An informative biography of the legendary basketball player who died suddenly in 1988 at the age of 40 because of a congenital heart defect. Maravich, named to the NBA’s 50 Greatest Players List in 1997, will probably be remembered best for his showmanship and his pioneer role as superstar. Journalist and author Berger (Big Time, 1990, etc.) chronicles the ballplayer’s life from pre- college through his Louisiana State University years to his pro career with the Atlanta Hawks, New Orleans Jazz, and Boston Celtics. He was dubbed “Pistol Pete” as a ninth-grader by a sportswriter who was impressed by the boy’s off-the-hip, one-hand push shot, a style blending confidence and cockiness. Maravich, a product of his father’s intense mentoring and coaching, became a prolific scorer—breaking the career college scoring record in 1970—and a master of dazzling plays, including dribbling between his legs. Even before his rookie year, he was clearly a superstar, netting an exorbitant salary and landing endorsement deals at a time when ballplayers weren’t seen as commercial spokespeople. But as Berger’s research reveals, Maravich’s life was laced with sorrow. His mother sank into the alcoholism and depression that led to her suicide. Maravich himself was troubled by success, becoming an alcoholic, suffering bouts of paranoia, and enduring injuries and illnesses throughout his professional career, which ended in 1980. Berger uses citations from teammates, friends, contemporaries, press clippings, and Maravich’s own words to show the complexity of his turbulent life as he bore the scrutiny and expectations of a superstar, becoming after retirement a born-again Christian. Old-time basketball fans will enjoy remembering Pistol Pete, and young fans will be introduced to the player who left such a mark on the sport at a time when showmanship on the hardwood was not the norm. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87833-237-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Taylor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
First-rate compendium of baseball fiction by Ring Lardner, often featuring fictional players among real ones on real teams: an annotated edition, ten years in the making, that deserves high praise for its immaculate scholarship, for its 111 photos and drawings of Lardner's real-life characters and of those real-life men the fictions are sometimes drawn from, and for the historical detail that editor Hilton—a professor emeritus of economics (Univ. of Calif., LA) and longtime baseball fan—amasses to underpin each work. As with Ken Burns's PBS series last summer, sports blends with art. Yes, the post-1915 Lardner gets short-winded, but his humor is some of the best since Mark Twain. And here, Hemingway, as he himself admitted, learned more about style and The Sentence than he did from Gertrude Stein, and more about how to catch dialogue on the wing more immediately than any living writer. Among the 24 short stories in this long loaf filled with raisins and walnuts are the six later collected as the You Know Me Al series, and the imperishable ``Alibi Ike'' with its opening: ``His right name was Frank X. Farrell, and I guess the X stood for `Excuse me.' Because he never pulled a play, good or bad, on or off the field, without apologizin' for it.''
Pub Date: April 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-8047-2405-9
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
A devoted and comprehensive tour guide, Trecker delivers the goods with gusto.
A veteran sports commentator shares the hard-nosed, insider machinations of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
A Chicago-based columnist and analyst for Fox Soccer Channel, Trecker got his first taste of World Cup fever at the 2002 games co-hosted (for the first time) by political rivals South Korea and Japan, in which the United States surprisingly progressed to the quarterfinals. Four years later, the author found himself in the commerce-driven German city of Leipzig, witnessing a rather lackluster team-placement ceremony at the start of a commissioned four-week tour of Germany for the 2006 World Cup. Finely balancing his personal experiences with comprehensive historical detail, and a generous supply of factoid footnotes, Trecker begins with the basics, explaining that the games are the end result of four years of carefully tracked worldwide competitions wherein 210 nations vie for 32 coveted placement slots. He ponders the controversial host-city selection process and profiles such better known team managers as suave, seasoned veteran “Bora” Milutinovic from Serbia and Wayne Rooney, pride of the Manchester team and polar opposite of “remote tabloid figure” David Beckham. A guaranteed cash cow, the World Cup event was positioned by Germany as “the biggest sales event the planet had ever seen,” even as that country continued to struggle with spiking unemployment rates and the residual shock of Eastern bloc unification. Trecker traveled to Hamburg, the United States’s home-base city; Munich, where he unexpectedly was housed in the gay district surrounded by Asian-staffed brothels and adult novelty shops peddling “World Cup–branded sex toys”; and onward to a spontaneous pub crawl in Frankfurt with the ever-thirsty English fans. Two weeks into the tournament, however, the author fell seriously ill, delaying his coverage (and the publication of this book). He recovered in time to witness the championship game, in which a game-altering headbutt would send 350-million spectators into a historic frenzy.
A devoted and comprehensive tour guide, Trecker delivers the goods with gusto.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-603098-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
