Books

"A white boy with flavor." That's one black NBA executive's appreciative appraisal of "Pistol" Pete Maravich, as quoted in Mark Kriegel's new biography, Pistol. Anyone who saw the late gunslinger in action would find it hard to argue.

Passes from any and all angles, from anywhere on the court; death-defying ball-handling feats; a voracious imagination and appetite for putting the ball in the hole: The Pistol was a modern artist on the hardwood, with a sense of spontaneity and flair rarely associated with white NBA players.

But the Maravich on display in Mr. Kriegel's highly readable portrait is also a tortured soul, the progeny of a taskmaster father and a depressed, alcoholic mother, driven for hours on end to expand his bag of tricks, an absurdly gifted basketball savant.

As a child, his dad and coach, Press, once had him lie face down in the back seat of the family car and dribble out the door as dad accelerated and decelerated, just so the kid could learn to handle the ball at different speeds. As a record-setting scorer at LSU — his career average of 44.2 points per game will likely never be matched — he drank as prolifically as he hoisted up jumpers.

"To watch Pete hoist a beer was to see a college kid having a good time," writes Mr. Kriegel. "But to look in his eyes was to see the sadness in his soul." As an adult, he grew obsessed with UFOs, going so far as to paint "Take me" on the roof of his Atlanta condo.

He found peace late in life as a born-again Christian. But through most of Mr. Kriegel's account, we're left with what Kris Kristofferson would call a walking contradiction. A man who spread so much joy among basketball fans was frequently immersed in physical and emotional anguish.

Mr. Kriegel begins Pistol with a paternal portrait, much as he did in Namath, his longer and more thorough biography of another cult-size athlete, quarterback Joe Namath. Press Maravich was melded in the hardscrabble Pennsylvania steel town of Aliquippa. A plant worker who found his salvation on the basketball court, Press played and then coached. He was a keen enough strategist that John Wooden, UCLA's Wizard of Westwood, would often pick his brain on nuances of the game.

But once Pete was born, he became the vessel of Press' hopes and dreams. The father trained the son not just to excel, but to excel with flavor. He wanted Pete to be a million-dollar player. That dream was realized when Pete entered the league professional sport in 1970 and signed a then-princely five-year, $1.5 million contract with the Atlanta Hawks.

He was seen as a great white hope for a Southern franchise eager to put butts in seats. But despite, and sometimes because of, his skill and pizazz, Pete clashed with teammates in Atlanta and later New Orleans, throughout a career plagued by injury and illness. He put up dazzling numbers and nonstop entertainment, but he never played for a winner.

Mr. Kriegel tries too hard at times in his efforts to make Pete a tragic, poetic figure, particularly when he slices passages from "Amazing Grace" in the second to last chapter. But he succeeds in making Pistol appealing to both the hard-core sports fan and the student of human nature. And he fully understands his subject's place in recent basketball history.

"It was Pete Maravich. ... who had anticipated what the game would become," he writes near the end of Pistol. "A hip-hop ballet, a rapper's delight, a cause for great celebration in the corporate suite. Pistol Pete was a harbinger of the high-concept ballplayer. These were the stars identifiable merely as Magic or Charles or, most of all, Michael, athletes who could be reconstituted in a variety of media, guys who could play as easily with animated characters as they could on the street."

If only he could have enjoyed it as much as we did.