January 24, 1980
He was working his way through the assortment of torture machines, one after another, big machines with pulleys and weights and bicycle chains, machines designed to pull the most hidden muscles in the body into action, whether the muscles wanted the action or not. Pete Maravich was stuffed inside this one machine, seated, trying to lift a designated weight a designated number of times.
"Wait a minute," he would say with a little smile.
He was trying to talk to three kids as he worked in the tiny Nautilus weight room at Hellenic College in Brookline yesterday afternoon, but talking and lifting at the same time were too much. Wait a minute. Woof. He would lift the designated weight, straining, and then he would resume the conversation.
" . . . so you want to play baseball, so why not concentrate on baseball?" he would tell this one kid, a catcher on the Hellenic nine. "If you're serious, if you really want to play pro baseball, then you should be playing baseball right now. How many guys can you name in the pros who were the old- time four-sport stars in college?"
"Uh . . . "
"Wait a minute."
Maravich lifted, and the conversation continued - "Quinn Buckner's about the only one I know," he said as he let the weight down. "You have to specialize, have to be catching as many baseballs as you can, have somebody throwing them at your knees and feet right now if you re a catcher." - and the conversation hit other points and Maravich hit other machines and the whole thing was free and easy and natural. Day One as a Boston Celtic. Free and easy and natural.
The sand-papering of the body into full competitive shape was beginning here. An apartment already had been found. Check. A favorite restaurant already had been found. Check. What else was there to do? His wife and son would be arriving as soon as possible. Check. Pete Maravich was ready to go.
Gladly.
"I feel like a rookie," he said when he completed his workout. "There's no other way to explain it. I feel as good as I have about playing basketball as I have in a long, long time."
His new team might have been in Detroit, and his actual debut as a Celtic might be a couple of weeks away, but for the first time, almost since he could remember, the most flamboyant basketball player of our time was part of an organization with a bona-fide chance of winning a title. For the first time, again almost since he could remember, he was just part of a basketball team. Not an "attraction," with his name played in lights above the name of his team. Not a backcourt "scorer," expected to load 'em up and shoot 'em out. A player. A part of a team. A part of a winning team.
"When's the last time you were on a team that won everything?" he was asked.
"You mean the big winner at the end of the season?" he asked.
"The big winner."
Not at New Orleans or Utah. Not at Atlanta, where his best team was 46-36 and where three teams died in the playoffs to eventual NBA champions. Not in college, Louisiana State, where the pressure probably had been the heaviest of all, playing for his father, cast almost as a floppy-haired, one-man band against the rest of the collegiate world. Not in . . .
"In my senior year of high school, Daniel High in Clemson, S.C., we were supposed to win the whole thing, and we lost in the semifinals by a point," he said. "A disputed loss. A kid on our team took a shot at the end of the game from halfcourt. And made it.
"We grabbed him, carried him around the court, went crazy. We won the game by a point, right? There were two officials working the game. One from our conference. One from their conference. The one from ours said he didn't know if the shot had beat the buzzer. The one from theirs immediatley said, No good.' We lost by a point, and the kid who made the shot actually went berserk in the locker room. Broke everything. Had to be strapped down. Me? I cried for two weeks."
The only time Pete Maravich remembered when he was in the finals of anything - "Does the Oklahoma City Classic count?" he asked. "I suppose not." - was when he was in the eighth grade. He was a starter already for Daniel High, 13 years old and 110 pounds and 5-feet-3, a dribbling wizard, "a better dribbler than I am in the pros."
"We lost that game, too, to Palmetto," he said. "I remember at the end of the game Mike Muth, one of their stars, picked me up and was carrying me around and saying you re great, a great, great player.' There I was, kicking my legs and yelling for him to put me down."
He smiled at the thought, Pete Maravich did. Smiled wide.
How long ago had that been? Thirty-one minus 13. That was 18 years. How many years? How many frustrations? The game has been such a grim profession at so many places. There have been so many fakers and frauds, handshakers and con men. How long has he had to be the sad-eyed clown, the Emmett Kelly of basketball, pulling the people from their seats at the things he could do but not really enjoying it himself? How long?
"I'm trying to get back to the way the game felt in high school," Pete Maravich said. "Fun. That's what I want out of this game. Not money. I'm looking for some fun."
He has chosen the Celtics as his last team in basketball, mostly in search of that fun. He turned down the Philadelphia 76ers for a variety of reasons - the style they play, the atmosphere he felt in Philadelphia, the full-scale physical they made him take - but the major reason was fun. He thought playing with the Celtics would be more fun. He didn't pick them because he handicapped them as world champions or because they offered more money. He picked the Celtics because they would be more fun.
"Just being part of a team . . . not counted on to score . . . passing . . . showing that I can play defense . . .," he shook his head at the heretical, almost impossible Day One thought. "I've wondered, all my career, how it would have been if I had gone to a winner in the first place. I've always thought the picture would have been different about me. My life would have been different. I've always wondered . . . and finally I'm here."
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