Short answers, pulled from the story.
Maravich scored 3,667 points in 83 varsity games at Louisiana State University, averaging 44.2 points per game. He held the NCAA Division I all-time scoring record for more than 50 years until Caitlin Clark surpassed it in 2024.
Three factors inflate the achievement. He was barred from varsity play his freshman year by NCAA rules, losing a full quarter of his college career in the record books despite scoring 741 points in freshman competition. He played before the three-point line existed, and former LSU coach Dale Brown estimated his average would have been 57 points per game if three-point shots had counted. He also played without a shot clock, which typically forces more possessions and higher scoring for all players.
He earned the nickname while attending Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. He had a habit of releasing the basketball from his side, as if drawing a revolver from a holster, which led to him being called Pistol Pete.
He scored 68 points against the New York Knicks on the 25th of February 1977. At the time, it was the highest single-game total ever by a guard in NBA history, and only Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor had ever scored more in a single game at any position.
Maravich collapsed and died of heart failure on the 5th of January 1988, during a pickup basketball game at the First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, California. An autopsy revealed a rare congenital defect: his left coronary artery was missing from birth, and his right coronary artery had compensated for the defect throughout his life without being detected.
Dylan wrote about Maravich in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, describing him as 'the holy terror of the basketball world' and a 'magician of the court.' Dylan recounted that upon hearing news of Maravich's death in early 1988, he began writing a new song called Dignity that same afternoon.