Campbell recalls memories of basketball legend Pete Maravich in new bio book

Around 1987, local writer and film producer Darrel Campbell collaborated with Peter “Pistol Pete” Maravich to write Maravich’s autobiography, “Heir to a Dream” and produce a basketball video instructional series, “Pistol Pete’s Homework Basketball.” Today, almost 35 years after first meeting Maravich, Campbell has published a biography about Pistol Pete, entitled “Hero and Friend: My Days with Pistol Pete Maravich.”
Campbell first met Maravich in 1985 while working as a script writer.
“I was writing ‘Days of Our Lives’ in Los Angeles,” he said, “and a friend of mine had done a sports-interview show for ESPN, and he had met Pistol Pete; he was a big fan of Pistol Pete, and so they kind of hit it off. And so, he called me the next day and said, ‘Hey, I just did this show with Pistol Pete on ESPN. Would you be interested in writing a movie about him?’”
Campbell didn’t need a second invitation; he’d admired Maravich for many years as a boy.

 “I … immediately said ‘Yes,’ because, I’d been a big fan growing up here in Mt. Vernon, you know,” he said. “A lot of us back in the ‘70s, we all wanted to be Pistol Pete.”
Campbell would spend about three years working with Maravich, interviewing him and his father, Press Maravich. Along the way, he and Maravich became very good friends. Unfortunately, Maravich passed away suddenly in 1988 of heart failure at the age of 40.
“It was a beautiful time for me, because I got to know the man and his father (who died six months later),” Campbell said, “and then we finished that book I was writing with him, ‘Heir to a Dream,’ then he passed away while we were doing book tours. It was such a blessing in my life to get to know this guy, (because) who would have known he would be gone three years after I met him.”
Campbell would also write and produce the movie “The Pistol: The birth of a legend,” which focused on Maravich’s eighth-grade basketball season; it was released in 1991.
To write his latest biography, Campbell used information he gained from Maravich and his father while collaborating on the earlier projects.
“That content has been sitting in my filing cabinet for about 30 years, and I just kind of pulled out letters,” Campbell said. “I had some little cassette tapes that we had interviewed; I transposed them. I tried to get things in his own words as he said them, because that would make it a really unique book. Nobody else could really tell the story that I knew, which was the last three years of his life. We spent a lot of time together.”
Because of his time spent with Maravich, Campbell said he has a story that no one else can tell, and there is another unique perspective to it.
“I got to know (Pete),” he said, “and here is the beauty of the book, ‘How many people get to actually meet their sports hero?’ then it turned into, ‘How many people get to become the friend of their sports hero?’ So, there’s a lot of years there from when I was a little kid to the day he died, he was a sort of a hero to me. And so, the essence of the book is, ‘What if your hero became your best friend?’”
Campbell said he hopes those who read the biography will come to see Maravich as more than a sports hero.
“I really hope they’ll walk away with several things,” Campbell said. “One is, they’ll get to know this sports legend a little bit better. There’s really nobody like him who’s ever lived. Everybody has their own story, but I think they’ll know a lot more about Pistol Pete. They’ll also understand what drove him, especially in the last part of his life. He was really wanting to be a man of character and a Christian witness. He really wanted to share the gospel with people. He was just amazing.”
In 1970, Maravich became the Division I all-time leading scorer by scoring a record-setting 3,667 points; a record that still stands. Campbell said he chose to write and publish the autobiography to coincide with this year’s anniversary of Maravich setting the record.
“I was trying to get it in the marketplace before this spring’s basketball season, because this is the 50th year of Pistol Pete breaking and setting the all-time scoring record for college,” Campbell said.
“Hero and Friend
 can be purchased online through Amazon.com; the cost is $14.95 for a paperback copy or $3 on Kindle. Campbell is working to make the book available through his website for those who would like to have an autographed copy; he expects those arrangements to be complete in March. For more information, go online to www.pistolpetebook.com, or visit the “Hero and Friend” Facebook page.