Pistol by Mark Kriegel

Author:Mark Kriegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

17. TAKE ME

Among the slights that continued to plague Pete through the off-season was the Rookie of the Year award. The balloting for 1971 resulted in a tie between Dave Cowens, Boston’s ferociously mobile center, and Geoff Petrie, a high-scoring marksman on the Portland Trail Blazers, an expansion team. That didn’t bother Pete, who was the first to admit that his own rookie season had fallen short of expectations. Rather, as the honor was bestowed by fellow players, it was the vote itself that hurt. For all his adjustment problems, Pete finished with an average of 23 points a game, 33 over the last month of the season. Still, he received only four of 192 votes.

In Pete’s mind, it was proof of the league-wide jealousy that ruined his first pro season. “I want to forget it,” he said. “I’ll be regarded as a second-year man, but I feel like a 10-year man.” The season might have aged him, but not his fans. The most dedicated were the youngest, their esteem and affection undeterred by the envy of his contemporaries or his own bouts of self-loathing.

Bob Kent would always recall how he transformed the country club in Sarasota, where Pete would stay at his condo. Somehow, word would spread that the Pistol was around. The private club was soon invaded, a makeshift spectators’ gallery forming before they had even left the practice range. “About 50 of them,” recalls Kent. “Young kids, just showed up out of nowhere.”

It was also in Sarasota that Pete was arrested after the season. He would plead no contest to drunk driving, a charge that earned him a $150 fine, one year probation, and stern words from Court of Record Judge Marvin E. Silverman. “You can forget about alcohol,” he warned, “or if you continue you will probably end your career around a telephone pole or become debilitated.”

The judge’s admonition, carried as wire service briefs in the Atlanta papers, didn’t receive much coverage. Having ended the season by shooting the Hawks into the playoffs, things were looking up for Pete. In July, the first annual Pete Maravich Basketball Camp would open on the grounds of a state college in California, Pennsylvania. The $125 tuition entitled campers to a week’s worth of instruction from Pete, Press, and Joe Pukach, plus a T-shirt and an official Pistol Pete basketball.

On July 23, the next to last day of the first session, word came that the Hawks had traded Walt Hazzard for Herm Gilliam. An excellent defender who could substitute for either guard, Gilliam would shore up a glaring weakness in the Hawks’ backcourt. What’s more, the move would allow Lou Hudson to return to his natural position, where he and Pete seemed a lock to become the league’s highest-scoring guard tandem. But most of all, the trade was the inevitable confirmation of what Hazzard had feared when Pete first signed. “I had two players in the same role. Both needed the ball to be effective,” says Guerin. “I had to move one or the other.

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