March 26, 2024 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, just days before his death, the 40 year-old Maravich shared his story to a small audience about his life pursuing success and fame—until that pursuit brought him to his knees. This is the story of him coming to Christ.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is our American Stories. Pistol Pete Maravich is widely
regarded as one of the greatest players in basketball history,
also one of my personal hoops heroes. Marrivich starred in
college with the LSU Tigers while playing for his father,
head coach Press Marivich, with thirty six hundred and sixty
seven points, and he averaged forty four point two points
(00:34):
per game. All of his accomplishments were achieved before the
adoption of the three point shot and the shot clock,
and despite being able to play varsity as a freshman.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Under the NCAA rules. That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Marrivig played ten years in the NBA and is considered
by many to be the best.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Ball handler of all time.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Just days before his death on January eighth, nineteen eighty eight,
the forty year old Pistol Pete spoke to guests who
gathered near the pool side of Jimmy Walker's house an
NBA All Star. We'd like to thank Vision Video for
giving us special access to this rare, bonus footage you
were about to hear from their fantastic uplifting movie The
Pistol The Birth of a Legend. Three to g Here's
(01:18):
Pete Maravich looking back on his life just days before
his death.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I grew up in Clemson, South Carolina. When I was
four years old, the only thing I ever knew was basketball.
By the time I was five years old, I was
already playing organized basketball. My parents baited me into the game,
that never forced me in. When I was seven years old,
my dad came to me and he says, Pete, he says,
I don't have any money to send you to college.
You're gonna have to get a scholarship. And if you
(01:43):
get a scholarship, they'll pay your way. Only make twenty
nine hundred dollars a year, and that's just not going
to pay your way by the time you get there.
And if you're good enough, Pete, you might even make
it to the pro basketball. That's where the greatest players play,
and there's so few. And if you get there, you
might play on a team that wins a world championship
and you'll get a big diamond ring, Pete, so big,
and it has on their World champions and you'll be
(02:04):
declared as the rest of the team, one of the
greatest at that particular time. Not only that, Pete, you'll
be able to make money. They'll pay you for doing it.
They'll pay you for playing something that you enjoy doing well.
From that day, I decided to commit my life totally
to basketball. I was dedicated, possessed, and obsessed by I
(02:25):
was so dedicated to it. I'll tell you some of
the things I used to do. We lived two and
a half miles outside of town in Clemson, South Carolina,
and I used to get the basketball and I'd dribble
in all the way. I would not accept the ride.
I'd dribble in with my right hand and dribble back
home with my left hand, five miles a day to
the gym, where i'd play eight to ten hours a day.
When I finally got a bicycle when I was about
eleven years old. Ten eleven years old, I learned to
(02:46):
dribble the basketball on my bicycle all the way. And
it made a lot easier to get into town too,
and I got there quicker, and I dribbled the ball
by riding the bicycle. It got so bizarre that my
dad came to me one day and he says, Pete,
come on, get your basketball on us. Go in the car.
So where are we going? He says, I'll tell you
when we get there. He went over and he went
on this specific highway and there weren't many cars there,
(03:07):
and he said, now look, I want you to get
in the back. See stick yourself out that back window there,
and you start dribbling the ball. I'm gonna drive at
various speeds. I want to see if you can really
control this then, And so I did that, and he'd
go five, ten, fifteen miles an hour, and twenty miles
an hour. And of course, if you realize when you're
(03:29):
trying to drive a basketballt of a car or on
a bicycle, you got to throw it away out in
front because he's going and it's coming back. It really
comes back quick, along with a lot of rocks. And
to see the faces on the people that just happened
to be driving by was something in itself. It really was.
I used to tick the basketball to bed with me.
(03:50):
I slept with a basketball till I was about thirteen
years old. I would get in bed and I'd lay
in the bed for one hour before I ever went
to sleep, and I would repeat three things fingertip control
backspin for through fingertip control backsmen followed through as I
released it laying down. I was completely possessed by the game.
I used to go around my house blindfolded, dribbling the
ball because I knew whe everything was, of course, through
(04:11):
the dismay of my mother. Sometimes I didn't, and I
knew how to drill the ball very fast. Out of
the house, I used to get the basketball and I
would dribble out in thunderstorms, lightning, everything else you couldn't
even see. I used to sneak out of my back window.
I'd go to this little spot where it was a
mud hole. It was kind of a real hard mud,
and I'd start drilling the balls of mud and everything
(04:32):
splashed up on me and literally scared to death because
of the thunder and lightning. Because I felt like if
I could dribble in that mud and that water and
everything else control it, I could certainly do it on
a court when someone was darding me. See. I was
so committed to the game of basketball. In fact, from
the time I was five years old I was seventeen
years old. I played over twenty thousand hours of basketball.
And the March Readers Digest they had a story in
(04:54):
there about television and how it affects young people's minds
or any person. There wasn't four against television says how
it affects one's mind, and it said that the average
person by the time he's twenty years old sees twenty
thousand hours of television. And I kind of paralleled that
with my life, twenty thousand hours of people watching television.
I've spent twenty thousand hours of hard sweat playing the
(05:16):
game of basketball. When I was twelve years old, it
was my first time I ever played in a regular
game for junior varsity. I made the junior varsity when
I was twelve, and I was at thirteen, I started
on my high school team and played five years of
high school basketball. I was four foot nine and a
half and at that time, at twelve, a reporter came
up to me after the game, and I used to
(05:37):
shoot the basketball from down here because I was too
weak to shoot it from up here, and so I
used to take the ball and take it and release
it like this. And this reporter saw him and he says,
what looks like this guy is drawing a pistol, And
he wrote that up and that name is stick Stuck.
Ever since I just threw that in, I know that
doesn't interest you at all. But I just wanted to
say say that. But he asked me after the game.
(05:59):
He came up an inner reviewed me. I was my
first interview I ever had, and I wish that had
been my last. But he said, what are you going
to do when you grow up, crystol Pete? And I said, well,
I'm gonna play pro basketball. I'm going to be on
a team that wins a world championship, get a diamond ring,
and make a million dollars. And he literally fell off
his chair with laughter, and I said, what are you
laughing about it? He said, a million dollars. They don't
(06:20):
make that kind of money. This was in the fifties,
and he was right. But I just felt like at
some point in my life I would My early church
life was absolutely probably zero. I was not raised in
a Christian home. I was raised in a church home.
I was raised with telling Pete, you got to go
to church. It's good to go to church. You gotta
(06:41):
you need church. But when I got into church said,
I didn't never hear anything. I never heard who Jesus
Christ was when I was young because I didn't want
to hear. See I was sitting there and literally count
ticks in my head one, two, three up to a minute,
and that would go for an hour until I got
out of there. I felt that if I was in
this church for an hour, or somebody in Philadelphia, La
Boston or New York was playing basketball, and when it
(07:02):
came down to get that scholarship, I would not get it. See,
and I progressed on into my teenage years. When I
was fourteen years old, was the first time I ever
had my first taste of alcohol. I had a beer
at fourteen years of age on the steps of the
Methodist church in Clemson, South Carolina, and I liked it.
(07:25):
I really did like it. I liked it a lot.
If there's something I can tell you young people here tonight,
it's this, don't ever take that first drink, and don't
ever take that first drug, because it'll never be your
last and it will lead to destruction. Because that's literally
what almost happened in my own life. Ninety eight percent
of all people in jails today started with that first drink.
(07:45):
Eighty five percent of over five hundred thousand people in
correctional institutions today committed their crimes while only the influence
of a mind altering substance. Drugs are alcohol, And all
of a sudden, this trem in, this commitment that I
had and everything else, I kind of went down the drain.
I didn't have it anymore. And I'd played so much
(08:07):
up until that time when I was fourteen fifteen going
to sixteen seventeen, but all of a sudden, I had
time on the weekends to do other things. I saw
the opposite sex for the first time in life. You see,
I was completely obsessed with basketball. I didn't do whatever
other people did. My god was basketball. Their god was sex, alcohol,
and whatever else. But I didn't see any of that
(08:29):
until I was fourteen. And then my eyes opened up
and I enjoyed it and I started getting into it.
And then that toe hold became a foothold, and the
foothold became a stronghold, and that stronghold became an entire possession.
I'm not scared to tell you here. I was an alcoholic.
I can't get people to write that up because I've
never been to a clinic or anything. And all my
friends drank just like I did, and they were alcoholics too.
(08:52):
I enjoyed it a great deal because there's a great
pleasure in sin. There's a lot of pleasure in it
because there wasn't nobody would do it. When I was
eighteen years old, I was asked to go out to
take Arrowhead out in San Bernardino, California, to a campus
crusade for christ. They asked me to come out there
and do what you just saw here what was called showtime.
They said, would you come out here and do your
(09:12):
clinic Pete? I said, well, sure, that'd be great. I'll
bring one of my friends and we'll just come out
there California. I've never been there. It'll be fun. So
we got in the car and I was just reaching
my eighteenth birthday, literally right before what was to be
called the pistol pe Era in Southeastern Conference basketball.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
And you're listening to Pistol Pete Merriviage reflecting on his
own life, his days before his tragic death and a
premature death at that. When we come back more of
it's remarkable talk by Pistol Pete. Here are our American stories,
(10:09):
and we're back with our American stories and we're to
continue with Pistol Pete Maravich, one of the old time
greatest players and an Idol of mine. I can't tell
you how many hours I spent watching him on television
the rare times he would come on, and then trying
to copy every single thing he did.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Let's go back to Pistol, Pete.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
And so I drove out there, and we partied all
the way out, and we had fun, and we chased girls,
and we just were in every bar we could find
and everything else. Took us three or four days to
get out there. And as I drove up on this campus,
I noticed that there were people sitting around praying and
holding hands under trees and things of this nature. And
I became very embarrassed. I didn't want any part of that,
(10:54):
and I told my friend, I said, hey, we got
to him. Get out of here. I'm gonna do this
clinic and get out of these people are nuts, I mean,
where are they smoking? And put that beer down. We
don't want to, you know, we don't want to see
him with this, with this beer. So I checked into
this place and it was for three days, and I
asked him what am I supposed to do my clinic?
And they said, well, Pete, we're not sure yet, but
if you just bear with us, we're gonna have you
(11:14):
over here with this group and I said, what do
you mean. What am I gonna do is it's well nothing,
there's nothing to do. We'll just put you here, would
you would be all right? And I said okay. So
I stayed with this group. My friend went with another group.
Now for three days, I finally heard who Jesus Christ was.
I wasn't concerned about that. To me, it was just
a story. It was a story. It was nice, that's nice.
(11:36):
But after the end of three days there there was
no impact on my life. We went out to the beach.
Bill Battle, who was an All American football player and
with a bicep as large as my thigh, said we're
going out to the beach. I'm taking this group with me.
We're gonna witness for Christ. And I said, what do
you mean witness? What is this?
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Bill?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Do you mean witness? What were you talking about? He's
just come along, Pete. We just want to we just
want to show what we do here. So I went
along with him and we went out on the beaches
out there in California beaches, and he goes up to
the worst looking group. This is back during the sixties.
This is the most revolutionary time, the rebellious time in
(12:16):
our history. Probably this led to so much of the
rebellion today. And yet he went up to the worst
looking group. Guy had tattoos, all of his own hair down,
he was smoking a joint, drinking. There was about four
or five of them. They were mean looking, ugly, they
didn't smell very good everything, And I stayed wait in
the background. But you know, the Lord has a way
to use people. You see. He went up to this
(12:37):
guy who was the meanest looking guy right behind his head.
He says, you know something, I would really like to
share something with you folks. And this guy was literally
gonna turn around and punch him. I know, because he
turned around. He said, look, go right ahead, because that
ad by sat was right in his face. Now, if
anything impressed me, it was that that did impress me.
(13:00):
I said, Wow, how God gets people's attention, It's amazing.
So they witnessed, and I don't remember. I think some
of them left right away. They said, oh, you Jesus
freaks and all this kind of stuff, and I just
kind of turned my head. I didn't want to know
part of it. At the end of three days, there
was a there was a thousand kids, and I was
part of it. And Bill Bright, who's founder of the
Camp scru SAD, gave a message much like Billy Graham
had an invitation for people to come receive Christ. Then
(13:22):
he had him to come publicly and receive him. And behold,
my friend was sitting next to me. He got up.
I said, what are you doing? Says Pete. I don't
know what to tell you. I really don't know what
to tell you. I've just received Christ, end of my life.
I said, ken, hey man, KEN'I you something you ate
or something something? And I grabbed him by the arm.
(13:44):
I literally tried to steal away his salvation. I said,
don't go up there. The embarrassing. Then I remember saying that,
and he pulled away and he went up there. He says,
you don't understand. I said, no, I don't. And he
walked up there. And I remember sitting there and saying, well,
you're not gonna get me. God, I'm gonna play Pro
basketball World championship team and make a million dollars. Boy,
that's what I want in life. But you know, as
I've reflected over that time, how many times I've cried
(14:10):
and wish that I'd received Christ in my life. Then
you know why, because God had sent me there for
a purpose, not to do a clinic. I never did one.
Nobody even asked me. But He put me there for
one reason. Pete, come home now, Come home now, because
you're about to embark on a tremendous amount of personal
(14:32):
tragedy and destruction in your life. And it doesn't have
to be that way, but you can choose that way,
and you don't have to. And I want on into college,
and I did a lot of things in college. I've
set something like around fifty basketball records from high school, college,
and pro The amount of trophies and awards and plaques
(14:53):
that I have, the amount of honorary mayorships and keys
the cities that I have, except the time when I
go to those cities and try to get the keys,
they don't ever give them to me. It could literally, really,
I'm could go around this entire pool area. Now. I
have a trophy from nineteen seventy two in a box.
It's never been opening, six foot five inches and six
(15:14):
foot five one quarter inch tall, the exact height of me.
I've never seen it. I've never opened the box, but
they're all stored away. They don't really do anything for me.
But I've had all those trophies, awards, I've had popularity,
I've had fame. I had a tremendous amount of fame
back in the sixties, tremendous amount of popularity everywhere when
(15:34):
we played before over right at a million people in
college in three years, and that's pretty good. And I
had all this adulation and people wrote me. I got
thousands of letters a week from fans. We idolize you,
Pete Merriwich, You're my idol, You're this, You're that. And
I wasn't a role model at all, not at all.
(15:55):
I wasn't a role model for young people at all. None. Zero.
And then after my college and I was All American
and I was uh a leading s I'm the leading
scorer of all time in college basketball. It'll be broken someday,
but I'm the leading scorer. I averaged over forty four
points a game for a three year period. I just
(16:19):
hold just all kinds of records. My high school records
are still hell. I still hold the record for the
All Star game. I scored forty seven points in the
East West High School All Star Game back in nineteen
sixty five, but still there. It hasn't been broken, and
some great players have come through there. And then I
went into pros, you see. And I had a lot
of fun in college, a lot of fun, too much fun.
(16:40):
In fact, I was in nine accidents in college and
walked away from every one of them. Not only that.
One time I was coming home from putting on a
clinic in Pennsylvania and I drove seven hundred miles and
I stopped for the night. It was a halfway point.
I went down to a local pub, ocal little bar,
sat in there and had about two beers, and a
(17:01):
young lady came over to me. I said, how are you, sweetie?
I said, I'm just fine. He said, you mind if
I sit down here? I said, well, suit yourself. So
I was sitting there. I wasn't there at two minutes
when a guy came up to me, about six foot five,
about two hundred and seventy pounds, said what are you
(17:21):
doing with my girl? He said, I'm not doing anything
with her, sir. I'm just sitting here. I'm just having
this cold beer here. I don't want any trouble. I didn't,
you know, and he started pushing me. He started hitting
me in the shoulder. And I grew up a kid
knowing that you never backed down from anybody. I don't
care what the odds. I wasn't going back down. And
(17:42):
I told him to get his hands off of me
and all this, and before long, one thing led to
another and they said, y'all get out of here. If
you're gonna fight. He said, yeah, come on, So I
said fine. So I got up and I went out quickly,
and I made myself through the crowd and I got
outside and I stayed behind the door, and I was
really gonna get this guy when he came out, but
he never came. Of course, I didn't wait there about
(18:04):
two minutes and he didn't come, you see, And so
I said, I'm better get out of here, and I
left and I walked out in the parking lot. As
I was walking in the back of the parking lot,
I tore it up. I saw a telephone booth where
I was gonna call a taxi to go to a
holiday in where I was staying. As I was walking out,
(18:24):
I heard this guy came out and yelled to me,
and little did I know that another guy had gone
around the other side and they both had blackjacks, which
I didn't know. And the guy. The old story is
that the guy just literally they just hit me from
behind and beat me up pretty good. As I laid
there on that parking lot that night, that girl came
(18:45):
up and I was all blood and she took a
twenty five automatic pistol and she put it in my
mouth and cocked it and she said, you're a dead man,
Pistol Pete, how about that? And I remember laying there
and from the so my heart, I said, yeah, kill me,
because then I'll have peace.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And you've been listening to Pistol Pete Marrivich. And he
gave this speech not long before his death, indeed, just
days before his premature death. More of Pistol Pete Marrivich's
life story, his last story that he told in front
of a large audience here on our American Stories, and
(19:40):
we continue with our American stories and with Pistol Pete
Marrivich's story, one of the last ones he told in
his life, this one just days before he passed.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
But you know something, there's a god up there that
overruled Satan that night, too, overruled him. And I know that.
And I went into the pros and I signed the
largest contract in the history of sports, not basketball sports
at the time, it made the Guinness Book of Records.
It lasted thirty days. They started pouring out a lot
(20:15):
of big money back then. And I searched all through
the nineteen seventies for what meaning there was to life.
I had to know the meaning, what was the meaning?
And I got involved in all kinds of different things.
I was involved in yoga and TM. I was involved
very heavily in uifology, philosophy. I was involved in different religions,
(20:38):
Hinduism especially. I was involved in everything. But the thing
about it is, none of it really satisfied me. They
were just all brief interludes of satisfaction, much like my
life was brief interludes of just ego, gratification, satisfaction and
all through that time. In fact, in nineteen seventy six,
I decided I was going to live to be one
hundred and fifty years old. And I got very heavily
(21:00):
and a nutrition because I was into Hinduism and I
was into the karma and all these other types of situations.
And I became a vegetarian and then a fruitarian and
a macrobotic and a mini dose and a MAXI dosed
on vitamins, and I fasted twenty five days, and I
sat in all kinds of different positions, and I was
searching for life, for friends. I was really searching for
(21:21):
life because my life had no meaning at all. My
life had absolutely no meaning at all. And at each
one of these stops, each one of these stops, I
had to have something else. They just didn't satisfy me.
In nineteen eighty I quit basketball. I just quit. I
walked away from it because of immaturity and because of
the fact that I just got tired of it all.
(21:42):
I just got tired of it. I got tired of
my life, and I became a recluse. For about two years,
I sat in my home. We had our first son, Jason.
He was only one and a half years old, and
I was set there for hours at a time trying
to teach him seven and eight year old puzzles. Because
I wanted my son, Jason to have what I didn't.
I wanted him to have a high intellect. See, I
want him to be an intelligent person. I want him
(22:05):
to be able to go to the right parties and
say the right things. I thought that was important. I
really thought that was important. And so my wife used
to come to me and she says, Pete, you really
need to go see someone because you're really flipping out.
I said, what do you mean? She says, you have
left this house in two weeks. I said, yeah, I know.
I brought to the garage and stuff, but I was
(22:26):
really lost. And in nineteen eighty two, I went to
bed one night. It was like any other night, Pete
Marriviage had all the material things you could want. I
used to carry around five thousand dollars in my pocket
and cash in twenties. I never cared any change. But
(22:53):
I had all that stuff, and none of it ever satisfied.
I mean not the money, not the wealth, not the success.
And I laid there in bed and I couldn't sleep,
and I didn't understand it. And all of a sudden,
everything started coming up in my life, all the sin,
every sin I'd ever committed, and I've committed many. Let
me tell you many sins in my life, and there's
(23:14):
nothing hidden. And I'm not airing all my dirty laundry here.
I'm not trying to. I don't want to give satan
any credit. But I can tell you this. It all
came up. And it also came up when I was eighteen,
when I could have received Christ. And it was five
thirty in the morning now, and I laid there crying
with two pillars back up in my back, with an
unsaved wife next to me. And I was sitting there crying,
(23:38):
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
(24:04):
about to get over on the side of my bed.
And what happened to me doesn't happen everybody. And what
happened to me happened to me. And that's why I'm
talking out of my shoes. Many people don't believe it.
Anything Odians don't believe it. Many people, many the Odians,
don't believe in God. God spoke to me audibly right
there in the room, and he said be strong and
(24:27):
left eye own heart, literally audibly. I looked around the room.
I was in total shock. I'd never heard anything like
that before, and I was so shocked that I reached
over and I woke my wife, just shaking her like crazy.
I said, Jackie, did you Jackie, did you hear what
the Lord said to me? Did you hear that? You
must understand Jackie had seen me go through all kinds
of trips in my life. And she just kind of
(24:50):
looked at me in a dark haze that it was
at five thirty in the morning and said, Pete, you
really have gun that's having you and she just went
back to sleep. You know. I was sitting there and
all of a sudden, about a year and a half ago, Uh,
my wife and I went through a terrible tragedy. I
was restoring an old Victorian home and I had just
(25:11):
gotten back from China. Some friends came over and when
we were showing them the house, uh, we'd gone upstairs
with them and there was no banishter. So we told
our kids to, you know, stay away from the stairs,
just gonna be here second we were showing them, and
as careful as we are with our children, I'd forgotten
that they didn't even really think about it. I'd built
in a little closet and upstairs room and in that
(25:31):
closet was an air conditioning vent, an old one that
had been stuffed up with insulation. And uh uh it
really happened very quickly. Uh. They both kind of ran
in there. We didn't see him, and all of a sudden,
it was like that. My wife heard a a very
loud thumped and when she uh went back there, Uh, Joshua,
(25:53):
my little two year old at the time, wasn't there. Uh.
I just kind of knew what happened, and I dashed
down the floor and I went in there, and I
saw my little son lying there in a pool of blood.
He had landed an impact had hit him directly in
the eye is where he hit on this part of
(26:14):
his head. He was in a semi conscious state, taken
CPR in the past, and my wife never did see him.
I'm glad she didn't because it's something I'll live with
on my life. But anyway, I picked him up and
he was just a lifeless little body. His heartbeat was
so faint that I didn't know whether he was going
(26:34):
to make it or not. But I rushed him to
the hospital. I got him there and there wasn't even
any doctors there at this particular hospital. The guy that
was supposed to be. There was off who was in
lunch or something like that, and it just so happened.
I had a Christian painter there and a Christian carpenter,
and they started praying. They found a doctor and he
(26:57):
came in and checked him out, and I was in
prayer in the other room. My wife was uh literally
away with uh just had lost it completely, and we
didn't know what was gonna happen to Joshua. About ten
minutes later, the doctor came out. He uh happened to
be an eye surgeon, and he says, Pete, Uh, Joshua's
gonna make it. And I said, thank God for that.
(27:18):
I said, that's just great. He says, but uh, We've
looked in his eye just very quickly, and it looks
like all the muscles of his eyes have been uh
of his eyes have been torn away. So I'm going
back in there and check him out, and and you
just uh waiting here, I said, find I just went
back in prayer. And my prayer wasn't that uh josh
(27:38):
be healed. My prayer was according to God's plan in
Joshua's life, that it just be worked out. And so
about fifteen minutes later, the doctor came back to me
and he says, Pete, He says, I really can't uh
believe what happened. And I said, what's that? Doctor? He says,
we look in Joshua's eye just now, and it's as
(27:59):
clear a bell. There's no contusions, there's no there's no
broken bones, his neck is there's nothing. I mean, it's
just absolutely clear. Plus the fact he's just gonna be perfect.
There's nothing wrong with him except this massive swelling that
has taken place. Well, that was just a little miracle
(28:19):
of my life. And as I thought about this, I
started reflecting back on my own life. And it's been
that way in my life hundreds upon hundreds of times
that I've literally reflected back at the times that I
really shouldn't be here, but I am here, and I'm
here for one purpose. Jesus Christ changed my life. Money
didn't do it. Women didn't do it, friends didn't do it.
(28:43):
Pastors didn't do it. Wealth didn't do it. Success present
of being a company, owning your own business, having your
own boat. I don't have much time left, and the
time that I have I'm giving to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
And you've been listening to pistol. Pete marriage and one
of the last talks he ever gave here on this earth.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
He suffered a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
And he died on Tuesday, January eighth, nineteen eighty eight,
after playing a pickup basketball game at a Pasadena, California church.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
He was only forty. Quote.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
We were on a break and he walked up to me, said,
focus on the family's James Dobson.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I asked him how he was feeling. He said, I
feel great.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
He took one step and fell, and Dobson continued quote.
I tried to do what I could, but he'd had
a seizure. That was easy to see. He was jaundice
and his eyes rolled back in his head. His body
was rigid. It was clear he was leaving. I called
out to him, asked him not to go, but it
(29:54):
was much too late. Pete Marrivig died in doctor Dobson's arms.
The story of Pete Maravich in his own words here
on our American Stories
This is our American Stories. Pistol Pete Maravich is widely
regarded as one of the greatest players in basketball history,
also one of my personal hoops heroes. Marrivich starred in
college with the LSU Tigers while playing for his father,
head coach Press Marivich, with thirty six hundred and sixty
seven points, and he averaged forty four point two points
(00:34):
per game. All of his accomplishments were achieved before the
adoption of the three point shot and the shot clock,
and despite being able to play varsity as a freshman.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Under the NCAA rules. That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Marrivig played ten years in the NBA and is considered
by many to be the best.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Ball handler of all time.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Just days before his death on January eighth, nineteen eighty eight,
the forty year old Pistol Pete spoke to guests who
gathered near the pool side of Jimmy Walker's house an
NBA All Star. We'd like to thank Vision Video for
giving us special access to this rare, bonus footage you
were about to hear from their fantastic uplifting movie The
Pistol The Birth of a Legend. Three to g Here's
(01:18):
Pete Maravich looking back on his life just days before
his death.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I grew up in Clemson, South Carolina. When I was
four years old, the only thing I ever knew was basketball.
By the time I was five years old, I was
already playing organized basketball. My parents baited me into the game,
that never forced me in. When I was seven years old,
my dad came to me and he says, Pete, he says,
I don't have any money to send you to college.
You're gonna have to get a scholarship. And if you
(01:43):
get a scholarship, they'll pay your way. Only make twenty
nine hundred dollars a year, and that's just not going
to pay your way by the time you get there.
And if you're good enough, Pete, you might even make
it to the pro basketball. That's where the greatest players play,
and there's so few. And if you get there, you
might play on a team that wins a world championship
and you'll get a big diamond ring, Pete, so big,
and it has on their World champions and you'll be
(02:04):
declared as the rest of the team, one of the
greatest at that particular time. Not only that, Pete, you'll
be able to make money. They'll pay you for doing it.
They'll pay you for playing something that you enjoy doing well.
From that day, I decided to commit my life totally
to basketball. I was dedicated, possessed, and obsessed by I
(02:25):
was so dedicated to it. I'll tell you some of
the things I used to do. We lived two and
a half miles outside of town in Clemson, South Carolina,
and I used to get the basketball and I'd dribble
in all the way. I would not accept the ride.
I'd dribble in with my right hand and dribble back
home with my left hand, five miles a day to
the gym, where i'd play eight to ten hours a day.
When I finally got a bicycle when I was about
eleven years old. Ten eleven years old, I learned to
(02:46):
dribble the basketball on my bicycle all the way. And
it made a lot easier to get into town too,
and I got there quicker, and I dribbled the ball
by riding the bicycle. It got so bizarre that my
dad came to me one day and he says, Pete,
come on, get your basketball on us. Go in the car.
So where are we going? He says, I'll tell you
when we get there. He went over and he went
on this specific highway and there weren't many cars there,
(03:07):
and he said, now look, I want you to get
in the back. See stick yourself out that back window there,
and you start dribbling the ball. I'm gonna drive at
various speeds. I want to see if you can really
control this then, And so I did that, and he'd
go five, ten, fifteen miles an hour, and twenty miles
an hour. And of course, if you realize when you're
(03:29):
trying to drive a basketballt of a car or on
a bicycle, you got to throw it away out in
front because he's going and it's coming back. It really
comes back quick, along with a lot of rocks. And
to see the faces on the people that just happened
to be driving by was something in itself. It really was.
I used to tick the basketball to bed with me.
(03:50):
I slept with a basketball till I was about thirteen
years old. I would get in bed and I'd lay
in the bed for one hour before I ever went
to sleep, and I would repeat three things fingertip control
backspin for through fingertip control backsmen followed through as I
released it laying down. I was completely possessed by the game.
I used to go around my house blindfolded, dribbling the
ball because I knew whe everything was, of course, through
(04:11):
the dismay of my mother. Sometimes I didn't, and I
knew how to drill the ball very fast. Out of
the house, I used to get the basketball and I
would dribble out in thunderstorms, lightning, everything else you couldn't
even see. I used to sneak out of my back window.
I'd go to this little spot where it was a
mud hole. It was kind of a real hard mud,
and I'd start drilling the balls of mud and everything
(04:32):
splashed up on me and literally scared to death because
of the thunder and lightning. Because I felt like if
I could dribble in that mud and that water and
everything else control it, I could certainly do it on
a court when someone was darding me. See. I was
so committed to the game of basketball. In fact, from
the time I was five years old I was seventeen
years old. I played over twenty thousand hours of basketball.
And the March Readers Digest they had a story in
(04:54):
there about television and how it affects young people's minds
or any person. There wasn't four against television says how
it affects one's mind, and it said that the average
person by the time he's twenty years old sees twenty
thousand hours of television. And I kind of paralleled that
with my life, twenty thousand hours of people watching television.
I've spent twenty thousand hours of hard sweat playing the
(05:16):
game of basketball. When I was twelve years old, it
was my first time I ever played in a regular
game for junior varsity. I made the junior varsity when
I was twelve, and I was at thirteen, I started
on my high school team and played five years of
high school basketball. I was four foot nine and a
half and at that time, at twelve, a reporter came
up to me after the game, and I used to
(05:37):
shoot the basketball from down here because I was too
weak to shoot it from up here, and so I
used to take the ball and take it and release
it like this. And this reporter saw him and he says,
what looks like this guy is drawing a pistol, And
he wrote that up and that name is stick Stuck.
Ever since I just threw that in, I know that
doesn't interest you at all. But I just wanted to
say say that. But he asked me after the game.
(05:59):
He came up an inner reviewed me. I was my
first interview I ever had, and I wish that had
been my last. But he said, what are you going
to do when you grow up, crystol Pete? And I said, well,
I'm gonna play pro basketball. I'm going to be on
a team that wins a world championship, get a diamond ring,
and make a million dollars. And he literally fell off
his chair with laughter, and I said, what are you
laughing about it? He said, a million dollars. They don't
(06:20):
make that kind of money. This was in the fifties,
and he was right. But I just felt like at
some point in my life I would My early church
life was absolutely probably zero. I was not raised in
a Christian home. I was raised in a church home.
I was raised with telling Pete, you got to go
to church. It's good to go to church. You gotta
(06:41):
you need church. But when I got into church said,
I didn't never hear anything. I never heard who Jesus
Christ was when I was young because I didn't want
to hear. See I was sitting there and literally count
ticks in my head one, two, three up to a minute,
and that would go for an hour until I got
out of there. I felt that if I was in
this church for an hour, or somebody in Philadelphia, La
Boston or New York was playing basketball, and when it
(07:02):
came down to get that scholarship, I would not get it. See,
and I progressed on into my teenage years. When I
was fourteen years old, was the first time I ever
had my first taste of alcohol. I had a beer
at fourteen years of age on the steps of the
Methodist church in Clemson, South Carolina, and I liked it.
(07:25):
I really did like it. I liked it a lot.
If there's something I can tell you young people here tonight,
it's this, don't ever take that first drink, and don't
ever take that first drug, because it'll never be your
last and it will lead to destruction. Because that's literally
what almost happened in my own life. Ninety eight percent
of all people in jails today started with that first drink.
(07:45):
Eighty five percent of over five hundred thousand people in
correctional institutions today committed their crimes while only the influence
of a mind altering substance. Drugs are alcohol, And all
of a sudden, this trem in, this commitment that I
had and everything else, I kind of went down the drain.
I didn't have it anymore. And I'd played so much
(08:07):
up until that time when I was fourteen fifteen going
to sixteen seventeen, but all of a sudden, I had
time on the weekends to do other things. I saw
the opposite sex for the first time in life. You see,
I was completely obsessed with basketball. I didn't do whatever
other people did. My god was basketball. Their god was sex, alcohol,
and whatever else. But I didn't see any of that
(08:29):
until I was fourteen. And then my eyes opened up
and I enjoyed it and I started getting into it.
And then that toe hold became a foothold, and the
foothold became a stronghold, and that stronghold became an entire possession.
I'm not scared to tell you here. I was an alcoholic.
I can't get people to write that up because I've
never been to a clinic or anything. And all my
friends drank just like I did, and they were alcoholics too.
(08:52):
I enjoyed it a great deal because there's a great
pleasure in sin. There's a lot of pleasure in it
because there wasn't nobody would do it. When I was
eighteen years old, I was asked to go out to
take Arrowhead out in San Bernardino, California, to a campus
crusade for christ. They asked me to come out there
and do what you just saw here what was called showtime.
They said, would you come out here and do your
(09:12):
clinic Pete? I said, well, sure, that'd be great. I'll
bring one of my friends and we'll just come out
there California. I've never been there. It'll be fun. So
we got in the car and I was just reaching
my eighteenth birthday, literally right before what was to be
called the pistol pe Era in Southeastern Conference basketball.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
And you're listening to Pistol Pete Merriviage reflecting on his
own life, his days before his tragic death and a
premature death at that. When we come back more of
it's remarkable talk by Pistol Pete. Here are our American stories,
(10:09):
and we're back with our American stories and we're to
continue with Pistol Pete Maravich, one of the old time
greatest players and an Idol of mine. I can't tell
you how many hours I spent watching him on television
the rare times he would come on, and then trying
to copy every single thing he did.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Let's go back to Pistol, Pete.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
And so I drove out there, and we partied all
the way out, and we had fun, and we chased girls,
and we just were in every bar we could find
and everything else. Took us three or four days to
get out there. And as I drove up on this campus,
I noticed that there were people sitting around praying and
holding hands under trees and things of this nature. And
I became very embarrassed. I didn't want any part of that,
(10:54):
and I told my friend, I said, hey, we got
to him. Get out of here. I'm gonna do this
clinic and get out of these people are nuts, I mean,
where are they smoking? And put that beer down. We
don't want to, you know, we don't want to see
him with this, with this beer. So I checked into
this place and it was for three days, and I
asked him what am I supposed to do my clinic?
And they said, well, Pete, we're not sure yet, but
if you just bear with us, we're gonna have you
(11:14):
over here with this group and I said, what do
you mean. What am I gonna do is it's well nothing,
there's nothing to do. We'll just put you here, would
you would be all right? And I said okay. So
I stayed with this group. My friend went with another group.
Now for three days, I finally heard who Jesus Christ was.
I wasn't concerned about that. To me, it was just
a story. It was a story. It was nice, that's nice.
(11:36):
But after the end of three days there there was
no impact on my life. We went out to the beach.
Bill Battle, who was an All American football player and
with a bicep as large as my thigh, said we're
going out to the beach. I'm taking this group with me.
We're gonna witness for Christ. And I said, what do
you mean witness? What is this?
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Bill?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Do you mean witness? What were you talking about? He's
just come along, Pete. We just want to we just
want to show what we do here. So I went
along with him and we went out on the beaches
out there in California beaches, and he goes up to
the worst looking group. This is back during the sixties.
This is the most revolutionary time, the rebellious time in
(12:16):
our history. Probably this led to so much of the
rebellion today. And yet he went up to the worst
looking group. Guy had tattoos, all of his own hair down,
he was smoking a joint, drinking. There was about four
or five of them. They were mean looking, ugly, they
didn't smell very good everything, And I stayed wait in
the background. But you know, the Lord has a way
to use people. You see. He went up to this
(12:37):
guy who was the meanest looking guy right behind his head.
He says, you know something, I would really like to
share something with you folks. And this guy was literally
gonna turn around and punch him. I know, because he
turned around. He said, look, go right ahead, because that
ad by sat was right in his face. Now, if
anything impressed me, it was that that did impress me.
(13:00):
I said, Wow, how God gets people's attention, It's amazing.
So they witnessed, and I don't remember. I think some
of them left right away. They said, oh, you Jesus
freaks and all this kind of stuff, and I just
kind of turned my head. I didn't want to know
part of it. At the end of three days, there
was a there was a thousand kids, and I was
part of it. And Bill Bright, who's founder of the
Camp scru SAD, gave a message much like Billy Graham
had an invitation for people to come receive Christ. Then
(13:22):
he had him to come publicly and receive him. And behold,
my friend was sitting next to me. He got up.
I said, what are you doing? Says Pete. I don't
know what to tell you. I really don't know what
to tell you. I've just received Christ, end of my life.
I said, ken, hey man, KEN'I you something you ate
or something something? And I grabbed him by the arm.
(13:44):
I literally tried to steal away his salvation. I said,
don't go up there. The embarrassing. Then I remember saying that,
and he pulled away and he went up there. He says,
you don't understand. I said, no, I don't. And he
walked up there. And I remember sitting there and saying, well,
you're not gonna get me. God, I'm gonna play Pro
basketball World championship team and make a million dollars. Boy,
that's what I want in life. But you know, as
I've reflected over that time, how many times I've cried
(14:10):
and wish that I'd received Christ in my life. Then
you know why, because God had sent me there for
a purpose, not to do a clinic. I never did one.
Nobody even asked me. But He put me there for
one reason. Pete, come home now, Come home now, because
you're about to embark on a tremendous amount of personal
(14:32):
tragedy and destruction in your life. And it doesn't have
to be that way, but you can choose that way,
and you don't have to. And I want on into college,
and I did a lot of things in college. I've
set something like around fifty basketball records from high school, college,
and pro The amount of trophies and awards and plaques
(14:53):
that I have, the amount of honorary mayorships and keys
the cities that I have, except the time when I
go to those cities and try to get the keys,
they don't ever give them to me. It could literally, really,
I'm could go around this entire pool area. Now. I
have a trophy from nineteen seventy two in a box.
It's never been opening, six foot five inches and six
(15:14):
foot five one quarter inch tall, the exact height of me.
I've never seen it. I've never opened the box, but
they're all stored away. They don't really do anything for me.
But I've had all those trophies, awards, I've had popularity,
I've had fame. I had a tremendous amount of fame
back in the sixties, tremendous amount of popularity everywhere when
(15:34):
we played before over right at a million people in
college in three years, and that's pretty good. And I
had all this adulation and people wrote me. I got
thousands of letters a week from fans. We idolize you,
Pete Merriwich, You're my idol, You're this, You're that. And
I wasn't a role model at all, not at all.
(15:55):
I wasn't a role model for young people at all. None. Zero.
And then after my college and I was All American
and I was uh a leading s I'm the leading
scorer of all time in college basketball. It'll be broken someday,
but I'm the leading scorer. I averaged over forty four
points a game for a three year period. I just
(16:19):
hold just all kinds of records. My high school records
are still hell. I still hold the record for the
All Star game. I scored forty seven points in the
East West High School All Star Game back in nineteen
sixty five, but still there. It hasn't been broken, and
some great players have come through there. And then I
went into pros, you see. And I had a lot
of fun in college, a lot of fun, too much fun.
(16:40):
In fact, I was in nine accidents in college and
walked away from every one of them. Not only that.
One time I was coming home from putting on a
clinic in Pennsylvania and I drove seven hundred miles and
I stopped for the night. It was a halfway point.
I went down to a local pub, ocal little bar,
sat in there and had about two beers, and a
(17:01):
young lady came over to me. I said, how are you, sweetie?
I said, I'm just fine. He said, you mind if
I sit down here? I said, well, suit yourself. So
I was sitting there. I wasn't there at two minutes
when a guy came up to me, about six foot five,
about two hundred and seventy pounds, said what are you
(17:21):
doing with my girl? He said, I'm not doing anything
with her, sir. I'm just sitting here. I'm just having
this cold beer here. I don't want any trouble. I didn't,
you know, and he started pushing me. He started hitting
me in the shoulder. And I grew up a kid
knowing that you never backed down from anybody. I don't
care what the odds. I wasn't going back down. And
(17:42):
I told him to get his hands off of me
and all this, and before long, one thing led to
another and they said, y'all get out of here. If
you're gonna fight. He said, yeah, come on, So I
said fine. So I got up and I went out quickly,
and I made myself through the crowd and I got
outside and I stayed behind the door, and I was
really gonna get this guy when he came out, but
he never came. Of course, I didn't wait there about
(18:04):
two minutes and he didn't come, you see, And so
I said, I'm better get out of here, and I
left and I walked out in the parking lot. As
I was walking in the back of the parking lot,
I tore it up. I saw a telephone booth where
I was gonna call a taxi to go to a
holiday in where I was staying. As I was walking out,
(18:24):
I heard this guy came out and yelled to me,
and little did I know that another guy had gone
around the other side and they both had blackjacks, which
I didn't know. And the guy. The old story is
that the guy just literally they just hit me from
behind and beat me up pretty good. As I laid
there on that parking lot that night, that girl came
(18:45):
up and I was all blood and she took a
twenty five automatic pistol and she put it in my
mouth and cocked it and she said, you're a dead man,
Pistol Pete, how about that? And I remember laying there
and from the so my heart, I said, yeah, kill me,
because then I'll have peace.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And you've been listening to Pistol Pete Marrivich. And he
gave this speech not long before his death, indeed, just
days before his premature death. More of Pistol Pete Marrivich's
life story, his last story that he told in front
of a large audience here on our American Stories, and
(19:40):
we continue with our American stories and with Pistol Pete
Marrivich's story, one of the last ones he told in
his life, this one just days before he passed.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
But you know something, there's a god up there that
overruled Satan that night, too, overruled him. And I know that.
And I went into the pros and I signed the
largest contract in the history of sports, not basketball sports
at the time, it made the Guinness Book of Records.
It lasted thirty days. They started pouring out a lot
(20:15):
of big money back then. And I searched all through
the nineteen seventies for what meaning there was to life.
I had to know the meaning, what was the meaning?
And I got involved in all kinds of different things.
I was involved in yoga and TM. I was involved
very heavily in uifology, philosophy. I was involved in different religions,
(20:38):
Hinduism especially. I was involved in everything. But the thing
about it is, none of it really satisfied me. They
were just all brief interludes of satisfaction, much like my
life was brief interludes of just ego, gratification, satisfaction and
all through that time. In fact, in nineteen seventy six,
I decided I was going to live to be one
hundred and fifty years old. And I got very heavily
(21:00):
and a nutrition because I was into Hinduism and I
was into the karma and all these other types of situations.
And I became a vegetarian and then a fruitarian and
a macrobotic and a mini dose and a MAXI dosed
on vitamins, and I fasted twenty five days, and I
sat in all kinds of different positions, and I was
searching for life, for friends. I was really searching for
(21:21):
life because my life had no meaning at all. My
life had absolutely no meaning at all. And at each
one of these stops, each one of these stops, I
had to have something else. They just didn't satisfy me.
In nineteen eighty I quit basketball. I just quit. I
walked away from it because of immaturity and because of
the fact that I just got tired of it all.
(21:42):
I just got tired of it. I got tired of
my life, and I became a recluse. For about two years,
I sat in my home. We had our first son, Jason.
He was only one and a half years old, and
I was set there for hours at a time trying
to teach him seven and eight year old puzzles. Because
I wanted my son, Jason to have what I didn't.
I wanted him to have a high intellect. See, I
want him to be an intelligent person. I want him
(22:05):
to be able to go to the right parties and
say the right things. I thought that was important. I
really thought that was important. And so my wife used
to come to me and she says, Pete, you really
need to go see someone because you're really flipping out.
I said, what do you mean? She says, you have
left this house in two weeks. I said, yeah, I know.
I brought to the garage and stuff, but I was
(22:26):
really lost. And in nineteen eighty two, I went to
bed one night. It was like any other night, Pete
Marriviage had all the material things you could want. I
used to carry around five thousand dollars in my pocket
and cash in twenties. I never cared any change. But
(22:53):
I had all that stuff, and none of it ever satisfied.
I mean not the money, not the wealth, not the success.
And I laid there in bed and I couldn't sleep,
and I didn't understand it. And all of a sudden,
everything started coming up in my life, all the sin,
every sin I'd ever committed, and I've committed many. Let
me tell you many sins in my life, and there's
(23:14):
nothing hidden. And I'm not airing all my dirty laundry here.
I'm not trying to. I don't want to give satan
any credit. But I can tell you this. It all
came up. And it also came up when I was eighteen,
when I could have received Christ. And it was five
thirty in the morning now, and I laid there crying
with two pillars back up in my back, with an
unsaved wife next to me. And I was sitting there crying,
(23:38):
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
(24:04):
about to get over on the side of my bed.
And what happened to me doesn't happen everybody. And what
happened to me happened to me. And that's why I'm
talking out of my shoes. Many people don't believe it.
Anything Odians don't believe it. Many people, many the Odians,
don't believe in God. God spoke to me audibly right
there in the room, and he said be strong and
(24:27):
left eye own heart, literally audibly. I looked around the room.
I was in total shock. I'd never heard anything like
that before, and I was so shocked that I reached
over and I woke my wife, just shaking her like crazy.
I said, Jackie, did you Jackie, did you hear what
the Lord said to me? Did you hear that? You
must understand Jackie had seen me go through all kinds
of trips in my life. And she just kind of
(24:50):
looked at me in a dark haze that it was
at five thirty in the morning and said, Pete, you
really have gun that's having you and she just went
back to sleep. You know. I was sitting there and
all of a sudden, about a year and a half ago, Uh,
my wife and I went through a terrible tragedy. I
was restoring an old Victorian home and I had just
(25:11):
gotten back from China. Some friends came over and when
we were showing them the house, uh, we'd gone upstairs
with them and there was no banishter. So we told
our kids to, you know, stay away from the stairs,
just gonna be here second we were showing them, and
as careful as we are with our children, I'd forgotten
that they didn't even really think about it. I'd built
in a little closet and upstairs room and in that
(25:31):
closet was an air conditioning vent, an old one that
had been stuffed up with insulation. And uh uh it
really happened very quickly. Uh. They both kind of ran
in there. We didn't see him, and all of a sudden,
it was like that. My wife heard a a very
loud thumped and when she uh went back there, Uh, Joshua,
(25:53):
my little two year old at the time, wasn't there. Uh.
I just kind of knew what happened, and I dashed
down the floor and I went in there, and I
saw my little son lying there in a pool of blood.
He had landed an impact had hit him directly in
the eye is where he hit on this part of
(26:14):
his head. He was in a semi conscious state, taken
CPR in the past, and my wife never did see him.
I'm glad she didn't because it's something I'll live with
on my life. But anyway, I picked him up and
he was just a lifeless little body. His heartbeat was
so faint that I didn't know whether he was going
(26:34):
to make it or not. But I rushed him to
the hospital. I got him there and there wasn't even
any doctors there at this particular hospital. The guy that
was supposed to be. There was off who was in
lunch or something like that, and it just so happened.
I had a Christian painter there and a Christian carpenter,
and they started praying. They found a doctor and he
(26:57):
came in and checked him out, and I was in
prayer in the other room. My wife was uh literally
away with uh just had lost it completely, and we
didn't know what was gonna happen to Joshua. About ten
minutes later, the doctor came out. He uh happened to
be an eye surgeon, and he says, Pete, Uh, Joshua's
gonna make it. And I said, thank God for that.
(27:18):
I said, that's just great. He says, but uh, We've
looked in his eye just very quickly, and it looks
like all the muscles of his eyes have been uh
of his eyes have been torn away. So I'm going
back in there and check him out, and and you
just uh waiting here, I said, find I just went
back in prayer. And my prayer wasn't that uh josh
(27:38):
be healed. My prayer was according to God's plan in
Joshua's life, that it just be worked out. And so
about fifteen minutes later, the doctor came back to me
and he says, Pete, He says, I really can't uh
believe what happened. And I said, what's that? Doctor? He says,
we look in Joshua's eye just now, and it's as
(27:59):
clear a bell. There's no contusions, there's no there's no
broken bones, his neck is there's nothing. I mean, it's
just absolutely clear. Plus the fact he's just gonna be perfect.
There's nothing wrong with him except this massive swelling that
has taken place. Well, that was just a little miracle
(28:19):
of my life. And as I thought about this, I
started reflecting back on my own life. And it's been
that way in my life hundreds upon hundreds of times
that I've literally reflected back at the times that I
really shouldn't be here, but I am here, and I'm
here for one purpose. Jesus Christ changed my life. Money
didn't do it. Women didn't do it, friends didn't do it.
(28:43):
Pastors didn't do it. Wealth didn't do it. Success present
of being a company, owning your own business, having your
own boat. I don't have much time left, and the
time that I have I'm giving to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
And you've been listening to pistol. Pete marriage and one
of the last talks he ever gave here on this earth.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
He suffered a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
And he died on Tuesday, January eighth, nineteen eighty eight,
after playing a pickup basketball game at a Pasadena, California church.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
He was only forty. Quote.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
We were on a break and he walked up to me, said,
focus on the family's James Dobson.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I asked him how he was feeling. He said, I
feel great.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
He took one step and fell, and Dobson continued quote.
I tried to do what I could, but he'd had
a seizure. That was easy to see. He was jaundice
and his eyes rolled back in his head. His body
was rigid. It was clear he was leaving. I called
out to him, asked him not to go, but it
(29:54):
was much too late. Pete Marrivig died in doctor Dobson's arms.
The story of Pete Maravich in his own words here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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