the sins of the father.

I'm about halfway through an an excerpt of a biography in this week's Sports Illustrated on Pistol Pete Maravich, and it's really a captivating thing about one of the sport's stars that casual NBA people like me have heard of but don't really know a heck of a lot about (the problem is that the regular season starts in the middle of football season; my attention is largely focused on big old dudes in pads beating on each other until the playoffs roll around and I realize that other sports exist)

True Hoop runs some of the basics down because SI doesn't make a lot of its great feature pieces or excerpt features like this readable online, and what always has seemed the most compelling backstory to the most driven (and at the same time) troubled athletes, whether huge successes or not, is how much their story is based on living out the failed dreams of parents, in this case, Pete's father Press, who missed his chance at being a pro player in his own right, and he wanted to create a great one in his son.

It's hard to read these things without feeling bad for Pistol Pete and what his dad put on him, but I think I'll be buying Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich when I see it in the stores.