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As Feb. 21, 1970 dawned in Baton Rouge, La., LSU’s Pistol Pete Maravich was 0-5 against Kentucky in his career. Now came this, the Pistol’s final chance to beat the Wildcats in the final game of his extraordinary career. Jubilant LSU fans who’d recently finished celebrating Mardi Gras began to arrive at the 9,000-seat John Parker Memorial Coliseum in Baton Rouge. Rarely had a college basketball game been bigger. That day’s regular season finale would be nationally televised, a rarity for the time. Kentucky boasted a No. 2 national ranking, an already legendary coach in Adolph Rupp, and a superstar of the Wildcats’ own, senior forward Dan Issel.

Already this season Maravich and Issel had dueled once, in Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum on January 24, before a standing-room only crowd of 12,500. Maravich went for 55 points in that game, but Issel managed 35 and his Kentucky team won by 13. Now Maravich, who’d set the NCAA career scoring record in Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum in the previous month’s defeat, had his final chance to beat the top team in the SEC.

The crowd was raucous and the arena made it seem more like a bullfight than a basketball game. The court was on top of a dirt floor, the same place where cows were paraded and sold. “It was basically in a rodeo arena,” Issel said. “You walked out on 4×8 plywood planking from the locker room to the elevated floor.”

The television cameras captured the ecstatic Bayou Bengal fans, and millions tuned in across the country, including Perry Pratt, the uncle of Kentucky senior Mike Pratt, who had retired to San Diego.

“He’d never seen me play before. Not in high school, not in college, never,” said Pratt, now a radio analyst for Kentucky baksetball. “Television was a big deal.”

By the end of the game, a new record would be set for regular season college-basketball viewing, breaking the record set by Houston and UCLA in the previous year.

Pistol Pete Maravich, who had been filling the arena since he was a freshman playing on the junior varsity team, was in the midst of leading the nation in scoring for a third consecutive year. Having averaged 43.8 points as a sophomore, 44.2 as a junior, Maravich was once more averaging over 44 points per game. That and 6.2 assists and 5.3 rebounds per game.

Despite all his success, Rupp, who would set the Division-I wins record with 876 victories when he retired in 1972, had a strategy that had thus far led to five victories.

“[Rupp] always told us to play him straight up, one-on-one, because he couldn’t beat us by himself,” Issel said.

With the fast-paced style favored by both Press Maravich, Pete’s dad and the LSU coach, and Rupp, an innovator and proponent of fastbreak basketball, both teams would have many possessions in the game to come.

And so the shootout began in Baton Rouge.

Issel scored then Maravich scored.

Two men who’d grown close as teammates trying out for the 1968 Olympic team sought to one-up each other in a contest that would leave Issel’s Pratt enthralled, almost like a spectator that was handed a jersey.

“I wasn’t surprised that Dan was scoring so many because they had young big men and he got them tired,” Pratt said. “But Pete? It seemed like Pete lived at the free-throw line. He was so creative, did such unexpected things with the basketball that he was always getting fouled.”

In the game Maravich would toe the line 22 times, making 18.

“That’s the real test of the true scorer,” said Pratt, “how many times does he get to the line.”

Ultimately Issel would shoot 19 of 33 for 51 points and also snag 17 rebounds.

But Maravich, a floppy-haired whirling dervish, would shoot 23 of 42 for 64 points.

“I remember watching him making those shots, and he took some wild shots in those days, and thinking, ‘Can they upset this? And then thinking, ‘Nah, they can’t beat us.’”

Indeed Maravich’s 64 points weren’t enough — Kentucky beat the smoking Pistol for the sixth and final time, 121-105.

In a little over a month, Issel and Maravich had combined to score 205 points in the two games between Kentucky and LSU. After the game the duo were supposed to be jointly interviewed. But the Pistol refused to come out of the locker room.

“He was too upset,” said Issel, “so I did the interview alone. I didn’t blame him, I’d have probably done the same thing if we’d lost.”

Inside the locker room a frustrated Maravich responded to reporters’ questions about the game.

“What happened? Well, for one thing, Kentucky was hot as hell. And for another, it seemed every time I looked up one of their guards would lose the ball, it would roll through nine pairs of legs and Issel would stick it in for a three-point play.”

Told of that quote almost 40 years later, Issel laughed.

Then he got serious.

“A basket and a foul was the old 3-pointer. If we’d had three pointers back then? At least 10 or 12 of Pete’s baskets in that game would have been 3-pointers. He’d have gone for over 70.

“Easy,” Issel said.

“That year I came in second in the nation in scoring at almost 34 points a game. Do you know how many points I was behind Pete?”

“Ten!” Issel exhorts, answering his own question.

“He averaged 44! Without 3-pointers!”

“Maravich wasn’t a great shooter, but he was the best ballhandler and passer I’ve ever seen,” Issel said. “Lots of times people just think he was a gunner. I don’t think he gets his rightful place in basketball history for what he could do with a ball in his hands.”

“He was a tremendous passer, and his passes would come from unbelievable angles. He’d hit guys in the back of the head, the face, he’d embarrass you if you weren’t watching him. Bird and Magic, they could pass, but they couldn’t pass like Pete.”

Issel would go on to play 15 seasons in the ABA and NBA, get elected to the Hall of Fame, and currently ranks eighth on the professional basketball scoring list. He went silent for a moment when asked to compare present-day players with Maravich’s ball-handling and passing skills.

Eventually he sighs, reflects back upon a career of basketball, and answers: “No,” he says, “there isn’t anybody today that can handle or pass the ball like Pete. No one.”

Maravich died in 1988 at the age of 40, almost 21 years ago.

“I remember exactly where I was,” says Issel, “at home in Denver and I heard it on the radio. It hit me hard. First because we were friends and second because he was so young.”

But that was well into the future. A year after their torrid shooting contest, Issel, Maravich, and Pratt found themselves on the same airplane as their teams traveled to play an ABA game.

A wistful Maravich confided to Pratt, “Man, I would have loved to play with you guys as teammates. I’m a passer!”

As the 40th anniversary of the game approaches, the memories still linger.

“You know,” says Pratt, “somebody sent me a YouTube link of our game against Maravich. I can see him playing right now, and when I watched that video he looked the exact same as I remember him — flamboyant, charismatic, he played with flair. Everyone would love him today.”

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