It Wasn’t Just Another Night Out on the Town

She was bouncing off the walls. Even her three dogs thought she was losing it. They wouldn’t come when she called. And with no one else hanging around at her home in Studio City, there was no real need to clean up, dress or do anything but pace the floors. By the time she began shooting pool, Cheryl Miller, an all-star talker anyway, was having a semi-crazy conversation with herself.

It didn’t take long for Katrina McNeal to figure out that her friend the basketball celebrity was becoming a basket case. Not quite kicking and screaming but practically, Cheryl was in dire need of being dragged from her own house.

“Get dressed,” Katrina commanded.

“Do I have to?” Cheryl asked.

“Cheryl, comb your hair!”

“OK, OK.”

The old Air Force master sergeant, Saul Miller, Cheryl’s pop, would have been proud of the way Katrina barked out those orders. She and several friends stuffed belligerent Cheryl into a car and drove her to La Boheme, a lovely restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard that generally prefers customers who dress and comb their hair. Their party of six was seated and soon began talking about everything but what everyone there was thinking about.

No one mentioned that telephone call the women’s basketball coach from USC was expecting the next morning. Not a peep. They asked, “How’s your team?” or they asked, “How’s your food?” but all through dinner they dodged that other subject nimbly. Cheryl was like a pitcher in a dugout, sitting beside teammates who don’t want to jinx the no-hitter. Until finally her musician friend, Richie Coetzen, could stand it no more and just blurted out, “You must be going through hell.”

“Richie!” everyone said.

No, it’s all right, it’s all right, Cheryl reassured them, but in reality she was the one who required the reassurance. Self-confident Cheryl, cocky Cheryl, never in her life a shrinking violet . . . she was the one who found herself turning her good buddy into “my therapist for the evening,” the one who couldn’t believe the words pouring out of her own mouth when she first began saying, “I have to get it! I have to!” and then, within minutes, asking, “But what happens if I don’t?”

But over dinner she pretended. Oh, what--that Hall of Fame thing? That induction into the shrine of college basketball’s immortals? That?

“I rationalized. I humbled myself. I put on a beautiful act,” Cheryl couldn’t help but confess later. “I did the old, ‘Oh, it was enough just to be nominated.’ Glenn Close couldn’t have topped the performance I gave. I said, ‘Oh, I’m sure God in His infinite wisdom and time will . . . ‘ which I believed in my heart, only maybe not at that moment. You know?”

The confirming phone call from the other coast would be coming the next morning, early if not bright, maybe before the sun came up. Cheryl couldn’t stand the suspense. It was after 11 p.m. and she needed to get to bed, but no way she could sleep, so she loaded up a Sega Genesis cartridge and sat there, 31 years old, playing Desert Strike.

Every basketball Cheryl had ever bounced--the one that rolled into the bushes that a 5-year-old girl fetched for her brothers, the one that gave her a 105-point night for Riverside Poly High, the one she dribbled against China in the Summer Olympics, the one she rolled to her players on her first morning as a coach--had brought her to this point, to this long night’s waiting for a wake-up call. All of Cheryl Miller’s hoop dreams were coming true.

As a kid, her nickname was “That Girl.” The boys chose sides and That Girl wanted to play. The boys got up a game and That Girl got picked but quick. That Girl could play. Nobody had to tell her big brothers or her little brother that. It was the little one, Reggie, who came up with the scam that made them the Dairy Queen money.

This was long before that “White Men Can’t Jump” movie with Wesley and Woody hustling two-on-two games all over L.A., the cool guy and the klutz, conning a couple of dudes into betting a few bucks. This was on, oh, say the schoolyard at John Adams Elementary, where skinny young Reggie would shoot by himself, waiting for a couple of pigeons, while sister Cheryl stood down at the other end of the playground, handling a basketball like a wrecking ball, aiming at the backboard and instead hitting the fence.

“You guys want to play me?” Reggie would ask two suckers. “My friend hasn’t shown up, but I’ll take my sister down there.”

Who was busy running toward her basket without bothering to dribble.

Or sometimes she came out of the bushes. “I hate coming out of the bushes,” Cheryl would shout at Reggie. “Why can’t you come out of the bushes?”

“Because you’re the one who’s got to be clumsy. You’ve got to do that girlie-girl stuff,” was Reggie’s reply.

Well, they both went on to bigger and better things, didn’t they? From the $5 or $10 they would take to the DQ for ice cream came the rise to scholastic stardom. The Cheryl Miller sister-act sting operation officially came to an end on that night she did the 105 number on Norte Vista, when the Poly coach pulled her two minutes from the end and Cheryl thought maybe she had scored 80 or so. Her cover was blown. People knew her name and face after that.

That was the night that made her fully appreciate what happened to Reggie last summer at Madison Square Garden. Everyone already was aware that Reggie Miller could play, but it wasn’t until he did everything but spin Spike Lee’s Malcolm X cap right off his head, popping for 25 in one quarter and then wrapping his fingers around his throat to mock Spike’s choking Knicks, that the whole pro basketball world became Reggie-conscious.

Cheryl could see it in his eyes.

“We’re watching him at my home on TV and we’re just going nuts,” she said. “You know how when you watch Michael Jordan play and you see him go into that zone? Well, this was like that, except Reggie’s my flesh and blood. Reggie’s been that good before, but this time it’s the NBA playoffs and on television and he’s right there in Spike’s face. Before the choke, Reggie made one from around five steps behind the three-point line. I could see his eyes on TV and they were lit up like stars.”

Cheryl used to ask herself basketball’s million-dollar question: “Why don’t I have that Y chromosome?” She had ability like Reggie and personality like Reggie. Nothing he did to those Knicks that night was anything she hadn’t done herself, and worse. After a tournament game against Louisiana Tech, Cheryl sat on the rim. They warned her not to do anything like that after the Tennessee game, so she didn’t. Instead she did a cartwheel.

And now she felt like doing another because basketball’s Hall of Fame was dialing her number. The man on the line said the vote was unanimous. He confirmed that Cheryl Miller and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had become certified gods of the pantheon together. Cheryl began to twist and shout. She shook Katrina and said, “I did it! I did it!” Katrina was happy to have baby-sat her friend and she laughed and said, “OK, can I go home now?”

“Think Kareem acted the same way?” Cheryl was asked.

“I tend to doubt it,” she said. “He probably just put on that ‘Silence of the Lambs’ face of his.”

Later that day, Cheryl took a plane to New York, did one of those perky morning-TV programs, then took in a Knicks-Milwaukee game at the Garden. She wasn’t there long when she saw Spike Lee coming. Cheryl flinched. She was in no mood to trade nasties with the Spikester at that moment. She was still basking in that Hall of Fame afterglow. She was just about ready to go for her throat or his throat or somebody’s throat when the film director introduced himself and said, “I just want to say congratulations. How’s it feel?”

Like she had been nominated and won.

That’s how it felt.