Pete Maravich dribbles his way to No. 81 in ‘The Basketball 100’: ‘He was something to see’

“The Basketball 100” is the definitive ranking of the 100 greatest NBA players of all time from The Athletic’s team of award-winning writers and analysts, including veteran columnists David Aldridge and John Hollinger. This excerpt is reprinted from the book, which also features a foreword by Hall of Famer Charles Barkley.

“The Basketball 100” is available Nov. 26. Pre-order it here. Read David Aldridge’s introduction and all of the excerpts here.

The boy who changed basketball preferred the solitude of an empty gym: the syncopated rhythm of squeaking shoes, the swish of the net, the echo of dribbles against a hardwood floor, plenty of open court to try things — to build the perfect jumper, to invent a novel spin move, to run and dribble and sweat and, in his words, fool around and throw up a hook shot from 35 feet.

For Pete Maravich, an empty gymnasium meant freedom. If you gave him a basketball, he could see the future.

“When you’re in the gym alone,” he once wrote in a first-person column for Sports Illustrated, “… you can do anything you want.”

When Maravich was in grade school, he would sequester himself inside a gym for up to 10 hours a day. There, he would embark on what he came to call “Homework Basketball,” a set of ballhandling and shooting routines designed to polish his skills. Of course, this is the Maravich story, the gym rat who could spin a ball on his finger for an hour and dribble a basketball outside a moving car, who followed the path laid by his father, Press, who was so fully consumed by the game that he once famously called his younger self a “basketball android.”

The thing is, that was only part of it. Maravich wasn’t just seeking mechanical perfection. He wanted something more, something revolutionary. He viewed basketball as an art form, as a mode of bodily expression. It could be deep, spiritual, emotional, and at its core, aesthetically beautiful. It wasn’t just a sport; it was a show. So before Maravich even had a term for “Homework Basketball,” he had a belief system: Forget the simple shot. He’d shoot on the move. Forget the basic chest pass. He’d create something entirely new.

As he practiced alone in a quiet gym, Maravich would throw a basketball off the wall and try to bounce it into the basket. He’d slam it off the floor and up toward the rim. He’d throw up running hook shots and go between the legs and flip it behind the back. And he’d hoist so many jumpers from his hip that a local newspaper writer in South Carolina came up with a simple nickname.

“Pistol.”

One night in the late 1970s, Bob Dylan, the legendary poet laureate of rock and roll, went to watch Maravich in New Orleans. Maravich was nearly a decade removed from his historic college career at LSU, and he looked even older, a little disheveled.

He’d begun his NBA career with the Atlanta Hawks in 1970 before moving to the expansion New Orleans Jazz in 1974. He led the league in scoring during the 1976-77 season, averaging 31.1 points per game, but also played on just two winning teams. The criticism that followed him since LSU had persisted. He was a selfish gunner. He didn’t play defense. He wasn’t a winner.

Yet, as Dylan watched Maravich work, he was utterly mesmerized.

“He was something to see — mop of brown hair, floppy socks — the holy terror of the basketball world — high-flyin’ magician of the court,” Dylan wrote, describing the night in his 2004 autobiography.

In Dylan’s memory, Maravich dribbled the ball with his head, scored on a behind-the-back, no-look pass and threw another to himself off the glass. He skipped around the court and finished with “something like 38 points,” Dylan wrote. “He could have played blind.”

In the end, Maravich’s career summary can be measured in just 658 regular-season games. He was done by 32, his final stint coming in a 26-game span for Boston in 1980, one year before the Celtics returned to the NBA Finals and claimed another title.

In numerical terms, Maravich ranks 24th all-time in points per game (24.2). He ranks tied with Dwyane Wade for 96th in assists per game (5.4). He shot 44.1 percent from the floor in his career and led the league in scoring and minutes in 1976-77. But to reduce Maravich to his numbers is to misunderstand his legacy, to miss how he pushed the sport into the future in the 1970s.

UCLA coach John Wooden called him the best ballhandler he’d ever seen. A Los Angeles Times sportswriter dubbed him a “White Globetrotter.” Jazz teammate Rich Kelley told Sports Illustrated that Maravich was a “stepchild of the human imagination.”

It was Maravich who first showed a young guard from Michigan the razzle-dazzle of the no-look pass. (“That’s where I saw all that,” Magic Johnson once said. “From Pistol Pete.”) It was Maravich who created the prototype for Stephen Curry and Steve Nash and Trae Young — and every NBA guard who ever hoisted a jumper off the dribble from 25 feet. It was Maravich — the Pistol — who was the progenitor of “Showtime,” the revolutionary with the shaggy hair and the floppy socks and the strange dietary quirks — plant-based, before that was a thing. When the holy terror of the basketball world had the ball in his hands, the aesthetic felt like art, closer to Bob Dylan than Bob Cousy.

“He was the original,” Pat Riley once said. “When you talk about ‘Showtime,’ you talk about creativity and bringing a whole different concept to the game of basketball. Pete was the original.”

If Maravich was an original, he also knew he would not be the last. The sport was changing, opening up — in style and racial demography — and it wasn’t going backward. One night in the fall of 1970, Maravich was at Madison Square Garden for a preseason game. In college, his LSU squad — the one coached by his father — had visited New York and played at the Garden. Even then, Maravich seemed to understand the pull of the city game.

“I’ve always insisted that basketball is an entertainment,” he told reporters, “and New York is where the fans love basketball.”

Maravich had returned, and a reporter was curious about his style, whether he was an anomaly or a harbinger.

“I think this is the coming trend, definitely,” Maravich said. “I think that the players are getting much bigger, much stronger, and they’re getting taller. The guards are getting faster. They can handle the ball better.

“I think the ’70s will be the type of basketball that will be played with the common behind-the-back dribble, the common behind-the-back pass, the common between-the-legs [moves] and different moves while in the air with the ball. This is the coming theme because I think basketball is the sport of the ’70s, because of the action that takes place and the people — the closeness of the game — the people can see the sweat coming from the people that are playing on the court, and they also get involved emotionally with the game of basketball.”

In 20 years, he would say the simple chest pass would go the way of the set shot. In time, there would be 6-foot-8 guards and 7-foot-5 centers, and everyone would be able to dribble and pass and play with flair. It was a simple evolution.

The future was coming.

When Maravich was at LSU, he decorated his dorm room with photos of Joe Namath, the rebellious, counterculture quarterback of the New York Jets. Maravich shared Namath’s affinity for shaggy hair and Broadway-style theatrics, but he also shared his blue-collar roots in western Pennsylvania, where his father, the child of Serb immigrants, had grown up selling newspapers in his hometown of Aliquippa. Press Maravich played basketball at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia, an early adopter of the fast break, before chasing a professional career in the 1940s, when the sport’s pro leagues were still in their infancy. He enjoyed a one-year stint with the Pittsburgh Ironmen, a charter member of the Basketball Association of America. But soon enough, he found his calling — coaching — influenced by the wizardry and style of the Harlem Globetrotters and motivated by the young basketball project that was coming of age under his roof.

By 1949, Press had earned his first head coaching job at West Virginia Wesleyan. Six years later, he moved to Clemson, taking his style to the Atlantic Coast Conference. When he worked camps at Campbell College in North Carolina, he occasionally roomed with Wooden.

In Press, Wooden could sense a contradiction: He was one of the most profane people he’d ever known. Yet of all the coaches in America, few knew the Bible better. He was a Navy man who served during World War II and wore a crew cut. But when it came to basketball, he was freethinking and progressive.

He wanted to elevate the game from its rigid, linear constructs. He had the perfect test group in his home, a talented son who became an avatar.

Pete Maravich was the sponge. He perfected the ballhandling drills his father passed down — the ones he’d later name “pretzel,” “ricochet” and “crab catch.” He learned to dribble while riding his bike. He studied the Globetrotters, often the best team in the world in the 1950s, and picked up a hesitation jump shot from Elgin Baylor, the legendary Lakers swingman. When he was in bed at night, he whispered the same shooting mantra: “Finger control, backspin and follow-through.”

When his father accepted the job at LSU, Pete followed him to Baton Rouge, becoming the most prolific scorer in college basketball history. In his first game as a sophomore (freshmen were not eligible for varsity), he finished with 48 points on 50 shots. The next year, he put up 66 points against Tulane (the Tigers lost). As a senior, he finished with a record 69 points against Alabama (the Tigers lost again). He averaged 44.2 per game across three seasons, scoring an NCAA record 3,667 points. It was during his senior season that he penned a first-person story for Sports Illustrated, documenting his rise. The headline: “I Want to Put on a Show.”

He didn’t like how people referred to him as a “hot dog” (he preferred “show time”). The folks who criticized him were behind; they didn’t understand where the game was going.

“Anybody who calls a guy a hot dog just because he puts the ball behind his back or between his legs is a complete dummy,” he wrote. “People who yell that are so far behind in basketball, it’s pitiful. Basketball is almost in the 21st century, it’s moving so fast.”

Maravich was moving fast too, and on March 23, 1970, he went to the Hawks with the third pick in the NBA Draft. The Hawks finished 48-34 the previous season, losing to the Lakers in what was then called the Western Division finals. The team was successful, experienced and filled with talented Black players. The arrival of Maravich — and his lavish contract — caused schisms in the locker room. Joe Caldwell, an All-Star shooting guard, bolted for the Carolina Cougars of the ABA. Other teammates felt overlooked. As Mark Kriegel documented in his 2007 biography “Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich,” Bill Bridges, the team’s leading rebounder, approached owner Tom Cousins and the team’s general manager, Cousins’ brother Bob.

“I’m not asking for a million,” he said, “but I do expect some compensation for what I’ve meant to the Hawks.”

Maravich averaged 23.2 points on 46 percent shooting as a rookie, chipping in 4.4 assists per game, but the Hawks finished just 36-46, losing to the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs. The story repeated itself the next season. In his third, Maravich made his first All-Star team, putting up 26.1 points and 6.9 assists per game as the Hawks returned to the playoffs with a 46-36 record. But the team was bounced once again in the first round.

Maravich spent a final losing season in Atlanta before being dealt to the expansion Jazz, a trade that became known as “the Louisiana Purchase.” Needing a star to sell tickets, particularly one with a decorated history in Louisiana, the Jazz paid the price of two first-round picks, two first-round pick swaps, two second-round selections and a few other assets. When Maravich learned of the deal, he was said to have one response: “Is that all?”

Maravich would spend five seasons in New Orleans, filling it up for bad teams inside a cavernous Louisiana Superdome, building a basketball foundation for another city in the South. He made three All-Star teams, led the league in scoring and kept searching for personal fulfillment. It was then that Maravich began to experiment — Hinduism, astral projection, macrobiotics, a discipline he referred to as “UF-ology,” or the investigation of UFOs.

In a Sports Illustrated profile by writer Curry Kirkpatrick in 1978, Maravich famously voiced the desire “to be invisible so I could kill the heads of all the rich banking families, redistribute the wealth and make the world a better place.”

All the while, the Pistol kept scoring. In February 1977, the year he averaged 31 per game, he scored 68 points on 43 shots in a 124-107 victory over the Knicks in New Orleans. It was a record for a guard. Years later, the signed ball from that night would go for six figures. At the time, Maravich didn’t think much of it.

“Actually, I didn’t feel very well,” he told reporters after the game. “I had a new shoe on my left foot, and it wasn’t very comfortable.”

Maravich opened his final season with the Utah Jazz before being placed on waivers and signing with the Celtics. By the time he found a winning team, his knees were about to give out. He played his final minutes in an Eastern Conference finals loss to the 76ers, returned home, read survivalist literature, fasted, gardened, raised a family, became a born-again Christian, wrote a book and put all those “Homework Basketball” drills on video, which resulted in an appearance in 1987 on ESPN’s “Up Close” with Roy Firestone.

At one point, Firestone asked Maravich about the criticism, the idea he didn’t play defense, that he was overrated, that, as Riley once said, “Every guard in the league wants to send a limo to pick Pete up at the airport and play against his soft defense.” Maravich had heard this since his days at LSU. He was a showboat. He shot too much. He didn’t know how to play winning basketball.

“I would go in the dressing room, and I’d look at the stats like anybody else,” Maravich said, “and they would say: ‘Well, he can’t play defense,’ or ‘Pistol Pete can’t do this.’ And I’d look, and the man I happened to be playing had like 10 or 12 points or 14 points — and I’d have 45 or 50. I’d say: ‘Who’s defending who?’ ”

Not long after, in the first week of January 1988, Maravich was playing pickup basketball at the First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, Calif. During a game, he collapsed. He died of a rare congenital heart defect, the kind that usually precludes any career in athletics. He was 40.

That week, Dylan happened to be drinking coffee when the news came across on the radio. Maravich hadn’t played professionally in close to a decade, but for a moment, Dylan was transported back to that night in New Orleans. He couldn’t forget the feeling of watching the Pistol. So right then and there, he went and wrote a song he titled “Dignity.”

That was the power of Pete Maravich, to create and entertain and reinvent the form, to inspire wonder in those who watched, to turn basketball into something closer to art.

“Some people seem to fade away,” Dylan wrote, “but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.”

Career NBA stats: G: 658, Pts.: 24.2, Reb.: 4.2, Ast.: 5.4 Win Shares: 46.7, PER: 18.4

Achievements: Five-time All-Star, Four-time All-NBA, Hall of Fame (’87)

Excerpted from “The Basketball 100” published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images )