Enemy Brings Out His Best

Reggie Miller alert: Watch out, Laker fans, he has you where he wants you.

Looking for the reason he bricked his homecoming and the biggest game of his life, Miller discovered it was the usual: insufficient fear and/or loathing.

Before Wednesday’s opener of the NBA finals, a big game for Miller usually involved New York, which he grew up hating, rather than Los Angeles, where he just grew up.

Hating the Knicks was easy, but how can he hate the Lakers? He sees them twice a year and for all the hype, all they’ve done recently is self-destruct theatrically each spring. (Of course, the series is young and Coach Phil Jackson hasn’t made known his thoughts on the American heartland yet.)

“I don’t have any bad feelings about L.A.,” Miller said Thursday, peering at reporters through his traditional wraparound dark glasses. “But you know, you need that extra motivation . . . something to get you ticked off. I think I’ve created that myself by going one for 16 in Game 1 of my first-ever NBA finals.

“So I’m more upset with myself now. Now I got to contend with myself, which is kind of scary, if you can believe that.”

What’s so hard to believe?

There has never been anyone like this 6-foot-7, see-through waif from Riverside Poly High, UCLA and Indiana who didn’t seem cut out for major college ball, to say nothing of the NBA stardom he would attain on sheer will, one of the greatest shooting touches anyone ever saw and an uncommon bravery that enabled him to surf mountainous waves of emotion that he summoned for motivation.

There have been many great stars but never one like Reggie, who dared--or lived--to poke the Madison Square Garden crowd in the eye with a sharp stick when he played there, to make sure it focused on him.

So where did he have his greatest moments? In the Garden, where he did things that rivaled the exploits of Michael Jordan: trading choke signs with Spike Lee while scoring 25 points in the fourth quarter of a ’94 playoff game; making two three-point baskets while scoring eight points in the last nine seconds to win another in ’95.

However, don’t forget the ’99 Eastern Conference finals, when the Knicks upset the Pacers. Miller blames himself for mellowing out in that one.

“Last year, I didn’t have that fire going against New York,” he said after last week’s Game 6 bombing run over Manhattan. “I never talked trash. I gave them all the respect and I think that killed my game, personally. . . .

“In years past, I hated New York. Last year, for some reason, I didn’t hate them because I thought it was going to be easy, to tell you the truth.”

Taking no chances this time, he announced the day before the series started that he hated the Knicks. Not that this was any news to the Knicks, but the Garden fans went for it, as usual. They were chanting their favorite Reggie chant when Miller, now almost 35, rose to the occasion as in days of yore, dropping 17 points in the fourth quarter on the Pacers’ favorite team.

Drive home safely and have a nice summer, suckers.

Big Sister Is Watching You

“The only thing big on him is his ears. Other than that, the man just comes with a big attitude and a big heart. He’s very different from everybody else in the league.”

--Teammate Sam Perkins,

to the Indianapolis Star

Before there were Knicks in Miller’s life, there were Lute Olson and the Arizona Wildcats, and before that . . .

Nobody ever had it quite like young Reggie, either, growing up as an unheralded younger brother of the player who revolutionized women’s basketball. He began hearing crowds serenade him with sing-song chants of “Chery-lll! Chery-lll!” in high school, before he had begun to taunt anyone or instigate anything.

Nowadays, Miller talks of himself as an underdog, or the man in the black hat, or the non-John Wayne, and his youth is where it began.

“I think that’s when it all started, you know, always being compared,” Reggie says. “And there’s nothing wrong with having, in my mind, the greatest woman basketball player of all time as your sis.

“Every opposing arena we went to, that’s where it always started in high school, and it’s been like that ever since.”

Cheryl was still at USC, getting ready to help the Trojans win NCAA titles in 1983 and 1984, when Reggie won a scholarship to UCLA, by default. It was the Larry Farmer administration, three coaches into the post-Wooden era, and the program was taking on water. Miller was brought in only after the Bruins’ top three recruits, Reggie Williams, Antoine Joubert and Tom Sheehy, turned them down.

The first thing anyone noticed was his uncommon shooting range. The second was his willingness to use it.

A year later, Walt Hazzard, succeeding Farmer, told Miller he’d have to rebound to start. Miller, then 6-6, 170, immediately began taking five a game.

That was also the year he spit at a Brigham Young player then blithely informed reporters, obliging Hazzard to take him out of the starting lineup for a game. The next season, Miller made his never-to-be-forgotten-in-Tucson gesture, rubbing his fingers together to referee Booker Turner to suggest that Arizona had paid him off.

Or as Miller would later write in his autobiography, “I Enjoy Being the Enemy”:

“Hey, I was a psycho in college.”

He was a multifaced psycho, though, a rare mixture of emotion, poise and discipline. He was respectful--he called sportswriters “Mister”--and brash at the same time. Nevertheless, he had a space-cadet reputation, a frail-looking body and the pros had a question or two about him.

In the spring of 1987, the Pacers were thinking about other positions. General Manager Donnie Walsh wanted Cal’s Kevin Johnson, but Cleveland was going to take him. Personnel director Mel Daniels was plugging a big man, Western Kentucky’s Tellis Frank.

The entire state of Indiana had its own choice--Steve Alford from little New Castle, who had just helped IU win an NCAA title, the apple of any Hoosier mom’s eye, handsome, immaculate and a dead-eye shooter, too. However, on the pro level he would be a little small at 6-2.

The Pacers didn’t have much good will to waste, but Walsh met Miller, found him to be charming, dedicated, even soft-spoken, and decided on him, no matter how many people told him to go for Alford.

“Everybody from Red Auerbach, who said it publicly on television, to people in the street,” Walsh says. “. . . I knew going in that I was gonna have that kind of heat and it didn’t bother me and still doesn’t.”

Miller didn’t know going in that his new home was going to rise in protest against his selection, but he found out soon enough. And won them over quickly enough.

In those days, rookies didn’t show up knocking down three-pointers from the NBA line, more than three feet farther back. Reggie was a new wave, all by himself. He’d been preparing himself to shoot the NBA three as far back as Riverside Poly, often to his coaches’ horror.

In his first year at Indiana, averaging 22 minutes as a reserve, he set a rookie record with 61 three-point baskets.

Meanwhile, Alford warmed the end of the Dallas bench and Indiana had a new hero.

Not that Miller didn’t still have a long way to go . . . or that anyone dreamed he was going there.

“When he started out, he was just a standstill shooter,” says ESPN analyst Jack Ramsay, Miller’s first pro coach. “He’s added the runner. He shoots the runner better than anybody else. And if you’re not careful, he’ll take it all the way and finish.”

And the next thing you knew, Miller wasn’t an NBA player, he was a star.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Superstar?

And then it got even better than that.

Miller was a great off-the-ball player--”I think he’s the best catch and shoot guy of all time,” Ramsay says--but that was just the point.

The great stars, the Jordans, Birds, Magic Johnsons, play on the ball. They have it, they distribute it, they break defenses down or shoot over them, they score or set someone else up. Guys who play off the ball are usually complementary, dependent on getting the ball from someone else.

But Miller was so good, he transcended his niche and grew into something else, a super off-the-ball player.

Miller began to stay in Indiana year-round. If you’ve ever spent a summer in the Midwest, you know what a sacrifice that was, and then there were the winters.

In basketball-mad Indiana, he was an idol and out of the real spotlight, at the same time. He didn’t have to carry the burden of being a star all the time, but he could still ride into the big city and shoot the place up.

The solitude stoked his anger. “They” were always forgetting he was there, writing him off, ignoring him, he thought.

He’d show them. And he did.

Bird became coach three seasons ago when Miller was 32 and challenged him to take it up another level. Reggie began thinking of himself as the man and working on his one-on-one moves. As he recently told Sports Illustrated, “If you want to be a hero, you’ve got to take hero shots.”

Then this season, with his contract running out, Miller laid in the weeds, letting Jalen Rose emerge, amid speculation he was unhappy about being unsigned.

“I love Reggie,” Walsh said at midseason, “but this is the first time I’ve had to say, ‘Wait awhile.’ I know he’s probably upset with me. Here was this skinny, little guy from UCLA who did whatever he was asked to do. There was no easy way to tell him to wait. But I have to protect the franchise.”

Then the playoffs started and Miller became the one and only Reggie again. Now, whatever happens, the triumphs that got them here or the pratfall in Game 1, it’s OK. Miller will keep firing and then they’ll see where they are.

“He’s been the organization for a long time,” Bird said. “He’s been the player, the one that’s taken them through the playoffs. . . .

“So I don’t get down on Reggie.”

Advice for Laker fans: If you’ve got anything rude to say, keep it to yourselves. The team you’re endangering is your own.

GAME 1

Points: 7

FG%: .063

*

PLAYOFF AVG.

Points: 22.8

FG%: .444