Solving the Mystery of Little Apartment and Why It Leaked

Mystery shrouds the digs of UCLA superstar Reggie Miller.

Perched above the garage of a mansion built in 1927, the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, Reggie’s apartment was once the quarters of the estate chauffeur. Nobody seems to know what happened to the original occupant, although some say that on dark and stormy nights in Holmby Hills he can be heard jingling the Rolls-Royce keys and moaning about working weekends.

The apartment has become an exhibit in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. investigation of the UCLA Bruins and 6-foot 8-inch high school superduperstar recruit Sean Higgins.

The NCAA has investigated whether Miller paid rent on the quarters. It has investigated whether Sean Higgins was promised that he would inherit the chauffeur’s quarters when Miller passes on to his great reward--a million-dollar job in the National Basketball Assn. It has investigated Higgins’ allegations that UCLA alumnus Steve Antebi, the wealthy owner of the estate, also offered Higgins a car and money to sign at UCLA.

While the NCAA is unraveling those mysteries, though, probably the most intriguing mystery is why anyone would want to live in this place. Let’s let Antebi describe the quarters.

“It has a tiny bathroom and tiny kitchenette down a dark, murky stairway that (Miller) can barely fit through,” Antebi has said. “It’s basically in a state of disrepair.”

In real estate parlance, it’s a charming efficiency rental. The place sounds so spooky it’s no wonder the NCAA and Pacific 10 investigators who quizzed Antebi declined his invitation to inspect the quarters. The Hardy boys would shy away from this place. Norman Bates would get goose bumps.

“It’s very small,” Antebi says. “There were terrible leaks during the rainy season.”

The same could be said about the government’s game plan for the Iran fiasco. But that’s another story.

Questions come to mind. If the apartment is so small, does Reggie Miller have to leave his ego outside? And why didn’t Antebi, a wealthy fellow, have some minor repairs done? Patch the roof, at least, or have the stairway de-murked?

“Why should I (fix the place up)?” Antebi asks. “I don’t have a chauffeur. Reggie walked in one day and said, ‘Can I live here?’ I said, ‘If you want to live in squalor, it’s up to you.’

“Reggie is a friend,” Antebi continues. “If a (nonathlete) student were a friend, I wouldn’t have charged (rent). I only charged Reggie because I figured someday someone would ask. I’m glad I charged him.”

Exactly what Antebi did or did not do will be decided by the NCAA and Pac-10 sleuths.

My uneducated guess is that the NCAA will release Higgins from his letter of intent to UCLA, based heavily on his testimony that he was coerced into signing by his stepfather. Again a guess, but UCLA will get off with a light penalty or reprimand for Higgins’ illegal visit to Antebi’s manse.

Antebi claims he’s not a booster of the UCLA athletic program, and therefore the visit was legal. But my hunch is that the NCAA and Pac-10 will disagree with him on this question of semantics.

Booster or no booster, Antebi doesn’t much like being lumped in the public mind with the wheeling, dealing, cash-flashing alum-scum like the SMU sugar daddies.

“If we (Bruins) buy our players, we’ve done a pretty inefficient job,” Antebi says. “We haven’t had a first-string (high school) All-American since Marques Johnson (a freshman in 1974). Sean Higgins would’ve been the first since then.”

But he would have been more a hostage than a player. Piece together the clues. On letter-of-intent day, Higgins is a mysterious no-show at his own press conference. Bruin Coach Walt Hazzard rushes to the UCLA campus early in the morning, in a near state of panic, to collect the signed letter of intent from Higgins’ mother. Then Higgins begs Hazzard for a release from the letter of intent.

Then Higgins goes public with a chilling story about being coerced at batpoint to sign the letter, and says: “I don’t give a hoot about UCLA. And I never did, either.”

Sounds like a true-blue Bruin, doesn’t he?

UCLA Athletic Director Pete Dalis says he has turned the matter over to the Pac-10 office, since it was a conference letter of intent. Hazzard says the matter is out of his hands.

Poppycock. With a word, Hazzard or Dalis could set the kid free.

That would make something of a mockery of the letter-of-intent system, of course. In the future, every high school star who changed his mind or even wavered in his commitment to Hoop U would simply pull a Sean Higgins.

Every coach would be forced to wait until the first day of practice to see who might show up to play on the team. No coach would live to be 40.

Still, the Bruins should kiss off this particular superstar and get back to the business of playing basketball games. And give the tiny apartment back to the ghosts of chauffeurs past.