Fathers & Sons & Sports (10 page)

By 1950 Press was coaching basketball and teaching phys ed at Aliquippa High School, where he himself had been a hoops legend. A new sheriff had come to the blackboard jungle, confiscating 300 switchblades and paddling students who violated his
vaunted rules. “It was a piece of wood, three or four inches wide—[Press] was pretty loose with that paddle,” recalls Nick Lackovich, then a student at Aliquippa.

Press had become a hard-ass. The dashing pilot with movie-star looks now wore his hair shorn to bristles. Detesting the duck’s ass haircut, Press formed the Crewcut Club. “If you didn’t belong, you couldn’t play ball for him,” says Pete Suder, one of his players.

“Press would run us like crazy, up and down the steps, around the gymnasium,” said Mike Ditka, then an underclassman, who’d go on to fame as an NFL tight end and the coach of the Chicago Bears. “He’d put that steely look on you, and you knew he meant business.”

Not every player saw Press as a mere authority figure. Joe Lee, his star point guard, recalls him with deep affection. Lee was black, as was half the Aliquippa team by then. His mother had passed away, and even by Aliquippa standards Joe Lee was poor. Press would often slip him lunch tickets. More than that, though, Press showed a level of concern Lee had not seen in other adults.

Press took his team all the way to Madison Square Garden in New York City because he wanted the boys to see firsthand that their game had a capital and, within it, a cathedral. On Sundays during the season he would drive them to Duquesne University to watch the varsity practice. On the way he would listen to the black radio station. Press knew all the words to the spirituals.

“That’s your heritage,” he told Lee, who found Press to be a surprisingly good listener. Once, Lee asked his coach why Aliquippa had no black cheerleaders. Press thought about it for a while. “You’re right,” he said. “There should be.”

Press’s Aliquippa teams also had their own mascot. He had sad, soft eyes and a big head mounted on a wispy frame. He was tiny but ubiquitous. If you saw Press, you saw Pete. He attended practices. He’d wiggle his way into team huddles. At home games, Suder recalls, “he’d sit on the bench right next to his dad.”

“He always wanted to be around Press,” says Joe Pukach, then Press’s assistant, “but Press was always around basketball.”

Woody Sauldsberry, a Globetrotter from 1955 through ′57, remembers proud Papa Press bringing Pete into the locker room when the team played in Pittsburgh. “His father knew some of the older players,” recalls Sauldsberry. “He would bring Pete in the dressing room, and the guys would take time with him. They would do some ball-handling tricks. Then he would do some. I remember he could dribble the ball down stairs. The kid was only seven or eight years old, but you could tell he was going to be good.”

“That’s all [Press] talked about: his son, his son, his son,” says Suder. “Press pushed him like crazy.” Suder also recalls that the coach, unlike many steelworker fathers, “had his arms around him all the time.” The game was an obsession, but also a kind of love. Press worshipped basketball. Pete worshipped Press.

On the afternoons of away games, the team would meet at four o’clock in the gym before riding out in the bus. Press would leave Pete behind with the lights on and this instruction: “Play.” When the team returned to Aliquippa, usually between midnight and one in the morning, Pete would still be there, still shooting.

In 1955 Press took the head job at Clemson, becoming the basketball coach at a football school. His job was to be a good loser to the ACC powerhouses, North Carolina, N.C. State, Wake Forest and Duke. Shortly after he was hired he said, “We expect Clemson to play interesting basketball … basketball that the fans like to see.”

Interesting basketball. At a place like Clemson, Press’s coaching acumen couldn’t be judged in wins and losses. Lacking a player capable of art, he conducted experiments in basketball science. Some were crazy, others brilliant. One was both: the grand experiment, a supremely interesting player, a product of talent and desire, an expression of his father’s imagination, a boy by whom one could judge the man.

As a coach’s coach, Press loved nothing more than entertaining other members of the fraternity at the Maravich house. They’d talk basketball as they sipped coffee and nibbled on cake. Then they’d adjourn for the main event. “He was dying to show off little Pete,” recalls Bill Hensley, then the sports information director at N.C. State. “We would go down to the basement, and Pete would dribble for us on the concrete floor.” The kid could dribble like Bob Cousy. “Then Press would put gloves on him so he couldn’t feel the
ball.” The kid still dribbled like Cousy—and then some. Pete would be going between his legs, behind his legs, throwing it against the wall, catching it behind his back. He was a machine.

Finally, Hensley recalls, Press would produce a handkerchief. “He would blindfold Pete so he couldn’t see the ball.” Never saw Cousy do that. Never saw anyone do that. “Before or since,” says Hensley. “We’d sit there for like half an hour, watching this little bitty kid dribbling everywhere. We felt then that Press might have something special on his hands.” That was during the 1956-57 season. Pete was nine.

Before long he was making the rounds with his father on the summer circuit. Their big stop was the Campbell College basketball camp in Buies Creek, N.C. For years Press roomed there with UCLA coach John Wooden. They were an odd couple: Wooden measured and modest, Press loud and profane. “Press was an enigma,” Wooden says of his cussing colleague. “I came to understand that it was just his way. But he knew the Bible so well.”

Not as well as he knew basketball, of course. “One should never underestimate Press’s knowledge of the game,” says Wooden. “Over the years he was the one I would go to for analysis on several aspects of the game.” At UCLA, Wooden would become the most successful coach in basketball history. He would win ten national championships and coach nineteen first-team All-Americas. Press never got to work with that kind of talent. He had only Pete.

Wooden first saw Pete around 1960. The boy was performing the dribbling and ball-handling routines that would become so famous. “I saw him do things at Campbell I didn’t think anybody could do,” Wooden says flatly. In assessing the boy’s talent and dexterity the coach compares him to some of the great black players he had known, going back to his days as an All-America at Purdue: “I had the great pleasure of playing against the New York Rens many times. They had some of the best ballplayers you could ever see. I watched the Globetrotters with Goose Tatum and Marques Haynes. None of them could do more than Pete. Pete Maravich could do more with a basketball than anybody I have ever seen.”

Then again, Wooden felt obligated to ask his enigmatic friend, To what end? All those tricks, what did they accomplish? “It’s crazy” he said. “How many hours does it take to learn all that? Wouldn’t he be better off learning proper footwork for defense?”

“You don’t understand,” said Press. “He’s going to be the first million-dollar pro.”

The gloves and blindfolds were just the beginning. There were so many other drills. Pete learned the fundamentals, of course: dribbling with either hand, chest pass, bounce pass, foul shots, jump shots and hook shots. But because the basics could become monotonous, Press invented more elaborate regimens. Most of these moves were anathema to coaches of the day, but they kept Pete’s interest alive. Often the ideas came to Press in his sleep.

In all there were about forty drills and exercises—Homework Basketball, they would come to be called. Press and Pete gave each of them a name, such as Pretzel, Ricochet, Crab Catch, Flap Jack, or Punching Bag. Pete would crouch, his arms moving in a figure-eight motion between and around his legs so rapidly that the ball looked as if it were suspended beneath him. He would bounce the ball two-handed between his splayed legs, catch it behind his back and then fire it forward, completing the pendulum motion. He would transform himself into a kind of human gyroscope. The beat of the ball as he dribbled it just inches from the ground approximated the staccato sound of a boxing speed bag. Perfected at Pete’s pace, the drills had an almost hypnotic effect.

Pete would dribble the two miles between his home and College Avenue, the town’s main drag. He’d dribble while riding his bicycle—alternating hands. One day Press told his son to get in the car and bring his ball. Pete did as he was told. Then Press instructed him to lie across the backseat with the passenger-side door open. Pete balked. He said, “What are people going to think?”

“Just do it,” said Press.

Pete did it. He dribbled as his father drove, learning to control the ball at different speeds.

He’d also dribble in the movie theater, keeping time on the carpeted aisle through a double feature. He’d dribble in Martin’s Drugstore, where he once won a five-dollar bet by spinning the ball on his fingertips for an hour straight.

Years later, Maravich would famously declare his childhood self “a basketball android.” But androids don’t think or feel, and the ball was an appendage not merely of his body but of his psyche as well. He went to bed with it, lulling himself to sleep while practicing his shooting form. He would repeat the words “fingertip control, backspin, follow-through” like a mantra. For Pete, there was comfort in repetition. Still, he was a light sleeper, as was his father. Once Pete awoke in a driving rainstorm. “I forced open my bedroom window and crawled out into the downpour,” he would recall in his autobiography. “In my bare feet I ran to the muddied ground and began to dribble … I knew if I could dribble under these conditions, I would have no problem on a basketball court.”

Frail as he looked, Pete didn’t acknowledge the usual boundaries of fatigue, age or nerve. Nor did his routines distinguish between the athletic and the aesthetic, between sport and show. He had already begun challenging his father’s players to games of H-O-R-S-E for money. He would have to hoist the ball two-handed, off his hip. “He was half our size, literally,” remembers George Krajack. “But he took some of our guys’ money.”

At Campbell, Pete bet Wake Forest’s All-America big man, Len Chappell, that he could make twenty-four of twenty-five free throws, with twenty of them hitting nothing but the net. He collected his winnings in Pepsis. In getting the better of Chappell, Pete had done something the rest of the ACC could not. It
wasn’t the only time, either. “I remember we played H-O-R-S-E for an hour,” says Chappell. “He shot me out of the gym.”

“He was the hardest-working athlete I’ve ever been around,” says Lefty Driesell, then the coach at Davidson. “It’d be 110 degrees, and he’d be dribbling or throwing the ball against a cement wall hours at a time.”

“Pete,” Driesell told him, “you’re working too hard.”

“I’m gonna be a millionaire, coach,” Pete replied. The boy kept going, throwing all those fancy passes against the wall.

“I ain’t never seen Oscar Robertson throw nothing but a plain old chest pass,” said Driesell.

“They don’t pay you a million to throw a plain old chest pass.”

While still at Clemson, Press developed ulcers. Basketball was literally bleeding him. His physician prescribed tranquilizers and advised Press not to take the game home with him.

“How can I do that?” Press asked. The real cure, at least to his way of thinking, was Pete. This Pistol had the magic bullet: a cure for all his regrets. Pete was Press’s ticket to basketball heaven. Still, some couldn’t help but wonder whether Pete would become a kind of human sacrifice. As John Wooden had warned Press, “You’re putting too much pressure on one boy.”

By 1965 Press had become the head coach at a bona fide basketball school, North Carolina State. There, he guided an undermanned Wolfpack team to an ACC championship and a ticket to the NCAA tournament, where its first opponent would be Princeton, a team made famous by its star, Bill
Bradley. A first team All-America, Bradley had won a gold medal in Rome, where he was captain of the U.S. Olympic team, and a Rhodes scholarship. The AP, UPI, and Basketball Writers Association would all name him college basketball’s player of the year. In three varsity seasons he had averaged more than thirty points a game. But even more significant was the manner in which he scored. “We knew,” recalls ′65 Wolfpack star Pete Coker, “that a different style was being created in places like New York, Washington and Philly.” A new game was developing; segregation could no longer keep it secret. But Bradley represented a triumph, however perishable, of the old style.

Here, then, was a Great White Hope. And more. Bradley personified the ideal collegiate athlete. His game was modest, practiced, even Protestant. Not only did he belong to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but he also taught Sunday school. Bradley, for whom khakis and white shirts were a standard-issue uniform, had made an art of conformity. “We were mesmerized by [him],” says Les Robinson, one of Press’s seniors, recalling the Wolfpack’s deflating rout by the Ivy Leaguers, 66-48, including twenty-seven points from Bradley. “Press showed me film of the game the next day … We weren’t guarding him like we guarded other guys. That’s what killed Press, that we were in awe of him.”

With the exception of that loss, it had been a wonderful season, proof of what Press could do at a basketball school. He was
voted the ACC’s coach of the year, but the most convincing evidence of his aptitude—and his outrageous aspiration for changing the game—wasn’t an award but a performance. It had taken place earlier that season, over the Christmas break, at Reynolds Coliseum. Only a half-dozen guys were there, but Bill Bradley himself inspired only a fraction of the awe they felt that day.

The game was three-on-three. There were four N.C. State starters: Coker, Larry Lakins, Larry Worsley and Tommy Mattocks. There was Robinson. Pete made six. He was seventeen.

“We loved to play against Pete,” Lakins would recall. “He was the coach’s son. Coach worked our tails off. That was our only retaliation.” They bellied him. They shoved him. They hit him. “We were beating the s—out of him that day” says Coker.

But none of that punishment made a difference. Whatever Pete threw up came down through the net. There were jump shots, hook shots, set shots, bank shots, left- and righthanded shots, driving shots and shots that seemed to come all the way from Guilford County. The game went on for hours as each player took his turn trying to guard Pete. None of them could.