evangelical
Christianity and died unexpectedly in 1988 at the age of 40, owing to a
genetic heart ailment.
A pair of recent biographies — one by Mark Kriegel, the author of
“Namath,” and the other a team effort from the actor and comedian Wayne
Federman and the journalist Marshall Terrill, with an assist from
Maravich’s widow, Jackie Maravich — cover this material baseline to
baseline, with admirable thoroughness. In “Maravich,” Federman et al.
assay a more exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) approach,
dutifully summarizing statistics in parentheses, front-loading each
chapter with not one but two epigraphs and stacking up repetitive
encomiums. Once you’ve had the Hall of Famer and onetime Maravich coach
Elgin Baylor say, “Pete is the best I’ve ever seen,” do we really need
to hear the same from a dozen others? But its labor-of-love enthusiasm
is infectious, and it’s essential for Maravich completists, especially
for the reassessment of his pro career and for anecdotal feats of
basketball wizardry, like his delivering on a boast to hit 100 jumpers
from beyond 25 feet without missing two in a row. It also contains the
single most convincing statistical refutation of the charge that
Maravich was a selfish gunner: in the N.B.A., when he scored more than
40 points, his team won 82 percent of its games, compared with Jordan’s
69 percent and Allen Iverson’s 68.
Kriegel’s prose is flashier but often errant. A young Maravich is
described as having “a big head mounted on a wispy frame, dense as a
wafer”; the Maravich-as-Elvis theme is hammered ad nauseam; and one
chapter in “Pistol” has the truly awful title “The Unbearable Whiteness
of Being Pete.” But Kriegel does uncover some nuggets otherwise lost to
history, as when he traces one inspiration for Maravich’s dribbling
drills to a ball-handling sensation named Ah Chew Goo, whom Pete’s
father, Press, had seen when stationed in Hawaii in the service.
Kriegel also tries to situate Maravich in his times, particularly in
relation to the era’s racial dynamics. Despite the precedent of Bob
Cousy’s legerdemain, Maravich’s crowd-pleasing style was identified
with that of the urban playground and its black stars. Marvin Turner, a
black player from Baton Rouge who competed against Maravich in the
summer, tells Kriegel, “There had never been a white guy who played
like that — he had a soul game.” The growing National Basketball
Association was beginning to be dominated by African-Americans, and the
mantle of “great white hope” thrust upon Maravich, along with the
accompanying rich contract, didn’t help his transition to the league;
when he joined the Atlanta Hawks, black veterans like Lou Hudson and
Joe Caldwell, who’d toiled for years for a fraction of the money
Maravich commanded, were understandably annoyed. In time, the tempest
blew over, but over a 10-year career that saw enough success for him to
be named one of the N.B.A.’s 50 greatest players, a complementarity of
teammates and coach failed to materialize, and he never came close to
showcasing his skills in the service of a championship.
Over the 800 pages in these books, despite tales of drinking,
vegetarianism and interest in extraterrestrials, Pete Maravich the man
remains something of a mystery. Perhaps that’s because he was a mystery
to himself, constantly searching before his post-career embrace of
Christianity. His innate basketball talent was manifest so early in
life — he once said, “There isn’t anything I did at L.S.U. or in the
N.B.A. I couldn’t do at 13” — that the young man was the sum of his
basketball feats, which he all but admitted late in life when he
described that earlier self as “a basketball android.”
What may be a revelation here is the portrait that emerges of Press
Maravich, who might stereotypically be viewed as merely riding his
son’s remarkable skills to the L.S.U. head coaching job. Kriegel is
particularly good at offering a corrective, and the most successful
part of his book describes the elder Maravich’s hardscrabble upbringing
in the Serbian immigrant enclave of Aliquippa, Pa., a company town
where nearly everyone worked for the steel producer Jones & Laughlin.
These vivid pages follow Press as he masters basketball in a church
gym, stars in college and in the fledgling pro game, serves as a Navy
flier, and works his way up the high school and college coaching ranks
by forming teams of players as hard-nosed and hardheaded as he was.
“Press didn’t recruit ability,” Kriegel writes. “He recruited desire.
He wanted guys who loved the game as much as he did, who shared his
confusion of basketball with salvation.”
At basketball backwaters like Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia
and the football powerhouse Clemson, his undersize teams became so well
drilled in his theories of tenacious defense and meticulous execution
that the legendary U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden often sought him out for
advice. “They were an odd couple,” Kriegel writes, “Wooden measured and
modest while Press was loud and profane.” In both books, Press emerges
as a full, flawed but appealing man, driven and tender, boastful and
loving. “Press was one of the greatest, most entertaining guys I’ve
ever met,” an L.S.U. administrator says in “Maravich.” But Press’s
formidable basketball mind became mush when his son was involved. “He
had ... become obsessed with Pete’s numbers,” a former assistant coach
says in “Pistol.” “He had gone from being one of the greatest coaches
in the game to the coach of the greatest player in the game.”
In the end, reading about Maravich the son is like reading about Gale
Sayers, the incomparable Chicago Bears running back: it mostly makes
you want to watch those precious old films, to witness with your own
eyes the impossible moves. That’s why the most exciting part of either
of these books for me was in an appendix to “Maravich” under the
“Selected References” section, titled “Video”: “Games: 1967 L.S.U. at
Tennessee; 1968 L.S.U. at Georgia,” and so on. Out there somewhere is
Maravich in context.
Jay Jennings, a former college basketball reporter for Sports
Illustrated, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Comic chronicles tragic showman "Maravich"
Q+A: Wayne Federman
Comic chronicles the tragic showman, 'Pistol' Pete Maravich
Book: "Maravich" by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill with Jackie Maravich (SportClassic Books, 2006)
Unless you're a Harlem Globetrotter fan, basketball and comedy usually don't mix.
It's odd then, that a stand-up comedian would co-author a biography of Hall of Famer "Pistol" Pete Maravich, sometimes a clown on the college and pro basketball courts, but a tragic figure in life.
Wayne Federman, 47, is a comedian and actor who has appeared onstage in Los Angeles at places such as the Improv and the Laugh Factory; on television in such series as "The Larry Sander s Show" and such movies as "Jack Frost" in 1998 and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" in 2005.
He and co-author Marshall Terrill have written perhaps the definitive book on Maravich, who died of a heart attack in 1988 at the age of 40. Aiding in the book were Maravich's widow, Jackie, and sons Jaeson and Joshua.
Federman will be in town this week , performing his stand-up routine at Harrah's Improv, coinciding with the NBA All-Star game activities .
During a recent telephone interview with the Sun from his home in Los Angeles, Federman discussed the remarkable book about the remarkable Maravich.
I'm a basketball fan. When I was a kid I was a Dr. J fan - that was sort of my era. In 1987 Pete Maravich released these instructional videotapes on basketball and they were just fascinating. Ever since then, I became more and more interested in the guy and I started researching him, especially his NBA career. Then Marshall Terrill, who had started writing the book, took me on as a co-author.
How did the two of you hook up?
He contacted me through the Internet. I had put up this little site because I had started collecting Pete Maravich videos and I had a couple of basketball games he wanted.
All of this collecting you were doing, was it with the intent of writing a book?
No. It was totally a hobby, but I have a knack for research and I started speaking to this guy, and the next thing I know he tells me I know more about Pete Maravich than anyone he has spoken to and he's been writing this book for half a year and would I like to be his co-author. I go, no, I'm trying to get an audition for "Mad About You" or something. But my girlfriend convinced me and so I say, "OK, let's give this a try."
I wrote it with the idea of making it into a movie. I just thought it would always make a great sports movie in a nontraditional way. It's not like "Hoosiers," where at the last second they win the game; it's a much more nuanced and sad and thrilling story. There's just a lot to the story.
Do you still have hopes of turning it into a movie?
Yes. Definitely. Very much so. I've been contacted by several producers. We are putting together something right now, and, let's just keep our fingers crossed, but it's looking very positive.
How exciting would that be to see your book come to life?
It's such a compelling story. Tragic. Thrilling. All the things I like in a movie. I don't know if you know this, but when Pete died, an autopsy was performed because he dropped dead of a heart attack at 40, after setting all these records that still stand till this day - and they find out he never had a left coronary artery and shouldn't have lived to the age of 20 and shouldn't have been allowed to play any sport, not even badminton; maybe he could have been on the chess team.
Was he aware of this?
No. He knew something was wrong with his heart. It kept him out of Vietnam, which we uncovered in the book. He had no idea it was lethal. No idea. I talked to team doctors from the Hawks and the Jazz and the Celtics, all the team doctors, and I asked, "Did you give him stress tests?" and they're like, "Yeah. He passed with no problem." I go like, "Wow, that's pretty amazing." I talked to a cardiologist who said you don't know you have this condition till it's too late. Now, they inject dye into your vein and take a better picture of your heart. If they had the technology back then, they said it could have been detected - but with just the stethoscope and EKG, no. He was a pro basketball player. It's ridiculous.
When did you first get interested in Maravich?
Like I said, in '87. He died the very next year. My interest was further piqued in '96, when he was selected one of the NBA's 50 great players. I wondered why. He never won a championship. I thought his pro career was a bit of a washout compared to his college career, where he averaged over 44 points a game. So then I looked into his pro career and it was pretty spectacular, but like everything involved with Pete Maravich, there's always a sadness or a touch of tragedy to it. His mom ended up killing herself just after he got traded to New Orleans. He blew out his knee just as the team is about to make the playoffs. Every step of the way - at times it was hard to write, you just feel bad for him, yet all anyone remembers of him are these fantastic Globetrotter moves in a real game; it's like this ultimate showman and the price that was paid for that.
Jackie Maravich remained silent about the tragedy for 20 years. Why did she now decide to talk about it and help you with the book?
First of all the kids were too young. She didn't want to have that all around them when they were trying to grow up. And two, Jackie Maravich is a very private person.
Why was the timing right for this book?
Three things. The kids were older, going to college, and she thought they could handle it. Second, an unauthorized book written several years earlier, she didn't like. And three, she was looking for an author who would write a comprehensive, fair and balanced book about his life. I stepped in at the right time.
How has the book been doing since its December release?
If possible, it's doing too well. The first printing of 10,000 sold out in 3 1/2 weeks. Since Christmas it's been nearly impossible to buy the book. The second printing should be hitting the stores about now.
Why did you choose to write this book?
Pete was such a unique guy in the history of the game. He was not really accepted by the team when he went to the Hawks - don't forget, there was a bidding war for him between the NBA and ABA, before the leagues merged. He got like five times as much money as the highest paid veteran player on the team. They resented the heck out of him immediately. And on top of that he started getting endorsement deals with Vitalis, Pro-Keds and basketballs; and all those endorsement deals were worth more than anyone else's contract on the team.
A lot of jealousy?
And for good reason. They say, "Hey, we built up the Hawks, we have had to struggle to get an extra $10,000 a year and this kid comes in and gets $250,000." At the time he signed a five-year, $1.8 million contract, which was the highest in any sport at the time.
Are there more books in your future or are you going to stick to comedy?
I don't know. I can't imagine what it would be. The amount of work I put into this - I was in way beyond what I thought I was capable of. There's nothing on the horizon, but then I never thought I would write a book in the first place.
Jerry Fink can be reached at 259-4058 or at jerry@lasvegassun.com.
Comic chronicles the tragic showman, 'Pistol' Pete Maravich
Book: "Maravich" by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill with Jackie Maravich (SportClassic Books, 2006)
Unless you're a Harlem Globetrotter fan, basketball and comedy usually don't mix.
It's odd then, that a stand-up comedian would co-author a biography of Hall of Famer "Pistol" Pete Maravich, sometimes a clown on the college and pro basketball courts, but a tragic figure in life.
Wayne Federman, 47, is a comedian and actor who has appeared onstage in Los Angeles at places such as the Improv and the Laugh Factory; on television in such series as "The Larry Sander s Show" and such movies as "Jack Frost" in 1998 and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" in 2005.
He and co-author Marshall Terrill have written perhaps the definitive book on Maravich, who died of a heart attack in 1988 at the age of 40. Aiding in the book were Maravich's widow, Jackie, and sons Jaeson and Joshua.
Federman will be in town this week , performing his stand-up routine at Harrah's Improv, coinciding with the NBA All-Star game activities .
During a recent telephone interview with the Sun from his home in Los Angeles, Federman discussed the remarkable book about the remarkable Maravich.
I'm a basketball fan. When I was a kid I was a Dr. J fan - that was sort of my era. In 1987 Pete Maravich released these instructional videotapes on basketball and they were just fascinating. Ever since then, I became more and more interested in the guy and I started researching him, especially his NBA career. Then Marshall Terrill, who had started writing the book, took me on as a co-author.
How did the two of you hook up?
He contacted me through the Internet. I had put up this little site because I had started collecting Pete Maravich videos and I had a couple of basketball games he wanted.
All of this collecting you were doing, was it with the intent of writing a book?
No. It was totally a hobby, but I have a knack for research and I started speaking to this guy, and the next thing I know he tells me I know more about Pete Maravich than anyone he has spoken to and he's been writing this book for half a year and would I like to be his co-author. I go, no, I'm trying to get an audition for "Mad About You" or something. But my girlfriend convinced me and so I say, "OK, let's give this a try."
I wrote it with the idea of making it into a movie. I just thought it would always make a great sports movie in a nontraditional way. It's not like "Hoosiers," where at the last second they win the game; it's a much more nuanced and sad and thrilling story. There's just a lot to the story.
Do you still have hopes of turning it into a movie?
Yes. Definitely. Very much so. I've been contacted by several producers. We are putting together something right now, and, let's just keep our fingers crossed, but it's looking very positive.
How exciting would that be to see your book come to life?
It's such a compelling story. Tragic. Thrilling. All the things I like in a movie. I don't know if you know this, but when Pete died, an autopsy was performed because he dropped dead of a heart attack at 40, after setting all these records that still stand till this day - and they find out he never had a left coronary artery and shouldn't have lived to the age of 20 and shouldn't have been allowed to play any sport, not even badminton; maybe he could have been on the chess team.
Was he aware of this?
No. He knew something was wrong with his heart. It kept him out of Vietnam, which we uncovered in the book. He had no idea it was lethal. No idea. I talked to team doctors from the Hawks and the Jazz and the Celtics, all the team doctors, and I asked, "Did you give him stress tests?" and they're like, "Yeah. He passed with no problem." I go like, "Wow, that's pretty amazing." I talked to a cardiologist who said you don't know you have this condition till it's too late. Now, they inject dye into your vein and take a better picture of your heart. If they had the technology back then, they said it could have been detected - but with just the stethoscope and EKG, no. He was a pro basketball player. It's ridiculous.
When did you first get interested in Maravich?
Like I said, in '87. He died the very next year. My interest was further piqued in '96, when he was selected one of the NBA's 50 great players. I wondered why. He never won a championship. I thought his pro career was a bit of a washout compared to his college career, where he averaged over 44 points a game. So then I looked into his pro career and it was pretty spectacular, but like everything involved with Pete Maravich, there's always a sadness or a touch of tragedy to it. His mom ended up killing herself just after he got traded to New Orleans. He blew out his knee just as the team is about to make the playoffs. Every step of the way - at times it was hard to write, you just feel bad for him, yet all anyone remembers of him are these fantastic Globetrotter moves in a real game; it's like this ultimate showman and the price that was paid for that.
Jackie Maravich remained silent about the tragedy for 20 years. Why did she now decide to talk about it and help you with the book?
First of all the kids were too young. She didn't want to have that all around them when they were trying to grow up. And two, Jackie Maravich is a very private person.
Why was the timing right for this book?
Three things. The kids were older, going to college, and she thought they could handle it. Second, an unauthorized book written several years earlier, she didn't like. And three, she was looking for an author who would write a comprehensive, fair and balanced book about his life. I stepped in at the right time.
How has the book been doing since its December release?
If possible, it's doing too well. The first printing of 10,000 sold out in 3 1/2 weeks. Since Christmas it's been nearly impossible to buy the book. The second printing should be hitting the stores about now.
Why did you choose to write this book?
Pete was such a unique guy in the history of the game. He was not really accepted by the team when he went to the Hawks - don't forget, there was a bidding war for him between the NBA and ABA, before the leagues merged. He got like five times as much money as the highest paid veteran player on the team. They resented the heck out of him immediately. And on top of that he started getting endorsement deals with Vitalis, Pro-Keds and basketballs; and all those endorsement deals were worth more than anyone else's contract on the team.
A lot of jealousy?
And for good reason. They say, "Hey, we built up the Hawks, we have had to struggle to get an extra $10,000 a year and this kid comes in and gets $250,000." At the time he signed a five-year, $1.8 million contract, which was the highest in any sport at the time.
Are there more books in your future or are you going to stick to comedy?
I don't know. I can't imagine what it would be. The amount of work I put into this - I was in way beyond what I thought I was capable of. There's nothing on the horizon, but then I never thought I would write a book in the first place.
Jerry Fink can be reached at 259-4058 or at jerry@lasvegassun.com.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Sonny West creates new web site
Sonny West, Elvis Presley’s longtime bodyguard, friend and charter member of the Memphis Mafia has announced the creation of a new web site.
The site, www.sonnywest.com, is currently a shell on the Internet. However, West says it will soon contain photos, videos, blogs, podcasts, FAQ and other state-of-the-art multi-media media. He said it will also offer an e-commerce link with various items for sale.
“It’s something I’ve been working on for some time and with the release of my new DVD and book, the timing seemed right,” West said. “I also wanted a forum to stay in touch with the fans.”
2007 is shaping up to be a big year for West, who will release a DVD and book. “Elvis: Up Close and Personal,” a two-and-a-half hour DVD, will contain one of West’s live shows, a question and answer segment, a meet and greet with fans and bonus backstage footage. The DVD is slated for a spring release.
West’s highly anticipated memoir, “Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business,” will cover West’s 16 years with Elvis Presley from 1960 to 1976. The book also includes two appendices – “All The King’s Men” and “Myths, Facts and Frequently Asked Questions.” The former is a section on former Memphis Mafia members while the latter is a list of questions West answers directly from Presley followers.
“Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business” will be published by Triumph/Random House and is set for a May release.
The site, www.sonnywest.com, is currently a shell on the Internet. However, West says it will soon contain photos, videos, blogs, podcasts, FAQ and other state-of-the-art multi-media media. He said it will also offer an e-commerce link with various items for sale.
“It’s something I’ve been working on for some time and with the release of my new DVD and book, the timing seemed right,” West said. “I also wanted a forum to stay in touch with the fans.”
2007 is shaping up to be a big year for West, who will release a DVD and book. “Elvis: Up Close and Personal,” a two-and-a-half hour DVD, will contain one of West’s live shows, a question and answer segment, a meet and greet with fans and bonus backstage footage. The DVD is slated for a spring release.
West’s highly anticipated memoir, “Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business,” will cover West’s 16 years with Elvis Presley from 1960 to 1976. The book also includes two appendices – “All The King’s Men” and “Myths, Facts and Frequently Asked Questions.” The former is a section on former Memphis Mafia members while the latter is a list of questions West answers directly from Presley followers.
“Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business” will be published by Triumph/Random House and is set for a May release.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Philadelphia Daily News on "Maravich"
Stan Hochman
How different would Maravich's life have been if he had been a Sixer?
'PISTOL PETE" Maravich never got to wear that Sixers jersey, the one with 44 on the back. Never got to run the break with Julius Erving, ebony and ivory, Maravich flicking one of those behind-the-back passes that the Doc could catch in full stride, and then soar, up, up, up.
Slam dunk! The net shimmying, the Spectrum shimmying too, with noise and did-you-see-that joy.
Call it the fickle finger of fate. Or blame the luck of the shamrock.
Urban myth or a true story? It was 1980, and the frugal and unsentimental Utah Jazz had cut Maravich. Doug Collins was sidelined with a gimpy foot and the Sixers needed backcourt help. Boston, a cigar-breath behind in the standings, did too.
So Maravich came east, stopping in Philly first. He waltzed through the interviews. His mended knee passed Dr. Michael Clancy's test. A giddy news conference loomed. But then Pete bolted from Temple Hospital and caught a plane to Boston. Signed with the Celtics the next day.
There are two, count 'em, two books about Maravich in the stores right now. One is called "Pistol" by Mark Kriegel. There's a portrait of Maravich on the cover, sheepdog haircut nearly shielding those basset-sad eyes. The other is "Maravich" by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill. Black, low-cut sneakers on the cover, unlaced, stuffed with a pair of gray, floppy socks.
Both books very readable, very sad, all those painful details about a dysfunctional family, about a troubled child who almost grows into a troubled adult. Houdini on the court, nothing up his sleeves except rubbery arms that ended with hands fluttering like doves. Some Pagliacci too, clowning on the outside, crying on the inside.
And then, a few years before he died young, a spiritual awakening. Died at 40, playing basketball, what else. In a church gymnasium, where else. It is the saddest of stories, worth reading, because there had never been anyone like Pistol Pete Maravich before, and there has never been anyone like him since.
He could pull up on a sequin, which is smaller than a dime. He could look right and pass left to an open teammate, hammering the ball with his right wrist. He averaged 44 a game at LSU, which translates to 50, because there was no three-point line back then, and so many of his shots were rainbows from 25 feet and hit nothing but net.
Pat Williams was the general manager of the Phillies' farm club in Spartanburg, S.C., first time he saw Maravich. Same Pat Williams who was the GM of the Atlanta Hawks when he traded Maravich to the expansion New Orleans Jazz. Same Pat Williams who was the GM of the Sixers in '80 when Maravich grumbled out of Temple Hospital on the way to Boston.
"Two of the local writers said they were going to Athens, Ga., to see Maravich," Williams recalled. He has a Kodachrome memory and a gift for storytelling. "I remember the Georgia Fieldhouse. I remember one of the most unbelievable evenings of my life. It was Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.
"And that was it, a rite of winter for so many people in small SEC towns like Athens and Starkville, once a year, here comes the traveling show. Two years later, I'm the GM of the Chicago Bulls and my first draft is the Maravich draft. Pete, Bob Lanier, Rudy Tomjanovich, Calvin Murphy, Nate Archibald.
"My next stop, fall of '73, I move over to the Hawks, and there's Pete, as a human being, at the low point of his life. Alcohol issues, insecurity, family woes, a nightmare. We couldn't go on that way.
"New Orleans started running hard at me, asking 'What would it take to get Pete?' I kept asking for more and more and more. Finally, the Atlanta owner, Tom Cousins said, 'Don't ask for anything more, you'll break that franchise.'
"On May 3, 1974, it was my job to break the news to Pete. He asked, 'What did you get for me?' I told him [two players from the expansion draft, a first-round pick, two second-round picks, a swap of draft positions for 2 years] and he said, 'Is that all?' "
Let the record show the Hawks squandered the draft picks acquired in a trade so lopsided, it was called "The Louisiana Purchase."
"And then, in '80," Williams said, picking up the narrative, "Utah waived him and Philly needed help at guard. So did Boston. The only question mark was his knee, and we got the OK on that. And then Dr. Stan Lorber gave him a full physical, including a rectal exam, including the finger test. Pete was not happy with that. He left.
"I can't say that was the determining factor. I do remember hearing from the late Fitz Dixon [the team owner] the next day. He was not happy. I remember trying to explain why we didn't get Pete.
"He went to Boston, said he had always wanted to be a Celtic, so maybe we had no chance. And then [coach] Bill Fitch buried him. Hardly played him. And we went out and got Lionel Hollins and beat Boston in the playoffs."
And got hammered by the Lakers in the Finals, including the game Kareem Abdul-Jabbar missed with an ankle injury and Magic Johnson played center and scored 42.
Maravich walked away from the NBA after that season.
"And then I saw Pete after his spiritual conversion," Williams remembered. "He would conduct chapel services at the All-Star Game. I can't recall a human being with more dramatic change to his life. He became a wonderful, warm, compassionate, loving human being.
"He had found peace of mind, peach of soul, peace of heart. And it was a beautiful ending to his story."
It's all there, in both books. "Maravich" tells in glowing prose of the time Pete did play with Doctor J. Preseason, in Atlanta, because the Hawks had signed Erving illegally, even though the Virginia Cavaliers had a contract with him, and even though Milwuakee would get Erving's NBA draft rights.
They were great together. And maybe they could have recaptured that magic with the Sixers. And maybe a finger kept it from happening.
And maybe Maravich really wanted to be a Celtic, just one more stumble in a tangled string of bad decisions.
How different would Maravich's life have been if he had been a Sixer?
'PISTOL PETE" Maravich never got to wear that Sixers jersey, the one with 44 on the back. Never got to run the break with Julius Erving, ebony and ivory, Maravich flicking one of those behind-the-back passes that the Doc could catch in full stride, and then soar, up, up, up.
Slam dunk! The net shimmying, the Spectrum shimmying too, with noise and did-you-see-that joy.
Call it the fickle finger of fate. Or blame the luck of the shamrock.
Urban myth or a true story? It was 1980, and the frugal and unsentimental Utah Jazz had cut Maravich. Doug Collins was sidelined with a gimpy foot and the Sixers needed backcourt help. Boston, a cigar-breath behind in the standings, did too.
So Maravich came east, stopping in Philly first. He waltzed through the interviews. His mended knee passed Dr. Michael Clancy's test. A giddy news conference loomed. But then Pete bolted from Temple Hospital and caught a plane to Boston. Signed with the Celtics the next day.
There are two, count 'em, two books about Maravich in the stores right now. One is called "Pistol" by Mark Kriegel. There's a portrait of Maravich on the cover, sheepdog haircut nearly shielding those basset-sad eyes. The other is "Maravich" by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill. Black, low-cut sneakers on the cover, unlaced, stuffed with a pair of gray, floppy socks.
Both books very readable, very sad, all those painful details about a dysfunctional family, about a troubled child who almost grows into a troubled adult. Houdini on the court, nothing up his sleeves except rubbery arms that ended with hands fluttering like doves. Some Pagliacci too, clowning on the outside, crying on the inside.
And then, a few years before he died young, a spiritual awakening. Died at 40, playing basketball, what else. In a church gymnasium, where else. It is the saddest of stories, worth reading, because there had never been anyone like Pistol Pete Maravich before, and there has never been anyone like him since.
He could pull up on a sequin, which is smaller than a dime. He could look right and pass left to an open teammate, hammering the ball with his right wrist. He averaged 44 a game at LSU, which translates to 50, because there was no three-point line back then, and so many of his shots were rainbows from 25 feet and hit nothing but net.
Pat Williams was the general manager of the Phillies' farm club in Spartanburg, S.C., first time he saw Maravich. Same Pat Williams who was the GM of the Atlanta Hawks when he traded Maravich to the expansion New Orleans Jazz. Same Pat Williams who was the GM of the Sixers in '80 when Maravich grumbled out of Temple Hospital on the way to Boston.
"Two of the local writers said they were going to Athens, Ga., to see Maravich," Williams recalled. He has a Kodachrome memory and a gift for storytelling. "I remember the Georgia Fieldhouse. I remember one of the most unbelievable evenings of my life. It was Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.
"And that was it, a rite of winter for so many people in small SEC towns like Athens and Starkville, once a year, here comes the traveling show. Two years later, I'm the GM of the Chicago Bulls and my first draft is the Maravich draft. Pete, Bob Lanier, Rudy Tomjanovich, Calvin Murphy, Nate Archibald.
"My next stop, fall of '73, I move over to the Hawks, and there's Pete, as a human being, at the low point of his life. Alcohol issues, insecurity, family woes, a nightmare. We couldn't go on that way.
"New Orleans started running hard at me, asking 'What would it take to get Pete?' I kept asking for more and more and more. Finally, the Atlanta owner, Tom Cousins said, 'Don't ask for anything more, you'll break that franchise.'
"On May 3, 1974, it was my job to break the news to Pete. He asked, 'What did you get for me?' I told him [two players from the expansion draft, a first-round pick, two second-round picks, a swap of draft positions for 2 years] and he said, 'Is that all?' "
Let the record show the Hawks squandered the draft picks acquired in a trade so lopsided, it was called "The Louisiana Purchase."
"And then, in '80," Williams said, picking up the narrative, "Utah waived him and Philly needed help at guard. So did Boston. The only question mark was his knee, and we got the OK on that. And then Dr. Stan Lorber gave him a full physical, including a rectal exam, including the finger test. Pete was not happy with that. He left.
"I can't say that was the determining factor. I do remember hearing from the late Fitz Dixon [the team owner] the next day. He was not happy. I remember trying to explain why we didn't get Pete.
"He went to Boston, said he had always wanted to be a Celtic, so maybe we had no chance. And then [coach] Bill Fitch buried him. Hardly played him. And we went out and got Lionel Hollins and beat Boston in the playoffs."
And got hammered by the Lakers in the Finals, including the game Kareem Abdul-Jabbar missed with an ankle injury and Magic Johnson played center and scored 42.
Maravich walked away from the NBA after that season.
"And then I saw Pete after his spiritual conversion," Williams remembered. "He would conduct chapel services at the All-Star Game. I can't recall a human being with more dramatic change to his life. He became a wonderful, warm, compassionate, loving human being.
"He had found peace of mind, peach of soul, peace of heart. And it was a beautiful ending to his story."
It's all there, in both books. "Maravich" tells in glowing prose of the time Pete did play with Doctor J. Preseason, in Atlanta, because the Hawks had signed Erving illegally, even though the Virginia Cavaliers had a contract with him, and even though Milwuakee would get Erving's NBA draft rights.
They were great together. And maybe they could have recaptured that magic with the Sixers. And maybe a finger kept it from happening.
And maybe Maravich really wanted to be a Celtic, just one more stumble in a tangled string of bad decisions.
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