Playing with Purpose Collection by Mike Yorkey

Author:Mike Yorkey [YORKEY, MIKE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62029-042-2
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

LUKE RIDNOUR: HEIR TO PISTOL PETE

Luke Ridnour was in fourth grade when his schoolteacher announced a big assignment she wanted Luke and his classmates to complete in two weeks.

The task?

Write a three-page paper on a person of their choosing.

Luke shifted eagerly in his seat. He knew exactly whom he wanted to write about.

When school let out, Luke gathered his backpack and sprinted from the rear of Blaine Primary School, past the green tennis courts, to the Blaine High gymnasium. The elementary school, middle school, and high school were located on the same campus, so the distance was only a hundred yards. Luke knew his father—a PE teacher and the high school’s head basketball coach—would be in his office preparing for practice.

The Ridnour family lived in Blaine, Washington, a small town of four thousand situated in the very northwest corner of the continental United States. The border town is the terminus point for Interstate 5, the West Coast highway that links the Canadian border with the boundary of Mexico, 1,381 miles to the south. Blaine’s colorful past dates back to the Fraser River gold rush of 1858, which brought an influx of eager prospectors into the region.

When Luke bounced into Rob Ridnour’s office that afternoon, he told his dad about the assignment he had received that day.

“Who are you going to write about?” his father asked.

“Pistol Pete.”

Of course, Rob thought.

Ten-year-old Luke knew about Pistol Pete because he and the family had recently watched The Pistol: The Birth of a Legend, a video that had been released a few months earlier. The slice-of-life movie told the story about Pete Maravich’s eighth-grade year when he played on the varsity basketball team at Daniel High School in Central, South Carolina, despite being too young to attend the school.

Set in 1961, the film recounted how Pete’s teammates ostracized him because of his young age and because of his unworldly talent for shooting and whipping behind-the-back passes. The Pistol also explored the supportive father-son relationship between Pete and his father, Press Maravich, who was a former pro player and Clemson University coach.

“Well, you’ll have to do some research on Pistol Pete before you write your paper,” said Luke’s father, who knew the entire Maravich story. Rob was a middle-schooler in the late 1960s when Pete’s sleight-of-hand artistry left crowds gasping and sportswriters crooning about the new sensation from Louisiana State University. (You’ll read a lot more about Pete Maravich in the last chapter.)

Over the next couple of weeks, Luke read Maravich’s autobiography, Heir to a Dream, and also watched Pistol Pete’s Homework Basketball training videos, which mesmerized him. Luke had been dribbling a basketball since age three and was a very skilled player for his age, but Pete could make the basketball do things he’d never seen before. Pete’s effortless demonstration of ball-handling prowess captivated Luke’s young imagination.

Luke emulated everything Pistol Pete did on the Homework Basketball videos—from ball-handling exercises like the Square V dribble, the crossover dribble, and the through-the-legs dribble, to positioning his wrist properly so as to impart backspin and thus more control on the jump shot.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.