WHERE ARE THEY NOW? : NIGEL MIGUEL : The Dream: Take II : After Flopping in Several NBA Auditions, Notre Dame Graduate Took His Act to Hollywood

As far back as he can remember, Nigel Miguel had the dream. The NBA. He clung to his dream with unshakable conviction.

And now, here he is, locked in the defensive crouch that brought him fame at UCLA and made him the New Jersey Nets’ second draft pick in 1985. The bright lights glare down upon him and the crowd gets nervous. And here comes Charles Barkley, pounding the ball against the court and eyeing Miguel confidently.

Suddenly, Barkley spins and slams his 265-pound body against the defender, sending Miguel reeling backward. He lands hard on his back . . . in a swimming pool?

Cut. Print it.

Miguel’s NBA dream fizzled. His was a career that died while still in its shell.

Today, the former basketball standout at Notre Dame High is an actor.

Hey, nobody ever put a one-dream limit on life.

Miguel has been cast in several big-time commercials, including spots for Reebok, Converse, Nike and Pepsi, but he got his biggest break yet when he landed the role of Dwight the Flight in the hit film “White Men Can’t Jump.” The work comes in steadily now, and he said he will earn more than $100,000 this year chasing his new dream of acting stardom.

Last week he said he picked up more than $12,000 in a supporting position to Barkley in a lavish Nike commercial made at the Culver Studios in Culver City. His roles included being knocked into the swimming pool and later taking a Barkley elbow to the chest that toppled him and eight other defenders like dominoes.

OK. So it wasn’t quite Anthony Hopkins in “Silence of the Lambs.”

“I’m here to learn,” said Miguel, 29, who still lives in Pacoima. “I’m here to talk to the directors and cameramen and watch and study. I’m here to learn my craft.

“This is now my basketball. I live this like I used to live hoop.”

Ah, hoop. Shattered backboards of life. He was the 61st player chosen in the 1985 NBA draft, a defensive wizard who was just starting to refine his offensive skills. He was about to walk into his own dream.

“I’ll go in there as a sleeper and I’ll turn a lot of heads around,” he told The Times the day he was drafted.

Miguel was about to wake up.

He was cut by the Nets and spent what was supposed to be the best year of his life in the magnificently rural town of La Crosse, Wis., playing in the Continental Basketball Assn. But instead of lying down, Miguel used that season to impress a couple of NBA teams, making the All-CBA rookie team as a point guard.

New Jersey, which had let him go just months earlier, was one team that liked what it saw. Again. The Lakers were the other. Both invited him to training camp for the 1986-87 season and he chose the Nets because they offered a two-year deal. The Lakers offered only a one-year contract.

The timing was perfect. In addition to the contract, which virtually guaranteed Miguel a roster spot under any circumstances, the Nets had lost in the previous months all four of their 1985-86 guards--Otis Birdsong, Micheal Ray Richardson, Kelvin Ransey and Darwin Cook--to either trades, injuries or drug-related suspensions.

“I was there,” Miguel said. “If I wasn’t the starting point guard, I certainly would have contributed some healthy minutes. I had gotten my chance.”

In the final week of training camp, Miguel suffered a broken bone in his left heel. The Nets sent him home and paid off the one guaranteed year of his contract.

The dream had not yet died, but it was definitely hooked up to life-support equipment. Miguel came back to the Nets in 1987 but he was a step slower. Again the Nets cut him.

The dream was given last rites.

“The fire had died,” Miguel said. “I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to explain it, but the edge that I always had was my willingness to work harder than anyone else at basketball. After the injury, I lost that. It was gone.

“And it was sad.”

The injury to his foot had forced Miguel to the sideline of the game for the first time since he was a kid. While he was there, however, he got his first chance to take a glance at what was going on outside basketball.

There was, he was surprised to find, a world out there.

At first, he didn’t much care for it.

“Being out of basketball for the first time made me realize that I hadn’t been in it for the money or the fame or any of that,” he said. “I realized that I just loved the game, that my pleasure was just in playing the game. But at the same time I realized all of that, I also had to deal with the idea that it was all over.”

Quickly, however, Miguel pulled himself out of the deep sadness. He had mulled a career as an actor, and now he put Plan B into motion. Within months he had an agent and shortly after that, late in 1987, he had a small part in a Reebok commercial. Other commercials followed and then, in April of last year, he auditioned for and won the role of Dwight the Flight in the Ron Shelton-directed “White Men Can’t Jump.” This new career now shows the same promise his basketball career once did.

“I’ve worked with Nigel several times,” said David Fincher, who directed last week’s work on the Nike commercial starring Barkley. “Nigel is good. He’s very good. The camera works on him.”

The new business is much different than Miguel’s old business. Basketball was all action. Acting is, well, mostly it is a business of sitting around. During the recent Nike shoot, the hours and days droned on as the director and his assistants frantically searched for perfection.

In one scene, a barber buffing a shine onto Barkley’s bald head is told to go for the perfect towel snap, a flamboyant, emphatic crack that seemed to exist only in the director’s mind. Five, six, seven takes. Over and over the towel was snapped across Barkley’s head but never quite right, as if the perfect towel snap onto a bald guy’s head is going to make everyone rush out to buy a $100 pair of sneakers.

Miguel stood off to the side. Watching.

“It’s not boring to me because I want to see it all, to learn it all,” he said. “But to be honest, it’s not like basketball. There’s quite a bit of standing around in this business. But this is what I want. This is my new life.”

And it won’t, he insists, be his last life.

Miguel earned a degree in political science from UCLA in 1985 and there is yet another dream that races through his mind, a dream planted as a child in his native Belize in Central America, the land his family left when Miguel was 6 for a life in the United States. It is a dream of helping. He would like, he said, to gain enough fame as an actor in the next decade to use the prominence to bring a new age to Belize, perhaps as an ambassador to the small nation.

“That is the ultimate goal,” he said. “The people there need so much. I think I can help them in a major way. When my name is known by enough people, perhaps by the time I’m 40 years old, then I will embark on that journey.”

Barkley, a friend of Miguel’s since 1981 when the two--along with Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing and other NBA mega-stars--played in a high school All-American game, knows the details of his friend’s life. Miguel has proved himself to be, Barkley said, tougher than some of the mega-stars.

“The NBA is a tough business and Nigel didn’t get the breaks,” Barkley said. “But he is a good man. When life puts you down like it did to him, it’s easy to stay down. Nigel has gotten back up in a big way.

“That doesn’t always happen to people.”