Pete played college ball when freshman were not allowed to play varsity in college though he started for his high school varsity as an eighth grader. Those who saw him play speak with incredulous glee as basketball has never seen the likes of the Pistol. He sold out the LSU " Cow Palace" for freshman games because he every game was an exhibition. He scored 50 in his first game. The LSU varsity arrived as the freshman game wound down and saw the packed house. Those numbers dwindled quickly with the close of the freshman game.
Two stories from Mark Kriegel's The Pistol. Pete, 11, was at a basketball camp where Lefty Dreisell, then Davidson's coach, instructed. "'I've never seen a player like that. He was the hardest working athlete I've ever been around. It'd be 110 degrees, and he'd be dribbling or throwing the ball against a cement wall hours at a time.'
'Pete,' Dreisell would say, 'you're working too hard.'
'I'm gonna be a millionaire, coach.' The boy kept going, throwing all those fancy passes against the wall.
'I ain't never seen Oscar Robertson throw nothing but a plain old chest pass,' said Dreisell.
'They don't pay you a million to throw a plain old chest pass.'"
LSU played Lou Carnesecca's St. John's team in the Rainbow Classic in Hawaii. Pete scored 40 points in the second half to St. John's 39. Lou Carnesecca called it "the best performance in basketball I had ever seen." Kriegel writes, "The passes were more memorable than the shots, as they were thrown in ways the city-slick Carnesecca had never even considered: blind, behind the head, off the wrist. Upon his return to the mainland, Carnesecca alerted the New York basketball establishment. 'You talk of Jerry West or Oscar Robertson or any of those great ones. Maravich is better.'"
Check out the passes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVnJeKX5OeY
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