Fathers & Sons & Sports (9 page)

There was a smile on his face. He reached over and felt the ice pack to make sure it was still cold. “You hate it? You hate football?”

“Yes, I hate football.”

He was quiet for a time, and I looked at him in the light of the dashboard. “You want to quit?” he asked. “Yes, sir.”

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. “Well, if that’s what you want you can call Coach Guidry and Coach Firman in
the morning and let them know. When we get home, you can tell your mother. You can tell your brothers and sisters too.”

“I didn’t say I was going to quit. I said I
wanted
to quit.”

“Then I’m mistaken?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You won’t need to call your coaches?”

“No.”

“No what?” “No, sir.”

He parked in front of the house and killed the engine. I could see Mama at the kitchen window and behind her Donna on the phone. A year ahead of me at school, Donna was a cheerleader and one of the most popular girls in her class. No one was prouder than she of my place on the team. Now Bobby entered the picture, standing on his tiptoes to look out the window and see who’d pulled up out front. He vanished and a few seconds later I spotted him at the door, waiting to find out how practice went, to check my arms and legs for new cuts and bruises, evidence of collisions with teammates.

At that moment I understood something that I was sure my father had realized long ago. There comes a time when quitting stops being an option, when quitting means quitting on those who are counting on you and quitting on your destiny, and although I was still groggy from Big Hamm’s hit, I understood this with absolute clarity. It was too late now to quit the team. It would always be too late.
My father never wore a hat in the house. He took his cap off. “I don’t want to make you think you have to play,” he said. “Everybody gets knocked down. Not everybody gets up, though. Today you got up.”

“You don’t need to tell me that. It would be better if you didn’t say anything.” I pushed the door open and stepped outside. “What’d Mama cook for supper?”

“Mixed meat and rice and gravy.”

“I hate mixed meat.”

“When you’re done eating, you’re going to thank her and tell her how good it was. You hear me, boy?” “Yes, sir.”

He took his time walking around to my side of the truck, and together we started under the pine trees for the house. I wasn’t feeling any better, so he held me by the elbow and made sure I didn’t drift.

can remember being a kid back in Mobile sitting on the back porch when an airplane flew over. I told my father when I grew up I was going to be a pilot. You know what he said? He said, “Ain’t no colored pilots.”

So I told him I’d be a ballplayer. And he said, “Ain’t no colored ballplayers.”

There were a lot of things blacks couldn’t be back then. There weren’t any colored
pilots. There weren’t any colored ballplayers in the major leagues. So it was hard to have those dreams.

Then Jackie came with the Brooklyn Dodgers to Mobile for an exhibition game in 1948. I went to hear him talk to a crowd in front of a drugstore. I skipped school to meet Jackie Robinson. If it were on videotape, you’d probably see me standing there with my mouth wide open.

I don’t remember what he said. It didn’t matter what he said.
He was standing there
.

My father took me to see Jackie play in that exhibition game. After that day, he never told me ever again that I couldn’t be a ballplayer.

I was allowed to dream after that.

hey cannot see him, this slouching, ashen-faced man in their midst. To their oblivious eyes, he remains what he once was, unblemished by the years, much as he appeared on his first bubblegum card: a halo of hair, the fresh-faced, sad-eyed wizard cradling a grainy leather orb.

One of the regulars, a CPA, retrieved that very card last night. He found it in a shoe box, tucked away with an old train set and a wooden fort in a crawl space in his parents’ basement.
He brought it to the gym this morning to have it signed or, in some way, sanctified. The 1970 rookie card of Pete Maravich, to whom the Atlanta Hawks had just awarded the richest contract in professional sports, takes note of the outstanding facts: that Maravich was coached by his father, under whose tutelage he became “the most prolific scorer in the history of college basketball.” Other salient statistics are provided in agate type: an average of 44.2 points a game, a total of 3,667 (this when nobody else had scored 3,000). The records will never be broken. Still, they are woefully inadequate in measuring the contours of the Maravich myth.

Maravich wasn’t an archetype; he was several: child prodigy, prodigal son, his father’s payment in a Faustian bargain. He was a creature of contradictions, ever alone: the white hope of a black sport, a virtuoso stuck in an ensemble, an exuberant showman who couldn’t look you in the eye, a vegetarian boozer, the athlete who lived like a rock star, a profligate, suicidal genius saved by Jesus Christ.

Still, it’s his caricature that evokes unqualified affection in men of a certain age. Pistol Pete, they called him. The Pistol is another relic of the ′70s, not unlike bongs and Bruce Lee flicks: the skinny kid who mesmerized the basketball world with Globetrotters moves, floppy socks and great hair.

But above all, Pistol Pete was his father’s vision, built to the old man’s exacting specifications. And the game now in progress is a dance in deference to that patrimony. The squeak of
sneakers against the floor produces an odd chirping melody. Then there’s another rhythm, the respiration of men well past their prime, an assortment of white guys: the accountant, insurance salesmen, financial planners, even a preacher. “Just a bunch of duffers,” recalls one.

“Fat old men,” smirks another.

But they play as if Pistol Pete, or what’s left of him, could summon the boys they once were. They acknowledge him with a superfluous flourish, an extra behind-the-back pass or an unnecessary between-the-legs dribble. The preacher, a gentle-voiced man of great renown in evangelical circles, reveals a feverishly competitive nature. After hitting a shot, he bellows, “You get that on camera?”

The Parker Gymnasium at the First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena could pass for a good high school gym—a clean, cavernous space with arching wooden rafters and large windows. At dawn, its halogen lamps give off a glow to the outside world, a beacon to spirits searching for a game. As a boy, Maravich would have considered this a kind of heaven. Now it’s a way station of sorts.

Pete begins wearily. He hasn’t played in a long time, and he moves at one-quarter speed, if that. He does not jump; he shuffles. The ball seems like a shot-put shot in his hands; on his second attempt at the basket it barely touches the front of the rim. But gradually, as the pace of his breath melds with that of the others and he starts to sweat, Pete Maravich recovers something
in himself. “The glimpse of greatness was in his ball handling,” the accountant will recall. “There would just be some kind of dribble or something. Just the quickness of the beat.” There was genius in that unexpected cadence, a measure of music. The Pistol’s talent, now as then, was musical. He was as fluent as Mozart, but he was sold like Elvis, the white guy performing in a black idiom. And for a time, he was mad like Elvis too.

Now the accountant tries to blow past Pete with a nifty spin move. Pete tells him not to believe his own hype. The Pistol wears an easy grin. Moments later he banks one in.

That smile again. What a goof.

The game ends. Guys trudge off to the water fountain. Pete continues to shoot around. And now you wonder what he sees.

Is it as he used to imagine? “The space will open up,” he once said. “Beyond that will be heaven, and when you go inside, then the space closes again and you are there … definitely a wonderful place … Everyone you ever knew will be there.”

The preacher asks Pete Maravich how he feels.

“I feel great,” he says.

In the next moment Pete begins to sway. Then his eyes roll back. The sound of his head hitting the floor will haunt those within earshot. Pete has begun to foam at the mouth. The preacher holds his head, trying to keep Pete from swallowing his tongue. He and another player administer CPR. Next, the EMS crew takes its turn. As the medics work, shooting jolts of electricity through his torso, the players kneel in prayer.

God’s will be done, they say.

Why now? they ask.

Finally, what remains of Pete Maravich is taken away in a slow-moving ambulance. No siren.

After returning from World War II, Press Maravich spent a season playing for the Pittsburgh Ironmen in what would be regarded as the inaugural year of the NBA. It was 1947, and the league wanted young men fresh out of college. There wasn’t much of a market for a thirty-three-year-old guard who had spent his best years as a Navy fighter pilot. Press’s preposterous idea that one could make a living playing basketball had run its course.

But in the death of that dream lay the genesis of another. A friend would recall the night Press barged in at halftime of a semipro game—“one of those games where you’re lucky to get a chipped-ham sandwich and a fishbowl of beer”—and announced, “My wife had a boy.” This boy would do what his father could not; his body language would articulate the old man’s vanity, genius, ambition. Eventually he would surpass even his father’s imagination. On June 24, 1947, a Serbian Orthodox priest from St. Elijah the Prophet came to the Maravich home on Beech Wood Avenue in Aliquippa, Pa. The baby was baptized Peter Press.