The Pistol is finally home and it feels really good

There are rare times, especially when you hit the final stretch of life, that you can turn back the clock to when you were a kid.

It’s a song you hear like “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the one-hit wonder The Foundations.

Or maybe a meal you eat at a timeless hometown restaurant like a slice of pizza from Baton Rouge’s Pastime Lounge.

Or a flashback moment teeing off on a neighborhood golf hole (Webb Park’s par 3 15th hole where a fence was finally erected to keep tee shots from slicing into South Foster Drive traffic) that has continually haunted you all your life.

It's why Monday’s statue reveal ceremony of the late “Pistol Pete” Maravich, who established himself as college basketball’s all-time leading scorer and a court magician for the ages in a freshman year (1966-67) and three LSU varsity seasons (1967-68 to 1969-70), was so personal for me.

Athletes never intend to be idols. For various reasons for different people, it just happens.

In my case, the Pistol came along at a time when I needed him the most.

My father Ace was sports information director at LSU starting in 1954 until he unexpectedly died of a heart attack at age 45 leaving behind a wife and four children.

I fell in love with sports and sports writing because of my dad. He was a great writer but a questionable judge of athletic talent.

One day in October 1966, he came home and told us about LSU's new basketball coach, a man named Press Maravich.

“Our new coach said he has a son named Pete who's supposedly a good player," Ace said. "But I saw him and he looks awfully skinny to play in college."

Ace quickly reversed his evaluation when he saw rail-thin Pete Maravich score 50 points, grab 14 rebounds and deal 11 assists in his debut on LSU's freshman team against Southeastern Louisiana.

I was at that game in the dusty rodeo arena on the LSU campus, the old John M. Parker Agricultural Center forever nicknamed “The Cow Palace.”

Like every kid in Baton Rouge, it was awe at first sight.

We all wanted to be Pete Maravich. We tried to skip a haircut or two and grow our hair longer like his. We cut the elastic out of our basketball socks so they would droop like the trademark lucky floppy socks he wore. We bought black Converse low-top sneakers, tried to convert to adidas as Pete did in his senior season and then to Pro Keds when he signed his first shoe endorsement as a pro.

We religiously practiced the ground-breaking ball-handling drills he created and named such as “The Pretzel” and “The Ricochet” which can still be viewed today on his set of video tapes called “Homework Basketball.”

We learned to spin the ball on our fingers, then toss it in the air, bounce it off our head and bank it into the basket. Why? Because Pete did it.

We shot stop-and-pop off-balance jumpers, turning and running back downcourt before they splashed through the net a la Pistol Pete.

He was given the greenest light in basketball history by his dad Press to shoot as much as he wanted. He put up scoring numbers that will never be consistently met on any level of basketball but nothing more unreachable than his 44.2 points per game scoring average in 83 LSU varsity career games.

His scoring spoiled us. We’d walk out of the Ag Center after he scored “just” 38 points and say, “Seemed like Pete was a bit off his game tonight.”

But what made the Pistol unforgettable and packed college arenas everywhere he played was his imaginative passing and ball-handling.

He threw behind-the-back passes, behind-the-back bounce passes, around the neck passes, between-the-legs passes, no-look passes, wraparound the body passes and deceptive passes in which the ball appeared to go the opposite direction that he threw it. He created and perfected his unique passing arsenal through hours and hours of practicing alone in gyms.

As kids, we all practiced those crazy passes, too, much to the chagrin of our junior high and high school coaches. They believed two-handed bounce, chest and overhead passes were fundamentals never to be tampered with.

What made the Pistol so personal to me, why he’s the only athlete whose pictures hang on my office wall and why he’s still my guy after my almost 66 years on earth, goes back to December 22, 1968.

It’s the day my father died. I was 12 years old and left on an emotional island by a stunned mother and siblings each deep into their own grief and in survival mode.

What somehow pulled me through for the next few years was Pete Maravich's greatness to work hard and dream big inspired me to transform from a chubby, overweight kid into a two-year starter on my Baton Rouge High team and a college basketball starter before a knee injury derailed my career.

In Pete’s final two seasons, my older brother Johnny and myself continued to attend all of LSU’s home games.

I also religiously huddled around a radio listening to Bob Peters and Brad Brian broadcast the Tigers’ road games on WJBO. I tracked the games using official NCAA scorebooks and began my sports writing career for a Baton Rouge teen newspaper called “What’s Happening.”

One of the best moments of my journalistic life came in July 1983 as a writer for the Shreveport Journal when I spent that day tailing Pete during his appearance at LSU during the Special Olympics World Summer Games.

Even then, at age 27 and four years into a sports writing career that is now in its 44th year, I was nervous asking Pete questions.

My subsequent story won national and state awards. Hey, I had to produce under pressure, didn’t I? After all, it was The Pistol.

One of the saddest days of my life came less than five years later on January 5, 1988 when Pete died of a heart attack at age 40 playing pickup basketball.

What was revealed in Pete's autopsy – humans have two coronary arteries but he was only born with one – made his career even more amazing.

“After his death, we discovered he had received the gift of an extended life with the revelation that Pete had a rare heart anomaly that normally causes fatality during adolescence,” Pete’s wife Jackie Maravich McLachlan said at Monday’s invitation-only ceremony on LSU’s practice floor prior to the statue unveiling. “I agree with some who have said Pete’s career and life were truly miracles. How wonderful for us to be part of such miracles.”

Over the years through subsequent Maravich biographies by brilliant writers including a book co-authored by Pete himself, we learned of his private struggle with alcoholism fueled by the daily pressure of having to live up to his enormous basketball reputation.

“This man has been quicker and faster than Jerry West or Oscar Robertson,” Lou Hudson, a former Atlanta Hawks teammate, once said comparing Maravich to two of the NBA’s all-time greatest guards. “He gets the ball up the floor better. He shoots as well. Raw-talentwise, he's the greatest who ever played. The difference comes down to style. He will be a loser, always, no matter what he does. That's his legacy. It never looked easy being Pete Maravich."

Thankfully after playing 10 years in the NBA and retiring, the Pistol eventually became a Christian and found the peace of mind that he had desperately sought.

The only shame in Monday’s statue ceremony 52 years removed from Maravich’s final LSU season is that his statue had been in storage for almost six years after the LSU Board of Supervisors finally approved its creation.

Since then, the usual, self-righteous politics of the Board kept the statue gathering dust. Certain Board members contended Maravich didn’t deserve a statue because he never earned a college degree which until 2019 had been an LSU rule for an athlete to be honored.

Some of those same Board members also kept blocking the school naming the basketball court in the Maravich Assembly Center for legendary Tigers’ men’s coach Dale Brown. All Brown did was succeed Press Maravich, take LSU to new plateaus and accelerate racially integrating the program while winning 448 games, four SEC regular season titles with 13 NCAA tourney appearances including two Final Fours in his 25 seasons.

It wasn’t until Collis Temple, the first African-American basketball player in LSU history who finished under Brown, was elected to the Board of Supervisors in July 2020 that he and fellow Board member Glenn Armentor were able to get the measure to name the court in Brown's honor approved last September at a fiery Board meeting. The dissenters believed the court should also include the name of former LSU women’s basketball coach Sue Gunter.

”We’ve had 10 years to talk about this and the reason we’ve talked about it for 10 years was because some folk didn’t want to do (it) for this nigger-loving Dale Brown,” Temple said in his stunning closing argument for Brown. “He changed the trajectory of the state of Louisiana and the mindset of all the stereotypical negativity.”

Dale Brown Court was dedicated this past season on Jan. 5 at halftime of the LSU-Kentucky game. It shouldn't be surprising there are still Board members – presumably the three that voted against naming the court for Brown – who are trying to get a proposal to change the name to the Gunter-Brown Court on the agenda of the Board’s next meeting Sept. 8-9.

Such a gutless possible reversal is sadly believable for the historically kangaroo court that has shaped LSU school policy.

In the meantime, Brian Hanlon, who has sculpted all six of LSU’s statues (including Gunter’s which is located on the Maravich Assembly Center corridor), is going to work on the next statue honoring two-time women’s national Player of the Year Seimone Augustus.

And when it is finished, it needs to be placed in front of the LSU basketball practice facility in the rear of the PMAC where the statues of Maravich, Bob Pettit and Shaquille O’Neal reside.

At the same time, the Pistol’s statue should be moved and placed in front of the arena named after him.

This is a no-brainer. But then again consider the lamebrain Board (a few members withstanding) who will likely feel the need to tediously debate such action before approving the move.

Good Lord, people. Let’s not take 52 more years to get this done.