Cornucopia

It is a story as old as basketball shorts are long.

While a country boy leads his college basketball team toward a national championship in a big city far away, the hometown locals flock to the gym where it all began.

Only, the tale of Florida’s Mike Miller is a little different.

These locals are pigeons.

In a cluttered little corner of a wind-swept prairie, they will be flocking to the gym in an attempt to eat it.

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You want a corn-pone Final Four?

You want corny reminders this is still a sport of playgrounds and driveways and barns?

You want corn-fed college athletes?

Mike Miller can give you more than that.

He can give you an entire palace.

The Corn Palace.

“The World’s Only Corn Palace,” reads the advertisement, and no man worth his salt (and butter) would argue.

Before Miller led the Gators into the national semifinals, against North Carolina tonight in Indianapolis, before he made enough big shots to become the biggest player in this tournament, he ruled the Corn Palace.

“If you haven’t seen it, you’ll never believe it,” Miller said.

Once you have seen it, you will believe in all of it, especially the part about small-town roots enabling the Final Four to withstand storms and remain this country’s most popular collegiate event.

Located on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Main Street in the farm town of Mitchell (pop. 14,191), the Corn Palace is where Miller played his high school basketball.

For the Mitchell Kernels.

In front of a mascot that resembles a winking ear of corn.

In games broadcast by, among others, radio station KORN.

Ready for a real earful?

On the front and side of the gym, as well as on three walls around the actual court, townspeople annually staple hundreds of thousands of ears of corn of various colors.

Those ears, combined with various types of grain, create various murals.

This year’s theme being the millennium, one can plow along the sidewalk in front of yellow-and-black depictions of Martin Luther King and Elvis.

Inside, players shoot free throws while staring into a corn-cobbed version of Mount Rushmore.

Townspeople put together the murals based on a local artist’s drawing.

“It’s like, corn by numbers,” said Dale Odegaard, the Corn Palace’s director of marketing and merchandising.

The corn-lage is reworked every year out of necessity because of, well, those pecking pigeons.

New York has “The House That Ruth Built.”

Mitchell has “The World’s Largest Bird Feeder.”

Have we mentioned the roof? It is adorned with decidedly un-Dakota-like minarets, turrets and domes.

Sitting across the street from Casey’s General Store and Uncle Zeke’s Black Hills Gold Jewelry, the joint looks like something straight from the set of “Ernest Goes to Moscow.”

The birthplace of corn-unism.

Tourists stalk it every summer with one question:

“They all ask, ‘Why?’ ” Odegaard said.

Well, OK, not all of them.

“They come up and say, ‘What the heck is that?” said Robin Ackman, co-owner of the nearby Scoreboard tavern.

The answer to both queries is the same. It is an answer that can be found at the wick of the flame that drove Miller, a 6-foot-8 sophomore, from these desolate rolling fields to this weekend’s national stage.

Built to bolster town pride, the Corn Palace now breathes it.

“You learn, if you want somebody to notice you from South Dakota, you have to bring something different,” Miller said.

Like his driving shot that beat Butler in the final second of overtime in the tournament opener. Like how he doesn’t want to be like Michael Jordan, but Larry Bird.

And like, well, the Corn Palace, which was appropriately built to honor the historical equivalent of a blocked shot.

Explorers Lewis and Clark once said they thought this area would be good for nothing. Some frost-resistant pioneers threw it back in their faces by growing long fields of corn and soybean.

In 1892, the Corn Palace was established to celebrate that highlight reel. It was redone in 1921, the roof was detailed in 1937 and the rest is agri-sports history.

“Yeah, we’ve all heard of the Corn Palace,” said Udonis Haslem, one of Miller’s Florida teammates from inner-city Miami. “I told him, if my high school team ever played up there, we would put so much heat on them, it would become the ‘Popcorn Palace.’ ”

Amid fields dotted with red barns that look like Monopoly hotels on Marvin Gardens, the Corn Palace has become as reliable as Free Parking.

On nights when cattle died and cars stalled and the wind chill hit 50 below, it has become a community’s heart.

“It’s like our own little Boston Garden,” Odegaard said.

This is where 3,500 fill the seats for nearly every home game during basketball season to cheer the state’s most prolific program, which won five state titles in the 1990s.

Many of those same fans also attended the road games, no small feat considering the nearest one is 50 miles away.

This was where Miller, whose family still lives in a modest wood-frame home across from a field filled with farm equipment, learned that basketball was more than just basketball.

And that his calling was higher than any leaping dunk.

“It doesn’t seem like you get a lot of credit, being from South Dakota,” he said. “It’s important I can show everyone about what people from there can do.”

Those people have already shown Miller.

Early in his high school career, during morning shoot-arounds on game days, he would be curious about all the coats draped over the Corn Palace’s front-row seats.

Turns out, those were people saving their seats for the game. Nine hours later.

Ernie Kuyper, Miller’s cousin and best friend, remembers once when the team turned its game cameras to the Corn Palace’s front doors when they opened in mid-afternoon.

“Everybody would come through the door and run to their seats,” he said “It was amazing.”

When people here aren’t watching basketball players, they are searching for them.

Miller was discovered in fourth grade, not by legendary Kernel Coach Gary Munsen, but by Munsen’s wife, Sheryl.

“She was his teacher, and she would watch him during recess, and one day she told me that this boy was something special,” Munsen recalled.

The high school coach visited the class to put on a basketball exhibition, dribbling around his back and through his legs and sinking a right-handed hook.

He then gave the ball to Miller, who did the same thing, only he made the shot left-handed.

“Son, are you left-handed?” Munsen asked.

“Nope,” the boy said.

Munsen knew.

Sheryl died of breast cancer a few years later. “I’m sure looking down from where she’s at, she knows too,” Munsen said.

Miller’s only problem was his weight. When he showed up in eighth grade at about 6 feet, 125 pounds, everyone called him “Skinny.”

To this day, nobody in town but his parents calls him anything else.

Only those in his new life call him Mike.

Skinny grew, and grew, and eventually became a high school All-American and perhaps the best basketball player to ever come from South Dakota.

Not to mention, king of the Corn Palace.

Recalled cousin Kuyper: “He was signing autographs for a half-hour before the games when he was a junior.”

Said Miller, surrounded by cameras and note pads in Indianapolis on Friday: “My status today has actually decreased from when I was in South Dakota. There are a lot more stars here. This is kind of nice.”

He later winced when asked about Thursday’s published reports that he had spoken to an agent more than 20 times during phone calls, a report that proves nothing more than bad judgment, but unsettling nonetheless.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, so this is not a distraction,” he kept saying, shaking his head.

Miller’s parents are scheduled to arrive this afternoon after a two-day drive from Mitchell.

Things will be better then.

While many college players decorate the tape above their ankles with the names of a parent or brother or girlfriend, Miller simply writes, “Family.”

His father, Tom, a former player, is principal at a local elementary school.

In other words, he always had keys to a school gym.

“People ask me a lot about parenting and I always say, ‘Spend time with your children,’ ” said Tom, sitting in his easy chair during a last moment of calm before leaving for Indianapolis. “Basketball enabled me to spend that time. We would just go over to the gym and shoot all night.”

Skinny still does. This summer, Miller and Kuyper would unlock the gym about 11 p.m. and play until 2, pulling garbage cans in the middle of the court and avoiding them as if they were defenders.

The two friends came together again last weekend. Miller was the outstanding player of the East Regional in Syracuse; Kuyper and friends drove 22 hours to watch him.

Miller, whose parents couldn’t make the trip, passed a Final Four T-shirt to Kuyper in the stands. Then later, by the bus, he handed him his snippet of the net.

“Ern, will you drive this home to my dad?” Miller asked. “I owe him.”

“Will do, Skinny,” said Kuyper.

Twenty-two hours later, the snippet was in the living room of that modest wood-frame home across the street from the farm equipment. A mother cried. A father beamed.

So corny. What corn pone. How cool.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

Game 1

Michigan State (30-7) vs. Wisconsin (22-13)

Today, 2:30 p.m., Ch. 2

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Game 2

North Carolina (22-13) vs. Florida (28-7)

Today, 5 p.m., Ch. 2

(30 minutes after first game)

Odd situation: Is Wisconsin upset forthcoming? Page 8

The tortoise and the hare: North Carolina vs. Florida. Page 9