Fathers & Sons & Sports by Mike Lupica Page B

he was the one I would go to for analysis on several aspects of the game.” At UCLA, Wooden would become the most successful coach in basketball history. He would win ten national championships and coach nineteen first-team All-Americas. Press never got to work with that kind of talent. He had only Pete.
    Wooden first saw Pete around 1960. The boy was performing the dribbling and ball-handling routines that would become so famous. “I saw him do things at Campbell I didn’t think anybody could do,” Wooden says flatly. In assessing the boy’s talent and dexterity the coach compares him to some of the great black players he had known, going back to his days as an All-America at Purdue: “I had the great pleasure of playing against the New York Rens many times. They had some of the best ballplayers you could ever see. I watched the Globetrotters with Goose Tatum and Marques Haynes. None of them could do more than Pete. Pete Maravich could do more with a basketball than anybody I have ever seen.”
    Then again, Wooden felt obligated to ask his enigmatic friend, To what end? All those tricks, what did they accomplish? “It’s crazy” he said. “How many hours does it take to learn all that? Wouldn’t he be better off learning proper footwork for defense?”
    “You don’t understand,” said Press. “He’s going to be the first million-dollar pro.”
    The gloves and blindfolds were just the beginning. There were so many other drills. Pete learned the fundamentals, of course: dribbling with either hand, chest pass, bounce pass, foul shots, jump shots and hook shots. But because the basics could become monotonous, Press invented more elaborate regimens. Most of these moves were anathema to coaches of the day, but they kept Pete’s interest alive. Often the ideas came to Press in his sleep.
    In all there were about forty drills and exercises—Homework Basketball, they would come to be called. Press and Pete gave each of them a name, such as Pretzel, Ricochet, Crab Catch, Flap Jack, or Punching Bag. Pete would crouch, his arms moving in a figure-eight motion between and around his legs so rapidly that the ball looked as if it were suspended beneath him. He would bounce the ball two-handed between his splayed legs, catch it behind his back and then fire it forward, completing the pendulum motion. He would transform himself into a kind of human gyroscope. The beat of the ball as he dribbled it just inches from the ground approximated the staccato sound of a boxing speed bag. Perfected at Pete’s pace, the drills had an almost hypnotic effect.
    Pete would dribble the two miles between his home and College Avenue, the town’s main drag. He’d dribble while riding his bicycle—alternating hands. One day Press told his son to get in the car and bring his ball. Pete did as he was told. Then Press instructed him to lie across the backseat with the passenger-side door open. Pete balked. He said, “What are people going to think?”
    “Just do it,” said Press.
    Pete did it. He dribbled as his father drove, learning to control the ball at different speeds.
    He’d also dribble in the movie theater, keeping time on the carpeted aisle through a double feature. He’d dribble in Martin’s Drugstore, where he once won a five-dollar bet by spinning the ball on his fingertips for an hour straight.
    Years later, Maravich would famously declare his childhood self “a basketball android.” But androids don’t think or feel, and the ball was an appendage not merely of his body but of his psyche as well. He went to bed with it, lulling himself to sleep while practicing his shooting form. He would repeat the words “fingertip control, backspin, follow-through” like a mantra. For Pete, there was comfort in repetition. Still, he was a light sleeper, as was his father. Once Pete awoke in a driving rainstorm. “I forced open my bedroom window and crawled out into the downpour,” he would recall in his autobiography. “In my