Miller Loves to Be Hard to Like : Pacer Star Guard Becomes Popular With Fans the Hard Way

Of course, he has an image problem. He gets ragged on in about two dozen cities across America for having a sister, Cheryl, who is more decorated in basketball, a sport he is making $3.2 million this season to play, and talks more trash than any three sanitation departments combined.

This has all stayed with Reggie Miller for so long, since his days at UCLA and into his NBA career with the Indiana Pacers, that it has become more like a tattoo than a reputation. It has become a part of him.

He makes the go-ahead shot with 0.8 seconds left at Chicago and gives an exaggerated bow to the crowd, in true hotdog style. It gets shoved back in his face when the Bulls win at the buzzer.

He wraps a bandanna around his shaved head--he has blue and red ones--and dons shaded rectangular glasses for a national-television interview. Team officials and even the NBC people suggest that he lose the garb. He wears it anyway.

He would be a unanimous first-team choice every year if peers voted on players they would most like to see tied down in Death Valley. In July. On an ant hill.

“When I used to play against him, we used to always mess with each other because we had known each other for so many years,” says Pacer guard Byron Scott, a Miller teammate this season. “Everybody hated him.”

This would all be troubling if not for one thing--Miller loves it so. He not only enjoys the reputation, he encourages the notion that one of the best shooting guards in the world could also be the same person who hung out with the Hell’s Angels, Eastern Seaboard Chapter, after Game 1 of the first-round playoff series at Orlando. He does not volunteer that, in fact, he took a couple of Pacer ballboys out to dinner instead.

His image has more spin than his jump shots. During a quiet moment in the home locker room at Market Square Arena, when all his teammates have cleared out after a practice, he allows that “I never thought I would come this far” and that he is very honored at being chosen to play for the United States in the world basketball championships this summer, but “I don’t know if I belong.” The modesty seems sincere.

So the rest is an act?

“I love it,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not out there to win a popularity contest. I’m out there to win basketball games.

“I don’t want to be the most popular guy, like in high school. The best thing is to go into an opposing arena and 15,000 people are focusing on you. That’s the best feeling. Being the most popular, I don’t know, I don’t get into people patting you on the back. I’m into hard work. I never had the best talent or the best jumper. I’ve always been about dirt and sweat. Nothing was ever given to me, so I’m not the nice kind of guy.”

So the rest is an act.

“He likes to show that image, like he can be a villain, but he’s far from that,” Indiana Coach Larry Brown says. “He’s not anything like you see. It bothers me a little bit because I love the game and I think these guys have such an effect on people and kids, but he’s a great example. Maybe some of the things he does on the court are a little crazy and out of whack, but I don’t think that’s him.”

Miller says that it is not, that much of what he does is because it makes good theater and basketball is, after all, a form of entertainment. He blames the biggest of all stages, television, for the bad-guy image getting blown out of proportion, obviously ignoring the person who promotes it. Nice bandanna.

Others suggest that the taunting on-court personality is born of the need to appear tough to compensate for a body that is anything but imposing, with only 180 pounds on a 6-foot-7 frame. Or that even after starring at Riverside Poly High and then UCLA, after proving his worth at every previous level, he truly is insecure with the notion of being considered by many the best shooting guard in the NBA’s Eastern Conference.

What goes on during a game is far more simple. Give him the ball and get out of the way. Forget that bow in Chicago or the mouthing off--this is what really accelerates the pulse rate of opponents: Miller cutting up another defense.

“I don’t know what they think about Reggie,” says Haywoode Workman, the Pacers’ point guard. “I just know they don’t want to leave him open.”

It probably hasn’t helped Miller that complete acceptance has come slowly, even as he has become the franchise’s all-time leading scorer and averaged at least 20 points in four of the last five seasons. The acceptance problem started when the Pacers made him the 11th pick in the 1987 draft--not because he was Reggie Miller from UCLA, but because he was not Steve Alford from Indiana.

Alford epitomized Indiana basketball, having gone from high school star in New Castle, about an hour east of here, to a career with the Hoosiers that included a national championship and a spot on the 1984 Olympic team.

But in his place came the brash Miller, who arrived with everything to prove and then was unable to beat out John Long for playing time. Miller averaged 10 points as a rookie. It was a rough time.

“I brought a lot of L.A. here,” he said. “They had to adjust. I wasn’t going to.”

He blossomed from 10 points per game that first season and 16 the second to 24.6 in 1989-90 while shooting 51.4%, the first time he had broken 50%. That was followed by 22.6 and 51.2%, 20.7 and 50.1% and 21.2 and 47.9% before going 19.9 and 50.3% this season.

He has become the most popular Pacer, if fan mail is an accurate gauge. He is the leading scorer on the first team in their 18-year history to reach the Eastern Conference finals. He likes almost everything about Indianapolis except the weather and loves the people, who he says are much nicer than in Los Angeles.

They love him, too. Most of them. Others still want someone else: Alford.

The former Hoosier went nowhere fast in the NBA and was out of the league after five seasons as a reserve with the Dallas Mavericks and the Golden State Warriors. Now, while Miller has finished third in the league in three-point shooting and is averaging 20.8 points in the playoffs, Alford is coaching tiny Manchester College near the Indiana-Michigan border.

“He’s the best,” Larry Brown says of Miller. “I’ve never seen a guy shoot the ball better, with (as much) range, as easily. If I was going to have somebody play H-O-R-S-E or take the last shot, I think it would be Reggie.”

And what about that comment from Scott on how everybody hated Miller?

“Now that I’m playing with him,” the former Laker says, “I love him to death.”

Better late than never.