NBA: Reggie Miller: Public Enemy No. 1

Madison Square Garden, New York, February 26, 2005: “Re Geee! Re Geee! Re Geee!” The game between the Knicks and the Pacers is not over yet, Reggie Miller is already celebrated. And not by the Pacers fans in the arena, but by the supporters from New York. It is clear to all viewers that Indiana’s Shooting Guard deserves this honour at his last performance at MSG. Nevertheless, the applause is not self-evident – after all Uncle Reg did to the Knicks. Miller is 53 years old today.

Miller’s individual successes trace the path of an extraordinary player: The 53-year-old is appointed to the All-Star team five times, and in 1994 he wins the World Championship as the second-best scorer after Shaquille O’Neal with Team USA. Two years later, gold follows at Olympia in Atlanta. Miller ranks 20th in the NBA’s all-time scoring list with 25,279 points.

One of only seven players in the history of the league, he is promoted to the elite 50-40-90 club. The feat of achieving a throwing quota of 50 percent, a triple quota of 40 percent and a free-throw quota of 90 percent was achieved by Miller in the 93/94 season.

Before he began his long career, however, it didn’t look like Reginald Wayne Miller was going to become an athlete at all. Due to a congenital hip malposition, he had to wear splints for five years as a child. His doctors predicted that he would never leave without help. But Miller was a fighter even then, and soon he could do more than that.

In a sporty family, the competition with his older siblings helped him to make up for lost years. The daily one-on-one with Cheryl, who became one of the best basketball players in US history, also affected Reggie’s game. So he trained on an unusually high flight curve to avoid the blocks of his big sister.

After attending Riverside High School in his birthplace in southern California, Miller made the jump to UCLA. In his last year with the Bruins, the triple line was introduced at the NCAA – Miller learned to love it right from the start and hit 44 percent of downtown at its debut.

The second-best scorer in college history after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and with a degree in history in his pocket, Miller, 22, set off for the NBA in 1987. The Pacers chose the slim shooting guard in eleventh position in the draft and right in his first season Miller picked up where he left off in college – he sank threesomes. 61 pieces to be exact: record for a rookie and the beginning of a great shooter career.

The threesome was Miller’s pitch. The spalding in the NBA roared a total of 2560 times through the Reuse after he had left his hand from downtown. Until 2011 his record held, then he had to relinquish the top position in the history books to Ray Allen.

The way Miller scored was particularly impressive: Again and again he managed to strip his opponents on blocks and turn the long jumper over the attacking defender ice-cold. Not infrequently he was fouled additionally, whereby the Leg-Kick is not without reason inseparably connected with Miller.

But Reggie Miller didn’t just sink throws – he celebrated them. A bow for the audience here, an air kiss for the opponents there. Miller was a showman. Not only in his own talk format, in which the Pacers star flickered across the screens in far too big suits at the beginning of the nineties, but also on the floor.

“Reggie was one of the best entertainers and actors in the world of sports,” says journalist Ahmad Rashad: “But he was also one of the best trash talkers in the history of the NBA. And he was so good at it that the opposing players said to each other a week before the match against the Pacers:’Don’t let Reggie into your head’. And what happened? He was already inside when he said “Hello and asked how you were today.”

Miller himself described his actions as follows: “70 percent of the talk on the floor was exclusively there to cheer me on. With the other 30 percent I tried to get into the heads of the opponents.” Miller certainly had this exclusive opinion on the relationship between motivation and psychological warfare.

But the reactions of the other players showed that it worked. Even Michael Jordan was upset by Miller and in 1993 was raptured to a fisticuff, which brought His Airness the second suspension of his career.

Uncle Reg lived for those moments. He enjoyed bringing his opponents to the whitehog. Not vicious. Rather sly-eared, clever, cunning. In the games against the Pacers, many players became aware of the influence mental strength and presence can have on the game – at the latest when Reggie’s constant chatter robbed them of concentration.

So did New York’s hot spur John Starks. The Knicks Shooting Guard lost control in 1993 in game three of the first playoff round after one of Miller’s innumerable sayings, gave his opponent a headshot and fled the arena. Indiana won the game, but not the series that marked the beginning of the intense Pacers-Knicks rivalry. Between 1993 and 2000, the two franchises met six times in the post-season: the breeding ground for extraordinary games and some of the most important clutch performances in NBA history.

Page 1: Early years and the trash

Page 2: The rivalry with the Knicks and the farewell