Incidentally and essentially, the NBA Finals authenticate greatness, not that anyone is likely to confuse Luc Longley with Kareem Abdul-Anybody. Still, the finger jewelry is self-gloating.
“You win a ring, you’re in a small club,” said Indiana coach Larry Bird, trying for his fourth, this time with his ankles gartered and crossed as he impassively watched his team drop the opening game of the Finals to Los Angeles 104-87.
The Lakers’ Kobe Bryant announced, only half in jest, that he had been waiting his whole life to be in the NBA Finals.
“For all my 21 years,” Bryant said.
Indiana point guard Mark Jackson has unscabbed floor burns older than Bryant.
All of which brings me inescapably to Reggie Miller. This was to be Miller’s time, and so it shall be inscribed, no matter how it turns out. And it started as unsightly as a wart in a wine glass.
Miller is the latest in the inexorable line of enduring and pitiable career regrets such as Charles Barkley, for one, and, say, Karl Malone for another.
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“You go to Utah and tell me that Karl Malone and John Stockton are losers and I’ll punch your face,” Shaquille O’Neal told a poser of the no-ring, no-respect theory.
Hey, the rules are the rules. Michael Jordan lived them. He was 28 when he got his first ring, same age as O’Neal. Julius Erving was 33 and already had saved and folded an entire league before he got his. Magic Johnson, younger even than Bryant, started at the very top and stayed there.
The point is, you don’t get the ring, you sit at the folding table.
While this is important for O’Neal finally to confirm his enormity, his full Shaqness, it is vital for Miller. The chance for Miller came late and will not come again.
However Miller is to be remembered, it will not be baiting Spike Lee in Madison Square Garden but how he fared when someone beyond Indiana scarecrows paid attention.
Miller came back to his old neighborhood fuller of himself than when he left, promising to “shock the world,” to establish the same kind of intense rivalry with the Lakers that the Pacers have had back East, to be the man of the match.
“That’s what the great players do,” said Miller, “step up when the money is on line.”
He didn’t say they stepped up right away, or stepped back, which is Miller’s signature move. Miller missed all seven shots in the first half, didn’t score until a free throw halfway through the third quarter, finished with an appallingly inadequate seven points.
As for the money on the line, Miller played as if he were paying the taxes on it.
“I feel bad I only got 16 shots,” Miller said. “If I’m 1-for-16, I’d rather be 1-for-25. I couldn’t put the ball in the basket, but if they continue to give me those looks, they’re in trouble. They play me like that, it’s just a matter of time.”
Miller could be that loony knight in Monty Python who kept losing body parts but, armless and legless, demanded the other knight come back and keep fighting.
“Reggie played hard,” said Bird. “We don’t give up on Reggie Miller.”
Miller has spent a career trying to get past someone better than he, first his older sister Cheryl and then the ghosts of UCLA, followed by the Bulls, the Knicks and Jalen Rose on his own team, always another ordeal to diminish Miller.
And now here is O’Neal, a giant emerging into the preeminent figure of the NBA. O’Neal’s chore made easier than Miller’s because O’Neal has only the Dutch elm, Rik Smits, in his way while Miller must scramble and scurry and get to an open spot before missing his jump shot.
Though he fouled out, Smits did not employ the usual Hack-a-Shaq strategy.
If he did, he probably would shatter his own forearm. It isn’t that Smits plays soft, but he does have his own yogurt flavor. O’Neal scored 43 points and had 19 rebounds.
“I got the easy shots,” O’Neal said. “Short hooks, power moves. I keep doing that, we’re a hard team to beat.”
How would Shaq defend Shaq?
“I wouldn’t,” O’Neal said. “I’d go home. I’d fake an injury or something.”
Or maybe not show up at all, as Indiana almost didn’t. The Pacers arrived for the game barely an hour before tip off. Embarrassing start for the hicks, getting lost on the way to the greatest evening of their lives, being late, as it were, for their own funeral.