As referenced in our Q & A with Paul Westphal, Bob Dylan wrote about the basketball player Pete Maravich in his memoir, “Chronicles, Volume One”. Here is that passage:

My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morning news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich, the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I’d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz. He was something to see — mop of brown hair, floppy socks — the holy terror of the basketball world — high flyin’ — magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket — dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass and caught his own pass. He was fantastic. Scored something like thirty-eight points. He could have played blind. Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

I started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day I’d heard the sad news about Pistol Pete. I started writing it in the early afternoon, about the time the morning news began to wear away and it took me the rest of the day and into the night to finish it.

There’s a lot out there on Pistol Pete, including on YouTube. For instance, click here to see footage of his 68 point game, when he played with the New Orleans Jazz versus the New York Knicks in 1977.

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