Whatever it was Spike Lee was saying to Reggie Miller in Madison Square Garden the other night, it wasn't anything Miller hadn't heard before. Or hasn't been hearing most of his life.
"You can bet the house on that," Miller's father, Saul, said Thursday from the family home in Riverside, Calif."I can't imagine anything in there Reggie hadn't heard in our own backyard . . . or out on some playground somewhere. And that `Cher-yl, Cher-yl' business?
"He's used to it by now," Saul added, "because that poor boy has spent most of his basketball days playing second fiddle to his sister."
That would be 29-year-old Cheryl Miller, former college and Olympic great, combative coach of the Southern California women's team and arguably the finest female talent the game has produced.
"When they were younger, he used to tag along behind Cheryl to the yard down by Castleview school. And if that wasn't bad enough, once they'd seen how Cheryl could play," Saul paused, chuckling softly, "Lord, the other kids must have dogged him without mercy."
And so the wonder of Reggie's performance Wednesday night in Game 5 may not be that he lit up New York's intimidating defense for 25 points in the fourth quarter of the most important game of his life. Or even that Reggie was able to ruin the Knicks and run his mouth at the same time. That's practically his signature.
No, the real wonder of what Reggie accomplished is that finally, at age 28, he can claim pride of place in his own house. Which, considering the house, is no small feat.
Saul and Carrie Miller are both 63, and raised five kids on his salary, first as a chief master sergeant in the Air Force and then as computer systems director at a nearby hospital. Those kids now range in age from 36 to 25.
To this day, the father remains convinced that Saul Jr., the oldest and now a saxophone soloist with the Air Force band in Washington, D.C., was the best athlete. That's saying something since their middle son, 34-year-old Darrell, played pro baseball in the California Angels' organization for five years, and the baby of the family, Tammy, was a standout volleyball player at Cal State-Fullerton. And that's before figuring Cheryl and Reggie into the mix.
Given all that competitive talent, it's not hard to picture a succession of trash-talking, sweet-shooting 2-on-2 games being contested from dawn until dark on the half-court Saul somehow shoehorned into the backyard. It was always Saul Jr. and Cheryl vs. Darrell and Reggie, and it was then that Cheryl began schooling her baby brother in earnest.
"But it wasn't until the two older boys moved out that Cheryl really started wearing Reggie out," recalled Saul, a pretty fair high school athlete back in Memphis, Tenn.
"We used to bring the other girls from her high school team out to the house and make him play defense against them. He didn't like it all that much at first. But they'd encourage him and he's always been a great self-motivator besides. As soon as Cheryl would go into the house to start her homework, Reggie would start shooting his jumper, 200 of them, day in and day out."
Though Reggie had been tearing up every Little League program in the vicinity of Riverside, he decided to follow Cheryl into basketball when he entered high school. For the longest time, it seemed like a game of diminishing returns, since whatever he could do, she could do better.
"I remember the first big game he had in high school," Saul said. "He had something like 39 points, and he came in the house acting big and thinking, `Well, I really done the do.'
"That was before he found out his sister had scored 105 the same night."
Though only one of them still plays the game, no one on the planet can get Reggie going like Cheryl. After playing unevenly through the first four games in the Eastern Conference finals, he was understandably reluctant to confirm the details of a telephone conversation with Cheryl on Wednesday.
But she told the New York Daily News she called simply to remind her little brother that a Miller never plays mellow.
"It was very short and sweet," Cheryl told the paper. "I said, `Reggie, you know and I know that's not your style. You're not a white-hat guy. You're not the Lone Ranger. You're Black Bart.' I told him to take off the cape and get off the white horse."
Spike Lee, take note:
You can call him Ray, or you can call him Jay. But anyone who knows anything about Reggie Miller knows the one thing you better not call him is "Cher-yl."