There still is nothing and no one like him.
When Pete Maravich was coming up of course, there was no ESPN or anything like that. There really wasn’t much college basketball on TV at all. He graduated from LSU in 1969 and even regional coverage was in its infancy. The Game of the Century, UCLA at Houston in 1968, was the first NCAA regular season game broadcast nationwide in prime time. ESPN was still a decade away from its first baby steps.
So when he started doing stuff like this, it was probably kind of mythic for a lot of people. Fourty-four points a game? For three years?
And with no three pointer, mind you!
Dale Brown once calculated that with a three point line, Maravich would have averaged closer to 57 points a game.
Even so, when you watch this, it’s not the shots that are mind-blowing. It’s the body awareness and the creativity, the passes that only he sees.
Maravich was Showtime before Magic and you can see how a young Larry Bird would have seen Maravich and how it might have sparked his imagination.
In short, you can’t fully understand the modern game without understanding Pistol Pete. He remains iconic and mind-blowing, one of the first people to play basketball more like improvisational jazz than the staid, patterned midwestern game it had always been before his arrival.
And as you watch this, keep in mind that he did all of this with a ticking time bomb of a heart: the man was born without a left coronary artery which makes his feats even more astonishing.
