Waiting Is Not So Easy : Not Being Focus Is Adjustment for Heat’s Miner

There never was anyone like Harold Miner nor have there been many rookie seasons like his.

Miner, a young man inclined to give thanks for his blessings, is simply thankful he has to go through it only once.

Between dreams come true, he has been snubbed in the draft and buried on the Miami bench, from which he still rises only intermittently. He returns to the Sports Arena tonight to play the Clippers, still smiling, a year older, several wiser.

Peaks and valleys?

He’s had a few.

The consensus No. 5 player in the draft, he found teams No. 5-11 looking for something other than a shooting guard and slipped to Miami at No. 12. The Heat already had four experienced guards but jumped at the chance to fit him in.

Miner was averaging 12 minutes when his childhood heroes, the Lakers, arrived in Miami on Dec. 28. He rose from the end of the bench to score 18 points, took over the game in the fourth quarter with 11 of those points and led the Heat to victory.

In his first trip back to the Forum he used to sneak into as an Inglewood teen, he made all six of his shots. He played only 11 minutes while the crowd chanted “Harold! Harold!”

He won his first NBA dunk contest at the All-Star game.

Recently promoted to No. 4 guard, he is playing more, averaging 9.6 points and 18.2 minutes, with the usual flashes of lightning and periods of darkness. Last week, he missed seven of his eight shots, came down on a fast break with the Heat trailing the Bulls by a point in the closing minutes, pulled up and sank a 17-footer with a hand in his face, putting Miami ahead to stay in its biggest victory of the season.

Then he went two for 10 in his next two games and played a total of 28 minutes.

“Lately I’ve been playing pretty much 22 to 25 minutes a game,” Miner said a couple of days ago, “but then, every now and then it might slip . . . dramatically.

“It was real tough early, not playing, but I just tried to use it as a learning experience and tried to not just sit there and complain. I wanted to sit there and learn, see what the guys are doing, how guys defend other guys, just little stuff like that.”

He had some stuff to work on, all right.

At USC, not to mention Inglewood High, he didn’t have to get with any program. He was the program. The offense began after he got into position.

Not many NBA rookies get the ball on the wing, wait patiently for all their teammates to clear out, speed-dribble through their legs to lull the defender and perhaps their teammates to sleep and then make their move.

Perhaps Michael (Grown-up) Jordan could have gotten away with it.

Harold (Baby Jordan) Miner couldn’t.

So the adjustment process began, slowly.

“I think he’s had a major adjustment,” Coach Kevin Loughery said. “I think most of your rookies, as we all know, come into the NBA, it’s a tremendous adjustment defensively . He’s had as much, if not more adjustment offensively . . . which you don’t see as often.”

Though he never complained aloud, Miner’s happy face grew long. Various teammates, not to mention opponents, adopted him. Miner isn’t merely a Southern California sensation. When the Rockets made their pick at No. 10 in a public ceremony on draft day, the Houston crowd chanted Miner’s name and booed the selection of Robert Horry. Loughery says half the questions he gets are about the playing time of his rookie guard.

“I talk to him (Miner) all day,” teammate John Salley says. “I’m like his big brother. I explain to him certain things: ‘We’ve got five guards and four of them play your position. You’re a rookie. There’s a lot of pressure on the coach.’

“At one time, he was getting really down. I said, ‘Let’s run some sprints.’ I didn’t need to run. . . . Sure enough, Kevin Edwards got sick while we were on the West Coast and Harold was getting 19-20 (minutes) a game. I told him, ‘You should be happy that you ran, that you stayed in shape.’

“He has to realize, everybody on this team was a star in college. But he’s the one everybody goes to. Different teams have different roles. He came in here to be a scorer. Now he’s got to develop.”

Says teammate Rony Seikaly: “We all try to encourage him to keep his spirits up, tell him, ‘It’ll come, it’ll come. You’re going through what everybody else went through.’ He’s got so much confidence, it’s not going to go down. Sooner or later, the coach is going to have to play him.

“I’ve said it before, I’d pay money to come see Harold Miner play because he’s just so exciting.”

Salley introduced Miner to his former Piston teammate, Joe Dumars, a Harold idol, and Dumars adopted Harold, too. Ironically, if Miner’s explosiveness evokes comparisons to Jordan, his personality is more like the low-key Dumars.

Flamboyant on the floor, Miner is mellow off it.

He had other adjustments to make, too.

The homeboy who had never been out of Los Angeles for longer than a USC trip now lived in a foreign land. To give it that Inglewood feeling, he moved his brother, Joe, in with him. He has flown about 10 of his best friends from Inglewood out to visit, several of them more than once, at a cost of about $800 per round-trip ticket.

He would have brought out some of his USC teammates, but they were in season. As soon as they are out of the NIT, some of them will be winging their way to Florida, too. When Miner’s friends talk about Air Harold, they don’t mean his dunking.

“It wasn’t so much tough to get used to living there as it was to leaving L.A.,” he says.

“I just miss the little things. . . . Where I grew up, I used to dribble up and down my hill, just handling the ball all hours of the day and night, just going up and down the hill on the street where I lived.”

Now he lives in an upscale neighborhood without a hill.

Life, it’s an adventure.