He Dislikes Treys on Silver Platter

In his heyday, Ben Hogan hated an easy golf course. He once played in a Palm Springs tournament in which two players shot 61s. “What,” asked Hogan, “am I doing on a golf course where people can shoot 61s?”

In a way, Reggie Miller, the basketball player, can relate to Hogan. Miller is a 6-foot-7 shooting guard for the Indiana Pacers. He is the leading scorer in Pacer history, an inspired player who smiles a lot on court and often gives the impression the game is fun, almost just a playground shoot-around again. Of course, when he gets the ball, the joke’s over for the other team.

His specialty is the long-distance basket, the three-point shot, basketball’s version of the home run. Reggie has made 882 shots at long range. He is the equivalent of battleship Indiana or the Pacers’ railroad gun.

But Reggie is unhappy. The three-point basket, which used to be 23 feet 9 from the basket, has been marked down to 22 feet.

Reggie feels like Hogan would if he saw them chopping down a tree or removing a sand trap. Or moving the tee up to take 25 yards off a finishing hole at Augusta or St. Andrews. Turning a par four into a par five.

“It’s too tempting,” grouses Miller.

Also, too easy. Reggie doesn’t need the extra foot and a half. For him, 26 feet would be temptation enough. Reggie threw in 840 threes from 23-9, and a lot of them were from almost midcourt. When he’s on, Miller can make them from the locker room.

Hogan used to feel that way about an easy course. It eliminated shotmaking. It put the inferior player on the same plane as the championship player. If the opera doesn’t have high C in it, everybody is Caruso. And Nijinsky wants a Swan Lake, not a fox trot.

And Reggie Miller doesn’t want any 22-foot threes. Reggie wants to run the ribbon clerks out of this game. Thirty feet would do him just fine. In fact, when the now-defunct ABA put the three-point basket in the pro game back in ‘67, the range was 30 feet. At that distance, there were few takers. At 22 feet, the air may be filled with jump shots this year.

Basketball is in a quandary anyway. Saddled with the 10-foot basket, which was deemed perfectly adequate back in the days when the human race was five to seven inches shorter on average than it is today, the game now sees a courtful of giants who drop baskets in from above like a guy posting a letter in a mailbox. And at 280 pounds, they usually go to the basket like a buffalo to water. Shaquille O’Neal doesn’t need a jump shot any more than Bronko Nagurski or Larry Csonka did.

The designers of the game saw basketball as an antidote to the physicality of football. They never envisioned a sport in which a basket would not be a 20-foot set but a two-inch drop. In their day, seven-footers went in the circus, not a sport.

The old ABA was scorned for its introduction of the three-point basket, but by 1979, the NBA reinstated the shot. And made it seven feet shorter.

It was perceived as a way to level the field between the seven-footers and the six-footers, but even then it was used only sparingly and didn’t make much of a difference in the game. Dunk shots were still preferred 2-to-1 over three-pointers.

Reggie Miller was one of a few players who made an art form out of the three. Larry Bird led the league two seasons in a row with 82 one season and 90 the next. Dale Ellis of San Antonio was the first to pop in more than 1,000. Dan Majerle of Phoenix broke the one-season mark with 192 last season.

Miller is probably the game’s most unsung superstar. He wasn’t drafted until the 11th pick by Indiana when he came out of UCLA and never became “Air” Miller or “Magic” or “Downtown.”

Part of Reggie’s problem was his happy-go-lucky appearance on the court. Actually, it was misleading. When Reggie grins, it’s a good time to check your watch or your wallet. And he wasn’t above exchanging taunts with a Spike Lee or whoever else was at courtside rooting against him.

Then there’s geography. Indianapolis isn’t really in the endorsement loop, but Miller electrified the basketball world last June when, playing against Patrick Ewing and the lordly New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden, Miller threw in 25 points in the fourth quarter one night, including a record five three-pointers. He put the worm in the Big Apple.

He made the Dream Team II in the World Championships, where he became the second-leading scorer. If it weren’t for Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon, he might have been the league’s MVP.

So, he doesn’t like to see that magical three-pointer cheapened. He doesn’t want rinky-dinks running up scores taking his shots. Like Hogan, he doesn’t want the fairway mowed, the Pacific Ocean taken out of play, the rough cut or the game played from the white tees. Great boxers don’t want to fight palookas, great tennis players don’t want to play 200th-seeded players. And Miller wants a three-point basket you can hardly see. Make basketball into the Battle of Jutland, not a dockfight, and Reggie’ll blow you out of the water.

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