How "Pistol" Pete Maravich we predictedryou are
The basketball player who literally left his heart on the court
Peter Maravich is one of the best players to ever play in the National Basketball Association. The guard is certainly among the top five basketball players who wore the Jazz team even before the franchise moved from New Orleans to Utah. Known by his nickname Pistol Pete, he was selected third overall in the 1970 draft and played 4 seasons for the Atlanta Hawks before moving on to the Jazzmen. Besides a remarkable career, there is one moment in his life that is as curious as it is terrifying. Pete Maravich predicts his own death.
Selected to the All-Rookie Team in his first season, Pete is getting all the attention. Subsequently, he participated in five All-Star games and was named to the All-NBA team twice, and in the 1976/77 campaign he became the leading scorer with an average of 31.1 points per game. At the end of the following season, however, he received a serious injury that stopped the development of his career. In the 1980s, it ended after an unsuccessful stint with the Boston Celtics.
Eight years after the official end of his NBA basketball adventure, now 40, Pistol Pete is back on the court to participate in a charity game for the First Church of Judaism in Pasadena. He fainted in this fight and died on the spot. Doctors subsequently discovered a heart problem that the Jazz player had never been diagnosed with. The left coronary artery is totally missing in him, which leads to a double enlargement of the right one to compensate for blood circulation.
Maravich's death is shocking and tragic, but even more shocking is an interview of his that the media is returning to in the difficult days surrounding his passing. During his fourth NBA season, or 1974, he told the Beaver County Times that he didn't want to play in the league for 10 years and then die of a heart attack. In 1988, the journalist who interviewed Pistol Pete, Andy Nuzzo, remembered this incident and dug through the archives, saying afterwards: “It was a bit scary. The story sat on my desk while I worked. I read it, then again and again. I couldn't believe it all fit together perfectly." Exactly 10 years after his debut in the NBA, Maravich ended his career, and shortly after he turned 40 years old, he died on the floor in a charity game after suffering a heart attack.
An extremely shocking fact that is difficult to explain. There are no known heart problems in Pete's family, either on his mother's side or on his father's side, who died a year before his son, but of prostate cancer.
There is no doubt that Pistol Pete will forever be remembered as one of the best dribblers ever, will forever remain a legend of the New Orleans Jazz and then the Utah Jazz. The only thing that can trouble the minds of his fans, as well as experts and journalists, is the fact that he predicted his death 14 years before it happened.