The Pistol

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 10 national championships and coach 19 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."