Pistol Pete Would Have Turned 73 Today!

[LSUDad]

Pete Maravich would have turned 73 years old today., Taken away way too soon in life..
Terrific memories from one of the greatest players ever.

 

 

 

 

 

[LSUDad]

'𝙋𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙡 𝙋𝙚𝙩𝙚'𝙨' 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙛𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙙 𝙢𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙖𝙜𝙚

𝙩𝙤 𝙇𝙎𝙐 𝙗𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙮𝙚𝙧𝙨

"Pistol Pete" Maravich was invited to give a motivational talk to Coach Dale Brown's LSU basketball team before a big game sometime in the mid-1980s.

It turned out not to be the talk Coach Brown and the players were expecting of this basketball superstar, who had played for LSU from 1967 to 1970.

First, Pete ticked off all his worldly accomplishments: College All-American, led the nation in scoring, biggest pro contract in NBA history, multi-millionaire, walked around with $3,000 cash in his pocket, drank, chased women, lived in a mansion. Then, he paused and lowered his voice:

"But, guys, I was a miserable human being. I thought I had it all.... But I was unhappy, miserable, fed up with life. I had everything society tells us is success."

Then came the bombshell: "I had decided to commit suicide" with a pistol.

"I was just going to put the pistol in my mouth. I was so down in the dumps. For some reason, I set the pistol down on the bed. I didn't know how to pray.... I fell on the bed, prone, face down and said, 'God, if you're there, would you somehow, in some way, please touch my life.'

"Instantly—I don't know how to express it—a peace took over my body, for the first time in my life.... I had been a miserable s.o.b. until I took God into my life.

"Guys, whatever you do, 𝙙𝙤 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪, or you will end up miserable, as I did."

More of this story can be found in Coach Dale Brown's motivational book, "Getting Over the 4 Hurdles of Life," available at [www.acadianhouse.com.](http://www.acadianhouse.com/?fbclid=IwAR1XJE0GToXKtGWsDAE2rrdvVVqSrX_IA7uOih_aHrtrtX3Uqfy4BwubR7w) In concluding "Pistol Pete's" story, Coach Brown writes: "Pete felt, as I do, that 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙚𝙙𝙜𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙤𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙛 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙗𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙚𝙩𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚 𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙧𝙤𝙡𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙤𝙙 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙪𝙨."

[LSUDad]

33 years ago today, the GOAT college basketball player passed away at the age of 42 years old. Elgin Baylor said that Oscar Robertson was the best he ever played against. Jerry West was the best he ever played with. "Pistol Pete was the best I ever seen." LSU coach Dale Brown went back through every game Pete played in at LSU, charted every shot he took, adding the 3 pt line, and came up with an average of 57 PPG for his career. He had averaged 44 PPG without the 3 pt line. The GOAT, may he RIP.

 

 

 

[LSUDad]

Remembering Basketball Hall of Famer Pistol Pete Maravich....He Died 33 Years Ago.....January 5 1988.....He Was 40 Years Old....He Was Way Ahead of His Time....

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hatchertiger]

I saw him play one time in the Super Dome when he was with the Jazz. He sure could put on a show. Had talent but put in the hard work to perfect his craft. 

[LSUDad]

 

 

 

[LSUDad]

https://fanbuzz.com/college-basketball/ncaa-sec/pete-maravich-lsu/amp/
 

 

 

[LSUDad]

 

[LSUDad]

Covid years, tailed back the Annual Book sale at LSU. Today it was back on. Been a number of years since I’ve been in this place. John M Parker. 
 

 

 

 

 

[LSUDad]

This is by far the best story on the Pistol. 

Edited June 1, 2022 by LSUDad

[LSUDad]

On this day, June 22, 1947 Pistol Pete Maravich was born in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. This exhibit was part of the Pete Maravich Pass at LSU. #PistolPete #PeteMaravich #PistolPeteMaravich #PistolPeteMovie
 

[LSUDad]

Bingo! 
 

LSU will unveil a statue of Pete Maravich, the all-time leading scorer in NCAA Division I basketball history, on Monday, July 25, the department announced Wednesday.

[LSUDad]

LSU is set to unveil the statue of Pete Maravich, the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer, on Monday, July 25th. The statue will stand alongside Hall of Famers Shaquille O’Neal and Bob Pettit on the north side of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.

Arguably the greatest college basketball player of all-time, Maravich shattered the record books during his time at the collegiate level. His scoring ability was second to none, putting up numbers basketball fans may never see again.

[LSUDad]

 

 

 

 

[LSUDad]

[LSUDad]

 

[LSUDad]

The untold story of the statue that now — finally — pays homage to ‘The Show’

Life was at times complicated for Utah/New Orleans Jazz legend ‘Pistol’ Pete Maravich. So was getting a statue that honors him completed and unveiled at LSU

By  Tim Buckley, 

, Aug 5, 2022 10:54 a.m. MDT
 

BATON ROUGE, La. — He played all of 17 games for the Utah Jazz after the franchise relocated to Salt Lake City.

Each was played during the 1979-80 season, before Pete Maravich was unceremoniously waived by the Jazz in January 1980, his ailing knees having stolen the stage from a man who made magic happen whenever the ball was in his hands.

But the Jazz retired Pistol Pete’s No. 7 jersey, homage much less to the time he spent in Utah and much more to the five seasons he played for the team from 1974-79, before it moved from New Orleans.

The New Orleans Pelicans even retired his No. 7, too, not because he ever played a game for that franchise, which originated in Charlotte, but instead in recognition of the time he spent dazzling in the Big Easy. And the Atlanta Hawks have retired his No. 44 as well, a nod to the first four seasons of his NBA career.

Now LSU, the school where his brilliance with a basketball blossomed, has holstered Pistol Pete’s No. 23 in bronze.

A statue of Maravich in his Tigers uniform was unveiled July 25, with just enough time to spare before preseason camp opened Thursday for the SEC football program — the 2019 national champions — that lives in a land where football long has been king.

Football may forever be that in Louisiana, but basketball is on the map, too, something that could not be said before Maravich first stepped on campus. He created a buzz about the game that simply did not exist before his arrival, and now — five-and-a-half decades later — there’s a statue to prove it.

The man who crafted the work, Brian Hanlon, has sculpted iconic figures from throughout American sports history.

Georgetown coach John Thompson, Temple coach John Chaney and UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian. Keith Jackson at the Rose Bowl. Auburn’s Charles Barkley. Dominique Wilkins, Bobby Cox and Evander Holyfield in Atlanta. Jim Brown and Ernie Davis at Syracuse.

 

Hanlon’s list goes on and on, including former LSU basketball coach Skip Bertman, late LSU Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon, basketball great Bob Pettit and — captured in an iconic mid-dunk moment — Shaquille O’Neal.

But when Hanlon was commissioned to produce a statue of Maravich, the subject matter held special meaning for the classically trained and internationally renowned Toms River, New Jersey, sculptor.

“This is more personal out of the five (LSU) statues as a result of me being 61 years old, and, as a kid, wearing floppy socks on purpose, and wanting to be Pistol Pete Maravich,” said Hanlon, dubbed the “Sports Rodin” by The New York Times in 2018 for his work in the sports entertainment sector.

“Your dream would be to score (44.2) points per game,” added Hanlon, referencing Maravich’s LSU career scoring average. “But a very inspiring gentleman, I think, off the court too. … If young people took the time to read about him, they would see more than statistics.”

For the record

Maravich scored 3,667 points in three years at LSU, averaging 44.2 points per game starting with the 1967-68 season.

His totals still stand as school and NCAA records today, despite a ban at the time on freshmen playing varsity basketball and the absence of a 3-point line and shot clock during Maravich’s college career.

Hanlon originally had one look in mind for portraying the 6-foot-5 shooting guard.

“Why wouldn’t you sculpt him shooting?” said Hanlon, also the official master sculptor for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. “I mean, this is the greatest shooter in the history of the game.”

The Louisiana Legislature renamed the venue the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in 1988, shortly after Maravich, who had previously undetected heart issues, died playing pickup basketball in Pasadena, California.

An LSU official earlier this year cited uncertainty over future arena renovation plans and the COVID-19 pandemic as reasons for the delay in the statue’s placement and unveiling.

Others suspect the fact Maravich never graduated from LSU played a part.

“Killing me. Killing me. Killing me,” Hanlon said of it taking so long.

“Pete is quite misunderstood in that as a young man he had a learning disability, and those things weren’t identified back then. So, for him to be, I think, slighted because he wasn’t able to read like you and I — I mean, he was reading backward; his dyslexia — is a little unfair.”

For several years the statue resided outdoors — weather-beaten, uncared for and unseen by public eyes — at a New Orleans-area storage facility.

Complicating matters, the back of its base was damaged upon delivery at LSU.

“For many, many different reasons it just got put on hold,” Hanlon said, “and by the time we were ready to install it … we had found out it wasn’t being stored very professionally.”

Hanlon spent 12 hours on a ladder making fixes, with assistance, the night before the unveiling.

He’s thrilled, though, to finally be able to share what he created with all who pass by it on the LSU campus.

“His basketball prowess — I don’t know if you can say the word genius, but — it’s certainly brilliant, on the level of all the greats of all time,” Hanlon said. “So this is one I always wanted to do.”

Body of work

Maravich — inducted in 1987 into the Naismith Hall of Fame — was the 1970 Naismith Award winner, Sporting News’ National Player of the Year and a three-time first-team All-American.
 

He also was a five-time NBA All-Star, including two of his seasons with the Hawks and three of his seasons with the Jazz before they moved from New Orleans to Utah, and he’s on, as are Pettit and O’Neal, the NBA’s 50th and 75th Anniversary All-Time teams.

Maravich finished his 658-game regular-season NBA career with a 24.2 points per game scoring average, including 25.2 ppg over 330 games with the Jazz and a career-high 31.1 ppg in 1976-77 — his third season in New Orleans, one in which he also averaged a career-high 41.7 minutes per game.

Pistol Pete simply loved to play, no matter how much the knees may have hurt.

But after two surgeries the pain caught up with him, and following the move to Salt Lake City it finally overtook him. He averaged just 17.1 points and 30.7 minutes in his 17 games with Utah, all of which were played in the Salt Palace, and all of which came off the bench.

Maravich couldn’t practice near the end, so then-coach Tom Nissalke did not play him for his last 20-plus games while still on the Jazz roster.
 

The body had failed Maravich, and with much around him unraveling, Pistol Pete was waived by then-Utah general manager Frank Layden.

It was the final move in the Jazz career of a man who, as former LSU coach Dale Brown suggested before the statue was unveiled, lived a complicated life.

Brown recalled talking with Maravich after asking him to speak to his then-Tigers team around the time of a 1987 game against Oklahoma in Oklahoma City.

“Without a doubt — this is not embellished — it is the most sincere, it is the most honest, it was the most fulfilling thing I’d ever seen in my life,” said Brown, who coached LSU from 1972-97 and took over from the man who coached Pistol Pete, Maravich’s own father, Press Maravich.

 

Former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown addresses the crowd during the ceremony to unveil the new Pete Maravich statue at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, La.

Jonathan Mailhes

“He (Pete Maravich) got up and said, ‘Guys, I see a lot of you guys are All-Americans. You’re going to be in the same position as me.’ He said, ‘As long as we are, we’re taught about wealth and we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that.’ He said, ‘I was a miserable human being. I was frustrated. I was disillusioned. And I was bewildered.’ He said, ‘Do not let all of this society phase … change your goal in life.’ ”

While sharing that anecdote, Brown shifts to a conversation he had with Pistol Pete.

“Sitting in the dressing room that night — he was a quiet man — he said to me, ‘Coach, I’ve got a question to ask you. I even thought of committing suicide one time.’ He said, ‘How in the world did we get so far off-track?’ ” Brown said. “I said, ‘I can’t give it the exact answer, Pete. But I can give you an answer about a dictionary.’ ”

A very Dale Brown-like response.

“‘This is what’s happened to us,’” Brown said.

“‘In 1806, the first dictionary ever printed, under the word ‘success,’ it said, ‘fortunate, happy, kind’ and ‘prosperous.’ Now, whatever that year was Pete and I were talking, now the dictionary describes success as ‘attainment of wealth, fame, rank and power.’ ” 

Gone too soon

Maravich attained a lot over the years, but just how much he enjoyed it will forever remain anyone’s best guess.

His career, like his life, really was cut far too short.

The Boston Celtics picked him up for a playoff run later in 1980, near the end of Larry Bird’s rookie NBA season. But after playing 26 regular-season games wearing green and nine in the postseason Maravich retired.

 

The widow of former LSU great Pete Maravich, Jackie Maravich, addresses the crowd during the ceremony to unveil the new Pete Maravich statue at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, La.

Jonathan Mailhes

The show was closed, but not forgotten.

“Over Pete’s lifetime many have described him as an entertainer, an artist, a showman, basketball assassin, wizard, genius or one-of-a-kind,” his widow Jackie said before the statue unveiling in Baton Rouge.

“Every time a family member meets someone and they find out Pete was a relative, they immediately have a smile and have a story about a memory of watching Pete play … and the thrill of seeing him perform his magic with a basketball.”

Someone, that is, much like a sculptor from Jersey named Brian Hanlon.

“My first love was basketball as a kid, and my nickname in HYAA community basketball was ‘Pistol Pete,’” said Hanlon, raised in Holmdel, New Jersey. “I scored … like, low 20s a game, so I got the title of ‘Pistol Pete.’”

Tim Buckley covered the Utah Jazz for the Deseret News from 1999-2011. He is now editor of Tiger Rag, a website — tigerrag.com — and monthly magazine covering LSU sports in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

[dachsie]

I am curious why Shaq got a statue before Pistol Pete did tho.

[LSUDad]

Pistol 1-31-1970, sets the NCAA Scoring record! 
 

 

[LSUDad]

Happy "Heavenly" Birthday to "Pistol Pete" Maravich, who would have been 76 today.....I was so fortunate to have seen him perform his 'Greatest Show on Earth"  live many, many times, as well as speak with him just a month prior to his untimely death at age 40. There will NEVER be another!

[houtiger]

When the NO Jazz played in the Superdome, you could sit in the top level for $1.50.  You could not make out player numbers, but by their movement you knew who they were.  Maravich was easy to spot.  It was a community event to go to the dome and watch a game.  At work, we'd say "let's go tonight" and get 6 - 10 guys and go.  You could park under the elevated road that went to the Miss. River bridge for free, it was a 2 block walk to the dome.  We all lived on the West Bank (worked over there for Entergy), so you got in your car and in a couple of blocks hit the up ramp onto the bridge, easy as pie!  At halftime you could scoot down to the second level and watch the second half.  We would go six or eight times a season.  The favorite game was against the Knicks who had Walt Frazier, a good scorer and the best defensive guard in the league.  Pete seemed to take it personal and tried to work over Walt.  The Knicks had a better team, but Pete would go all out and the Jazz won a lot of those.

 

"Some of the record pro basketball crowd of 26,511 watched Pete Maravich, and the New Orleans Jazz, defeat the Los Angles Lakers, 113‐110, Wednesday night from seats nine to 13 stories high at the Louisiana Superdome. The almost 8,000 fans who sat in the Terrace level could see Maravich's moves if they had good eyesight, but his uniform number was not visible. Maravich looked like a floppy‐haired kewpie doll and Kareem Abdul‐Jabbar like a big doll. But it didn't matter. The Jazz, winning six of their first seven games, are turning football‐minded New Orleans’ to pro basketball.

Normally, the basketball seating capacity at the Superdome is 19,203, all‐reserved seats in the $3.50‐to‐$7.50 price range. On game nights the Terrace level is opened for the general admission price of $1.50, and coupled with the Jazz success, it has proved to be a bonanza.

“The Dome is a vast place,” said Barry Mendelson, a Jazz vice president,” and now we are able to draw people who normally couldn't afford the more expensive seats. Families of six and seven are coming to the game. The remarkable thing about the crowd was that it rained heavily in the city and suburbs. We had 18,000 tickets sold for the game, but we didn't expect the big walk‐in crowd.

“If this record is ever broken,” said Maravich, who scored 30 points, “it will be in one of two places—right here or on another planet where they do nothing but play basketball.”

 

[houtiger]

I came across the video below, and Pete finally found a good situation his final NBA season, helping the Celtics win their division and advance to the playoffs.  Here is the history:

"The Utah Jazz began play in the 1979–80 season. Maravich moved with the team to Salt Lake City, but his knee problems were worse than ever. He appeared in 17 games early in the season, but his injuries prevented him from practicing much, and new coach Tom Nissalke had a strict rule that players who didn't practice were not allowed to play in games. Thus, Maravich was parked on the bench for 24 straight games, much to the dismay of Utah fans and to Maravich himself. During that time, Adrian Dantley emerged as the team's franchise player.

The Jazz placed Maravich on waivers in January 1980. He signed with the Celtics, the top team in the league that year, led by rookie superstar Larry Bird.^[24] Maravich adjusted to a new role as part-time contributor, giving Boston a "hired gun" on offense off the bench. He helped the team post a 61–21 record in the regular season, the best in the league. And, for the first time since his early career in Atlanta, Maravich was able to participate in the NBA playoffs. He appeared in nine games during that postseason, but the Celtics were upended by Julius Erving and the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference finals, four games to one.

Realizing that his knee problems would never go away, Maravich retired at the end of that season. The NBA instituted the 3-point shot just in time for Maravich's last season in the league. He had always been famous for his long-range shooting, and though injury-dampened, his final year provided an official statistical gauge of his abilities. Between his limited playing time in Utah and Boston, he made 10 of 15 3-point shots, giving him a career 66.7% completion rate."