Will the Choke Be on Him?

If there’s a word to describe Reggie Miller, the basketball player, it’s derisive . And contrary might get it too.

He distrusts sentiment. He’s the kind of guy who might bite the coin you paid him with. He’s got a lot of con in him. You’d want to cut the cards. He laughs a lot. At you.

He loves to taunt you. He was almost ecstatic when he found the movie maker, Spike Lee, at courtside at the Knicks’ games rooting for New York. It buoys Reggie. Makes his day. He gets in a “Here, watch this!” mode. Or, like that magician who calls you out of the audience and pulls a quarter out of your ear. Or your watch.

But, you know, you can talk all you want of Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and John Stockton, I don’t know of any man more dangerous with a basketball in his hands than Reggie Miller. Particularly with the game on the line. The more desperate the situation, the more he rises to it.

I don’t know of an episode in basketball history more electrifying than the show he put on in the closing moments of the Knick-Indiana Pacer game at Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday.

First of all, his team trailed by six points with 18 seconds to go. Whereupon, Reggie scored six points in less than four seconds. Then, he calmly made two free throws to give his team a game that New York thought it had safely won.

Reggie was in his element. The Knicks, ahead, 105-99, with 18.7 seconds left, were banging chests, high-fiving, grinning from ear to ear. The game was in the refrigerator. Spike Lee was waving a towel. Broadway was the Great White Way again. The occasion seemed to call for a rousing George M. Cohan march.

That’s when Reggie gave his regards to Broadway. They’ll remember him in Herald Square, all right.

Here’s what happened: With time running out, Reggie grabbed the ball, stutter-stepped to the top of the left key and swished in a three-point shot.

OK, 16.4 seconds left. New York has to inbound the ball. The Knicks’ Anthony Mason panics, facing a five-second violation, and fires the ball in.

Reggie intercepts it. (Actually, the Knicks’ Greg Anthony had fallen down.)

Reggie has an open two-pointer, but he quickly dribbles back beyond the three-point line, turns and fires. Swish! The score is tied. The ultimate audacity.

There are 13.3 seconds left. Then, the Knicks’ John Starks gets fouled. He goes to the line with a chance to reclaim the game.

He misses both free throws. New York’s Patrick Ewing gets the rebound, tries a fall-away jumper, hits the rim. Miller grabs that rebound, is fouled by Mason.

With 7.5 seconds left, Miller calmly makes both his free throws. The Indiana Pacers have crushingly defeated the New York Knicks, 107-105.

It was Miller Time, all right.

But, then, Miller got light. Reggie apparently ran past the Knicks’ locker room clutching his throat and gargling and shouting, “Choke artists!”

Miller was shooting from three-point range again. Loving the man-you-love-to-hate role he has chosen to play in front of New York fans. He is the worm in the Big Apple.

He relishes the role. When you play for Indianapolis, you tend to feel you might be overlooked. It’s well established in New York that if you make it there, you make it everywhere. Make a great catch in a World Series in Oakland, it’s in the agate. Make it in New York, it makes Page 1. They write songs about it.

So, Reggie wants New York to know he was there.

But is it smart? Would he be better off to say, as Joe Louis always used to say, “Another lucky night,” and let it go at that?

Not Reggie’s style. Reggie plays in-your-face basketball on and off the court. As he said when someone asked him why he ran back for a three-point basket: “On the road, you got to put the dagger in.”

The question is, who did he put the dagger into?

Perhaps you noticed in Game 2, it was New York’s turn to do a sack dance. The Knicks came out with fire in their eyes and mayhem in their hearts. Sometimes it looked as if the whole team sagged in on Reggie.

It was a typical New York game--62 fouls, fewer than 100 points for each team, muscle in the key. No Pacer had more than 13 points, Reggie had only 10 and only one three-point basket in 34 minutes versus two in four seconds on Sunday.

Coaches as a class dislike gloating on the part of the troops. It inflames the victims of it. Some New Yorkers may still remember 60 years ago when the New York Giants’ manager, Bill Terry, within a victory of the National League pennant, and scheduled to meet Brooklyn in a final series, elected to deliver the mocking line, “Brooklyn? Is Brooklyn still in the league?”

It was a taunt to haunt. Brooklyn was still in the league. But New York wasn’t in the World Series. Brooklyn won both games, knocking the Giants out.

Baseball is not a contact sport and not ordinarily thought of as a game in which emotion counted. Basketball is not supposed to be a contact sport either. But it is. And emotion counts.

Should Reggie have called a timeout on himself? Should he have hurried past the Garden celebrities and the Knicks’ locker room murmuring, “Another lucky night”?

Has he handed an edge to Pat Riley’s Knicks? Is he the Bill Terry of the ‘90s?

Tune in tonight to find out. He may be the one playing in a muzzle. Or he may be the one making all those three-point shots and pointing a finger derisively.

Whatever happens, you can bet you’ll never hear Pat Riley asking, “Indiana? Is Indiana still in the league?” He’d choke on it.