Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich

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(Editor's Note)
Those who knew Pete Maravich beyond ad copy and cut lines already understand that his death after a church half-court pick up game was about the best he could hope for. He was just 40 years old when his heart gave out, not that long after that same heart was ready to give up.

Pistol Pete was the incomparable prodigy of the basketball court, like a Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations amid the racket of a game already going rude and crude. His obituaries lauded his finesse; the buckets of points and the blind bounce passes with eyes of their own. Yet for as much glory the game offered, a greater despair dogged him like a late day shadow. Basketball was for him, in Buddhist terms, the hungry ghost.

From the bestselling author of Namath, Mark Kriegel, comes Pistol, an evocative biography of one of the most beloved and enduring legends of basketball, an athletic mega-star who'd sooner be remembered as a humble Christian. For Maravich, his most important work was not a game, but rather his lay ministry.

Pistol is by no means a garden-variety sports biography of some fallen and redeemed icon with far too much bling and free cash. Kriegel instead crafts more a Faulknerian tale of obsession and resignation, fathers and sons, culture clashes of south and north – all balanced on the turbulent blade of the 60s and 70s.

Kriegel is a former sports columnist for the New York Daily News and author of the novel Bless Me, Father. And in Pistol. with that metaphorical marriage of a reporter with a dirty gin glass in one hand, and a novelist with a goblet of fine wine in the other, Kriegel mixes up Pulitzer material.

John Budris
Editor, HOFMAG.com