Pete Maravich Shares His Life Story… Just Days Before His Death

On this episode of Our American Stories, just days before his death, on January 8, 1988, 40-year-old “Pistol” Pete Maravich spoke to guests who gathered near the poolside of Jimmie Walker’s house—an NBA All-Star.

Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is our American Stories. Pistol Pete Merevich is widely
regarded as one of the greatest players in basketball history,
also one of my personal hoops heroes. Marreich starred in
college with the LSU Tigers while playing for his father,
head coach Press Marevich. He's the all time leading NCAA
Division One scorers still with thirty six hundred and sixty

(00:34):
seven points, and he averaged forty four point two points
per game. All of his accomplishments were chi before the
adoption of the three point shot and the shot cluck,
and despite being able to play varsity as a freshman
under the NCAA rules It's crazy. Marriage played ten years
in the NBA and is considered by many to be
the best ball handler of all time. Just days before

(00:58):
his death on January 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

(01:18):
of a legend. Three to g Here's Pete Maravich looking
back on his life just days before his death. 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 baded me into the game.
They never forced me in. When I was seven years old,

(01:39):
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
get a scholarship, they'll pay your way. I'll 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

(02:01):
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
declared as the rest of the team, one of the
greatest at that particular time. Not only that, Pete, you'd
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

(02:25):
the basketball. I was dedicated, possessed, and obsessed by it.
I was so dedicated to it. I'll tell you some
of the things I used to do. We left two
and a half miles outside of town in Clumps in
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 on 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

(02:46):
I was about eleven years old. Ten eleven years old,
I learned to dribble the basketball on my bicycle all
the way in. It made it a lot easier to
get into town, too, and I got there quicker, and
I dribbled the ball by riding the bicycle. He got
so bizarre that my dad came to me one day
and he says, Pete, come on, get your basketball, and
it's going the car. So where are we going? He says,
I'll tell you when we get there. He went over

(03:08):
and he went on this specific highway and there weren't
many cars there, and he said, now look, I want
you to get in the back sea, stick yourself out
that back window there, and you start dribbing the ball.
I'm gonna drive at various speeds. I want to see
if you can really control this. And and so I
did that, and he'd go five, ten, fifteen miles an

(03:30):
hour and twenty miles an hour. And of course, if
you realize when you're trying to drill a basketball to
a car or on a bicycle, you gotta throw it
way out in front because he's going to be 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 take

(03:52):
a basketball to bed with me. I slept with a
basketball to 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 backs been followed through
fingertip control backs been 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

(04:13):
because I knew where everything was. Of course, to the
dismay of my mother, sometimes I didn't, and I knew
how to dribble 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

(04:33):
start dribbling the balls of mud and everything 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 something was guarding me. She 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

(04:54):
March Reader's Digest they had a story in there about television,
how it affects young people's mind or any person. It
wasn't four against television. It just 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 people watching television. I've spent twenty thousand

(05:17):
hours of hard sweat playing the 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,

(05:37):
at twelve, a reporter came up to me after the game,
and I used to 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 it 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 just

(06:00):
wanted to say say that. But he asked me after
the game. He came up and interviewed me of my
first interview I ever had, and I wish it had
been my last. But he said, what are you gonna
do when you grow up? Phistol Pete? And I said, well,
I'm gonna play pro basketball. I'm gonna be on a
team that wins a world championship to get a diamond
ring and make a million dollars. And he literally fell
off his chair with laughter, and I said, what are

(06:21):
you laughing about? He says a million dollars. They don't
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

(06:42):
to church. It's good to go to church. You gotta
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. So I was sitting there and literally count
ticks in my head one, two, three up to a minute,
and I would go for an hour until I got
out of there. I felt that if some if I
was in the church for an hour, or somebody in Philadelphia,
La Boston or New York was playing basketball, and when

(07:05):
it came down to get that scholarship, I would not
get it. See, and I progressed on end to 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 Clumps in South Carolina.

(07:28):
And I liked it. I really did like it. I
liked it a lot. If it'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. Eighty five percent of

(07:50):
over five hundred thousand people in correctional institutions today committed
their crimes while one of the influence of a mind
altering substance. Drugs are acohol. And all of a sudden,
this tremendous 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 of until that time when

(08:12):
I was fourteen fifteen going in 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 my 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 until

(08:33):
I was fourteen. And then my eyes opened up and
I enjoyed it, and I started getting into it. And
then that toehold 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.

(08:55):
I enjoyed it a great deal because there's a great
pleasure in sin. There's a lot of pleasure in it
because of what 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

(09:16):
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 to be fun. So
we got in the car and I was just reaching
my eighteenth birthday and literally right before what was to
be called the Pistol Pete era in Southeastern Conference basketball.
And you're listening to Pistol Pete Merivitch reflecting on his
own life, his days before his tragic death and a

(09:41):
premature death at that when we come back more of
its remarkable talk by Pistol Pete here on 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 all 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. Let's go back
to Pistol Pete. And so I drove out to and

(10:33):
we partied all the way out, and we had fun,
and we chased girls, and we just we're 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, and I told my friend,

(10:55):
I said, hey, we gotta hurt him. Get out of here.
I'm gonna do this clinic and get out of these
people were nuts. I mean, we're 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, what am I supposed to
do my clinic? And They said, well, Pete, we're not
sure you have If you just bear with us, we're
gonna have you over here with this group. And I said,

(11:16):
what do you mean. What am I gonna do? Is
as well? Nothing, just nothing to do. Would just put
you here, would you? Would it be all right? I said? Okay?
So I stayed with this group. My friend went with
another group, and 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. But after the end of three

(11:37):
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 bicept 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? Well, what
is this Bill? Do you mean witness? What were you
talking about? He's just come along, Pete. We just want

(11:58):
to just want to show what we do here. So
I went along with him and we went out on
the beaches out there, 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
our history. Probably that's led to so much of the
rebellion to day. And yet he went up to the

(12:21):
worst looking group. Guy had tattoos, all of his own
hair down here, 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 way
in the background. But you know, the Lord has a
way to use people. You see, he went up to
this guy who was a meanest looking guy. Right behind
his head. He says, you know something, I would really

(12:41):
like to share something with you folks. And this guy
was literally going to turn around and punch him. I no,
because he turned around. He said, look, go right ahead,
because that advice, it was right in his face. If
anything impressed me, it was that that did impress me.
I said, Wow, how God gets people's attention, It's amazing.

(13:05):
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 don'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 was founder of
the campus Crusey, gave a message much like Billy Graham
had an invitation for people to come receive Christ. Then
he had him to come publicly and receive him. Lo

(13:25):
and Behold. My friend was sitting next to me. He
got up. I said, what are you doing, says Pete.
I don't. I don't know what to tell you. I
really don't know what to tell you. I've just received
Christ into my life. I said, Kenny, hey, man, kend
you something you ate or something so and I grabbed
him by the arm. I literally tried to steal away

(13:46):
his salvation. I said, you don't go up to the
embarrassing Then I remember saying that, and he pulled away
and he went up there and 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, being
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 and

(14:10):
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 tragedy and destruction

(14:33):
in your life. And it doesn't have to be that way.
But you can't 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. I've set something
like around fifty basketball records from high school, college, and
pro The amount of trophies and awards and plaques that
I have, the amount of honorary mayorships and keys to

(14:58):
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. I could, literally, really,
I could go around this entire pool area. I have
a trophy from nineteen seventy two in a box. It's
never been opening, six foot five inches six ft five
one quarter inchestall the exact height of me. I've never
seen it. I've never opened the box, but they're all

(15:21):
stored away. They 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 popular everywhere when
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

(15:43):
thousands of letters a week from fans. We idolize you,
Pete Marritich, You're my idol. You're this, You're that. And
I wasn't a role model at all, not at all.
I wasn't a role model for young people at all. None. Zero.
And then after my college and I was all of

(16:03):
American and I was leading. I'm the leading scorer of
all time in college basketball. It'll be broken someday, but
I'm the leading score average over forty four points a
game for a three year period. I just hold just
all kind of records. My high school records are still hell.
I still hold the record for the All Star game.

(16:24):
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 the pros,
you see. And I had a lot of fun in college,
a lot of fun, too much fun. In fact, I
was in nine accidents in college and walked away from
every one of them. Not only that. One time I

(16:46):
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, and I went
down to a local pub loc a little bar sat
in there and it had about two beers, and the
young lady came over to me. I said, how are you, sweetie?
I said, I'm just fine. Said you mind if I

(17:08):
sit down here? I said, well, suit yourself. So I
was sitting there. I wasn't there two minutes when a
guy came up to me, about six foot five, about
two hundred and seventy pounds, said what are you doing
my girl? He said, I'm not doing anything with her, sir,
I'm just sitting here. I'm just having this cold beer

(17:28):
here and 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 as a kid knowing
that you never backed down from anybody. I don't care
what the odds I want going to back down. And
I told him to get his hands off of me
and all this, and before long, one thing left to another,
and they said, y'all get out of here. If you're

(17:48):
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 two
minutes and he didn't come, you see, And so I

(18:10):
said I'd better get out of here, and I left,
and I walked out to the parking lot. As I
was walking in the back of the parking lot, out
toward up, I saw a telephone booth where I was
gonna call a taxi to go to a holiday And
while I was staying, as I was walking out of her,
this guy came out and me yelled at me a little.
Did I know that another guy had gone around the
other side and they both had blackjacks, which I didn't know.

(18:33):
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 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, as you're a dead man, Pistol Pete,

(18:55):
how about that? And I remember laying there and from
the episode of my heart, I said, yeah, kill that,
because then I'll have peace. And you've been listening to
Pistol Pete Marevich and he gave this speech not long
before his death, indeed, just days before his premature death.

(19:15):
More a Pistol Pete Marevitch's life story is last story
that he told in front of a large audience here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American

(19:42):
stories and with Pistol Pete Marevich's story, one of the
last ones he told in his life, this one just
days before he passed. 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

(20:03):
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 of big money back then. And I
searched all through the nineteen seventies for what meaning there

(20:24):
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 ufology, philosophy. I was
involved in different religions, Hinduism especially. I was involved in everything.
But the thing about it is, none of it really

(20:45):
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, the nineteen seventy six,
I decided I was going to live to be one
hundred and fifty years old, and I got very heavily
in a nutrition because I was into Hinduism and I
was into the Carmen and all these other types of situations.

(21:07):
And I became a vegetarian and then a fruitarian, and
a macrobotic, and on minidose and a maxidosed 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 life because my
life had no meaning at all. My life had absolutely
no meaning at all. And in each one of these stops,

(21:27):
each one of these stops, I'd 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. 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

(21:49):
had our first son, Jason. He was only one and
a half years old, and I was sat there for
hours at a time trying to teach him seven and
eight year old puzzles. Because I wanted my son, Jason
had what I didn't. I wanted him to have a
high intellect. See, I wanted him to be an intelligent person.
I wanted him 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

(22:12):
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 haven't left this house in two weeks. I said, yeah,
I have. You know. I brought to the garage and stuff,
but I was really lost. And in nineteen eighty two,
I went to bed one night. It was like any

(22:32):
other night, Pete. Marriage had all the material things you
could want. I used to carry around five thousand dollars
in my pocket in cash in twenties. I never cared
any change, but at all that stuff, and none of

(22:55):
it ever satisfied. I mean not the money, not the wealth,
not the success. And I lay 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 nothing hidden. And I'm not airing all my

(23:17):
dirty laundry. Here am I 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, and I said, God, I've punched you,

(23:40):
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?

(24:04):
And I was about to get over on the side
of my bed. And what happened to me doesn't happen
to 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. Any theologians don't believe it. Many
thologians don't believe in God. God spoke to me audibly
right there in the room. 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 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 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 gone nuts 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,
my wife and I went through a terrible tragedy. I
was restoring an old Victorian home and i'd just gotten

(25:11):
back from China. Some friends came over and when we
were showing them the house, we'd gone upstairs with them
and there was no banister. So we told our kids
to stay away from the stairs, just gonna be here
second we were showing them, and as careful as we
are with our children, I had forgotten that they didn't
even really think about it. I built in a little
closet and upstairs room, and in that closet was an

(25:32):
air conditioning then an old one that had been stuffed
up with insulation, And it really happened very quickly. 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 very loud thump, and when she went
back there, Joshua a little two year old. The time

(25:55):
wasn't there. 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 his head. He was in a semi

(26:16):
conscious state taking CPR in the past, and my wife
never did see him. I'm glad you didn't, because there's
something I'll live with on my life. Anyway. I picked
him up and he was just a lifeless little body.
His heartbeat was so faint that I didn't know whether
it was gonna make it or not. But I rushed

(26:37):
into 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 just so happened.
I had a Christian painter there and a Christian carpenter,
and they started praying. They found a doctor and he
came in and checked him out, and I was in

(26:59):
prayer in the other room. My wife was literally away,
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 happened to be an eye surgeon,
and he says, Pete, Joshua was gonna make it, and
I said, thank God for that. I said, that's just great.

(27:19):
He says, but we've looked in his eye just very quickly,
and it looks like all the muscles of his eyes,
of his eye has been torn away. So I'm going
back in there and check him out. And and you
just waiting here, I said, find I just went back
in prayer, and my prayer wasn't that josh be healed.
My prayer was according to God's plan in Joshua's life,

(27:44):
that did 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 believe what had happened. And
I said, what's that? Doctor? He says, we look in
Joshua's eye just now, and it's as clear as a bell.
There's no contusions, there's there's no broken bones, his neck

(28:07):
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 in 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. But I've literally reflected

(28:30):
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. Pastors didn't do it.
Wealth didn't do it. Success president, being a company, owning
your own business, having your own boat. I don't have

(28:54):
much time left, and the time that I have I'm
giving to the Lord Jesus Christ. And you've been listening
to Pistol Pete marriage in one of the last talks
he ever gave here on this earth. He suffered a
heart attack, and he died on Tuesday, January eighth, nineteen
eighty eight, after playing a pickup basketball game at a Pasadena,

(29:18):
California church. He was only forty. Quote. We were on
a break and he walked up to me, said, focus
on the families, James Dobson. I asked him how he
was feeling. He said, I feel great. He took one
step and fell, and Dobson continued quote. I tried to

(29:39):
do what I could, but he'd had a seizure. That
was easy to see. He was jaundiced 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 was much too late.
Pet Marriage died in doctor Dobson's arms. The story of

(30:02):
Pete Maravich in his home words. Here are our American
stories