Fathers & Sons & Sports by Mike Lupica

heaven, and when you go inside, then the space closes again and you are there … definitely a wonderful place … Everyone you ever knew will be there.”
    The preacher asks Pete Maravich how he feels.
    “I feel great,” he says.
    In the next moment Pete begins to sway. Then his eyes roll back. The sound of his head hitting the floor will haunt those within earshot. Pete has begun to foam at the mouth. The preacher holds his head, trying to keep Pete from swallowing his tongue. He and another player administer CPR. Next, the EMS crew takes its turn. As the medics work, shooting jolts of electricity through his torso, the players kneel in prayer.
    God’s will be done, they say.
    Why now? they ask.
    Finally, what remains of Pete Maravich is taken away in a slow-moving ambulance. No siren.
    After returning from World War II, Press Maravich spent a season playing for the Pittsburgh Ironmen in what would be regarded as the inaugural year of the NBA. It was 1947, and the league wanted young men fresh out of college. There wasn’t much of a market for a thirty-three-year-old guard who had spent his best years as a Navy fighter pilot. Press’s preposterous idea that one could make a living playing basketball had run its course.
    But in the death of that dream lay the genesis of another. A friend would recall the night Press barged in at halftime of a semipro game—“one of those games where you’re lucky to get a chipped-ham sandwich and a fishbowl of beer”—and announced, “My wife had a boy.” This boy would do what his father could not; his body language would articulate the old man’s vanity, genius, ambition. Eventually he would surpass even his father’s imagination. On June 24, 1947, a Serbian Orthodox priest from St. Elijah the Prophet came to the Maravich home on Beech Wood Avenue in Aliquippa, Pa. The baby was baptized Peter Press.
    By 1950 Press was coaching basketball and teaching phys ed at Aliquippa High School, where he himself had been a hoops legend. A new sheriff had come to the blackboard jungle, confiscating 300 switchblades and paddling students who violated hisvaunted rules. “It was a piece of wood, three or four inches wide—[Press] was pretty loose with that paddle,” recalls Nick Lackovich, then a student at Aliquippa.
    Press had become a hard-ass. The dashing pilot with movie-star looks now wore his hair shorn to bristles. Detesting the duck’s ass haircut, Press formed the Crewcut Club. “If you didn’t belong, you couldn’t play ball for him,” says Pete Suder, one of his players.
    “Press would run us like crazy, up and down the steps, around the gymnasium,” said Mike Ditka, then an underclassman, who’d go on to fame as an NFL tight end and the coach of the Chicago Bears. “He’d put that steely look on you, and you knew he meant business.”
    Not every player saw Press as a mere authority figure. Joe Lee, his star point guard, recalls him with deep affection. Lee was black, as was half the Aliquippa team by then. His mother had passed away, and even by Aliquippa standards Joe Lee was poor. Press would often slip him lunch tickets. More than that, though, Press showed a level of concern Lee had not seen in other adults.
    Press took his team all the way to Madison Square Garden in New York City because he wanted the boys to see firsthand that their game had a capital and, within it, a cathedral. On Sundays during the season he would drive them to Duquesne University to watch the varsity practice. On the way he would listen to the black radio station. Press knew all the words to the spirituals.
    “That’s your heritage,” he told Lee, who found Press to be a surprisingly good listener. Once, Lee asked his coach why Aliquippa had no black cheerleaders. Press thought about it for a while. “You’re right,” he said. “There should be.”
    Press’s Aliquippa teams also had their own mascot. He had sad, soft eyes and a big head mounted on a wispy frame. He was tiny but