Dale Brown says perseverance key to success; event raises money for St. Mary Outreach

Persevering through the struggles of life and knowing what you want to achieve are the keys to gaining success and happiness, former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown said Wednesday.
Brown was the guest speaker during a St. Mary Outreach Fundraiser at the Petroleum Club of Morgan City. The event included a dinner and a silent auction.
St. Mary Outreach Executive Director Brenda Liner said this fundraiser was an inaugural event that organizers hope to make an annual one.
St. Mary Outreach, which mainly serves as a food bank, relies on donations to operate. Fundraisers are extremely important “for us to keep our doors open and be able to serve our community,” Liner said.
The organization also provides cleaning products, hygiene products, baby formula, diapers, clothing, rent assistance and life-sustaining medication.
Brown, 80, is the winningest coach in LSU men’s basketball history; his teams played in 15 consecutive NCAA tournaments; and he went to two Final Fours. Brown grew up poor, raised by a single mother who cared deeply about people, he said.
Brown’s mother had an eighth-grade education, but told him something that has stuck with him the rest of his life.
His mother told him, “If you spend too much time polishing your image, you’re eventually going to tarnish your character, and you’ll be an unhappy person.”
Among the people who greatly struggled with knowing what they wanted out of life was the greatest offensive college basketball player of all time, Pete Maravich.
Maravich averaged 44.2 points per game during his four-year college career with no shot clock or three-point line.
Maravich’s father, Press Maravich, was the head coach at LSU during that time. LSU fired Press Maravich after Pete Maravich left the school, and then hired Brown as head coach.
“Pistol Pete” Maravich was a legend who “had everything,” Brown said.
Brown had never met Pete Maravich until years after his college career when Maravich was doing color commentary for a nationally televised LSU game.
Brown asked Maravich to come talk to his team and Maravich agreed. Maravich was the highest paid athlete in the history of sports when he entered the NBA. He led the NBA in scoring and is in the college basketball Hall of Fame, he told the team.
Maravich said, “I had everything the world calls success, but I was a miserable human being.”
Maravich chased women and did drugs, but was extremely unhappy, Brown said. One morning, Maravich put a pistol in his mouth and was ready to pull the trigger.
For some reason, Maravich decided to put the pistol down, and all of a sudden, Maravich had a peace come over him and accepted God into his life, Brown said.
Brown also told the story of a time he had just finished giving a lecture at a military base in Germany when he got a tap on the shoulder. Brown turned around and saw “a giant of a man,” probably 6 feet, 9 inches tall and 250 pounds. The man had a stutter.
He told Brown he was going to try out for a basketball team, but couldn’t dunk a basketball and he tired quickly after running up and down the court a few times. He asked Brown to show him some exercises.
“I was heading back to Ba-ton Rouge the next day, and I said, ‘What I’ll do, soldier, is when I get back to LSU, I’ll send you our weight training program. I said, ‘How long have you been in service, soldier?’” Brown said.
“I can still see this giant of a guy,” Brown said. “He smiles … and says, ‘Coach Brown,’ he says, ‘I’m not in the service.’ I said, ‘You’re not?’ He said, ‘Coach Brown, I’m only 13 years old.”
That person was Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal’s father was a career military man stationed in Germany at the time. Brown approached O’Neal’s father, who told Brown that basketball “is all fine and good,” he said.
“But it’s time blacks developed intellectualism so they can be presidents of corporations instead of janitors,” he told Brown. ‘They can be generals in the army instead of a lowly sergeant like me. If you’re interested in my son’s intellect, someday we might talk.’”
Brown received a letter from O’Neal saying he did everything Brown told him to do, but his high school coach cut him from the team, telling O’Neal he was too slow and clumsy and “could never be a basketball player.”
Brown then responded to O’Neal, telling him how to handle negative criticism. If you always try to do your best and never give up, “sooner or later God will take care of everything else,” Brown said.
O’Neal now has a doctoral degree and is one of the most benevolent people Brown has ever met.