College Hoops Legend Pete Maravich: A Cautionary—and Redemptive—Tale

It is that time of year. For basketball fans and those who are not, March Madness may be the best three weeks in sports. Women’s March Madness is peaking in popularity too, thanks to some amazing talent, including Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, who recently broke the NCAA college basketball scoring record held by former Louisiana State University hoops standout “Pistol” Pete Maravich.

As we celebrate the brilliant young athletes competing to win an NCAA title, it’s worth recalling Maravich’s story—how he lived and how he died. It’s a cautionary tale, one Maravich himself came to understand not long before his death at the age of 40. It’s also a redemptive tale, one worth sharing with fellow sports fans and friends.

In his three seasons at LSU in the late 1960s (NCAA rules prohibited freshman play), Maravich shattered every NCAA scoring record, averaging 44 points per game and ending his collegiate career with 3,667 points in just 83 games. And he did it without a shot clock or a 3-point line.

Curious as to how many points Maravich would have averaged if there had been a 3-point stripe, former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown reviewed old charts and discovered Maravich made an astonishing 13 3-point shots per game. “That would have given him a career average of 57 points per game under today’s rules,” basketball legend Bill Walton said. “That guy was unbelievable!”

It would have also increased his career point total to an unbelievable 4,731.

And unbelievable is precisely how to describe Maravich’s game. Take a look at a highlight reel and you’ll see a player not just ahead of his time. He practically invented modern basketball, from his looks (floppy socks and hair), to his dazzling dribbling skills and crossover moves, to his crowd-pleasing no-look passes and long-distance shooting. Maravich created his own brand long before marketing gurus discovered brands matter in sports.

“[Maravich] is one of the only players of his time who would have fared better in the contemporary game than when he actually played,” wrote Mark Kriegel, author of the Maravich biography Pistol. In the book, he quotes Magic Johnson, who in 1997 told Maravich’s two sons, “Your pops was the original. He was the real ‘Showtime.'”

Maravich entered the NBA with the richest contract for a rookie in league history: $1.6 million over five years. In his 10-year career, he was a five-time NBA All-Star, averaged 24.2 points, including a league-leading 31.1 points in 1976-1977 and a career-high 68-point performance against the New York Knicks that same season. Maravich was among the youngest players ever inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame.

It was everything Maravich had ever dreamed of—and spent his entire life preparing for—in terms of basketball successes. But just days before his death, he shared a deeply personal story, what Christians call their personal testimony, with a group of friends and strangers. He shared the parts of his life the press never covered, the parts he hid from the world.

“I was dedicated, possessed and obsessed by basketball,” Maravich began in his talk to an audience. “We lived two and a half miles outside of town, and I used to get the basketball and dribble all the way. I wouldn’t accept the ride. When I got a bicycle, I learned to dribble the basketball on my bicycle all the way, and it made it easier to get into town. And I got there quicker.”

His father was a basketball coach at Clemson during Maravich’s formative years (he would also coach his son at LSU) and planted the seeds in his son for a life playing basketball in college and for a living in the NBA. That pursuit would dominate his life and become his identity.

But below the surface lurked problems. “I had a beer for the first time at 14 years of age on the steps of the Methodist church in Central, South Carolina,” he recalled. “And I liked it. And all my friends drank just like I did, and they were alcoholics too. I enjoyed it a great deal because there’s a great pleasure in sin. Because if there wasn’t, nobody would do it.”

While at LSU, Maravich’s love of alcohol would lead to many misadventures. “I was in nine accidents in college and walked away from every one of them,” he said.

Maravich once told a story about how his drinking nearly got him killed. He was traveling long-distance for a basketball clinic and stopped in a small-town Pennsylvania bar to have a drink. He soon started a flirtatious conversation with an attractive woman sitting next to him when suddenly, out of nowhere, her very big boyfriend appeared. Maravich found himself, a highly recognized college star, in the middle of a mess. Looking to get out of it, he walked outside to find a pay phone to call a taxi when the mess he’d started in the bar followed him.

“The guy just literally hit me from behind and beat me up pretty good,” Maravich said. “As I laid there on that parking lot, that girl came up and I was all bloody, and she took a 25 automatic pistol and put it in my mouth and cocked it and said, ‘You’re a dead man, Pistol Pete, how about that?’ And I remember laying there and from the depths of my heart, I said, ‘Yeah, kill me because then I’ll have peace.'”

That peace was something he’d never find in his basketball career. Always, he was looking to fill a void in his life he couldn’t name.

“I had a tremendous amount of fame and adulation. I got thousands of letters from fans. ‘We idolize you, Pete. You’re my idol. You’re this, you’re that,'” Maravich said. “But I quit basketball, I walked away from it because I just got tired of it all. I got tired of my life. I was really lost.”

Maravich then did what few highly successful people do in public, let alone in private: He shared the depths of his own suffering.

I searched for meaning in my life. I got involved in all kinds of different things. I was involved in everything. But none of it satisfied me. They were just brief interludes of ego, gratification and satisfaction. What I was really searching for was life, because my life had no meaning at all.

It turns out he had an experience in the middle of the night that changed his life, one that many Americans who’ve experienced spiritual epiphanies understand. “I lay there in bed and couldn’t sleep and didn’t understand it,” he explained. “And all of a sudden, everything started coming up in my life, all the sin I’ve ever committed. It all came up.”

Maravich was just getting started.

It was 5:30 in the morning, and I laid there crying with two pillows back up in my back, with my wife next to me. And I was sitting there crying, and I said, ‘God, I’ve punched you, I’ve kicked you, I’ve cursed you, I’ve used your name in vain. I’ve mocked you, I’ve embarrassed you. I’ve done all those things. And yet do you really, I mean, will you really forgive me the things that I’ve done? And I was about to get over on the side of my bed and what happened to me happened to me. God spoke to me audibly right there in the room. He said, ‘Be strong and lift thine own heart,’ literally audibly. I looked around the room. I was in total shock. I’d never heard anything like that before. I reached over and I woke my wife, just shaking her like crazy. I said, ‘Jackie, did you hear what the Lord said to me? Did you hear that?’ And you must understand, Jackie had seen me go through all kinds of trips in my life, and she just looked at me in a dark haze and said, ‘Pete, you’ve really gone nuts,’ and she just went back to sleep.”

That night changed Maravich’s life. “I started reflecting back on my own life, at the hundreds of times I really shouldn’t be here, but I am here, and I’m here for one purpose,” he told the crowd. “Jesus Christ changed my life. Money didn’t do it. Women didn’t do it. Friends didn’t do it. Pastors didn’t do it. Wealth didn’t do it.

He ended his testimony with a simple and prophetic message. “I don’t have much time left,” he told the captivated audience, “and the time that I have I’m giving to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Just days later, Maravich’s new journey of faith brought him to California to tape a Christian radio show, and he was invited to play some pickup ball at a nearby church. Asked how he was feeling by a new friend, Maravich replied, “I feel great.” Those would be the last three words he’d ever speak. The newly born Christian collapsed on the floor moments later and died of heart failure on January 5, 1988, at the age of 40.

Doctors discovered Maravich was born without a left coronary artery. The right artery, burdened by the missing left, finally gave out. Experts believe it was a medical miracle that he lived as long as he did.

Maravich’s story is worth telling as we hover around our big and small screens watching talented young college athletes, men and women, play the sport they love. As we shower them with praise—praise that can approach hero worship—remember that underneath it all they’re people just like us. Young people with real-life problems—many of them spiritual—that records, trophies, money and fame can’t cure.