The smack talk started on the concrete slab in the family’s backyard in Riverside, Calif. That’s where Reggie Miller learned he couldn’t give an inch.

He was born with bad hips and crooked ankles, stuck in leg braces until he was 4 and warned by doctors that a sport like basketball wasn’t the best idea. He ignored them. He’d sit inside, watching his older brothers and sister war on the court for hours on end, craving the competition.

When the braces came off, the lessons commenced.

“Everybody in my family took turns kicking my butt in basketball,” he once said.

Especially his older sister. Cheryl wasn’t just bigger, wasn’t just better, she was merciless, too, same as her older brothers had been to her.

“Cheryl would trample all over him,” the family’s youngest sister, Tammy, once said. “Reggie was just a skinny little twig.”

And Cheryl spent years dominating that skinny little twig. She tested him. Toughened him. She blocked every shot of Reggie’s she could. Eventually, he realized he was better off flinging them from the outside, farther and farther from the basket. At one point Saul Miller had to extend the concrete an extra five feet. His son had range.

Maybe that’s where all his cocksure came from: if you can handle a decade’s worth of on-court whoopings from your older sister — even if she’d become one of the greatest women’s basketball players in history — maybe you can handle anything. The “Che-ryl, Che-ryl” chants he heard in high school and college. The boos he heard on draft night. The hecklers who’d give it to him in every arena, in every city, throughout his 18 seasons with the Indiana Pacers.

Some players wanted to silence the noise. Reggie Miller sought it out.

“He loved that people hated him,” says his teammate of eight seasons, Austin Croshere.

“Reggie looked for any grudge he could find,” adds longtime Pacers beat writer Mark Montieth. “And if he couldn’t find one, he’d create one.”

Sometimes, the fuel came from his father. Once, after his son had given a lousy effort in a high school game, Saul told Reggie on the way home, “You didn’t play worth 50 cents tonight.”

Reggie never forgot that. For years, he’d slip two quarters under his wristband before games as a reminder to always play hard.

On the court, he chirped at the best of them, knowing he’d have to find a way to back it up — which he usually did.

In college, he cursed out a referee and accused him of getting paid off. In the pros, he went at Michael Jordan as a rookie. Larry Bird, too. He once taunted Derek Harper, “JoJo (English) threw you into the stands, what do you think I’m gonna do to you?”

After a young Shaquille O’Neal blocked his shot and bodied him to the floor, Miller screamed at the 7-foot-1, 300-pounder, “Harder! Hit me harder!”

One night on the road, after hearing it from an opposing fan all game, Miller drilled a late 3, turned and shouted at him, “Take that, b—!” The ref warned him about taunting.

“Taunting the crowd?” Miller replied, incredulous.

Not even the courtside celebrities were safe. Miller once ran past actor Alec Baldwin after hitting a 3 and screamed, “Yes, I am God!” — a nod to a line from Baldwin’s film, “Malice.”

Miller called John Starks all sorts of unprintable names, baited him into a headbutt and got him kicked out of a playoff game. He grabbed his junk in front of Spike Lee, stole the show at Madison Square Garden too many times to count and warred with half the city of New York.

He flopped. He instigated. He irritated. He exaggerated. He’d lure players into ejections, then wave them off the court with a sly smile. He’d cuss them out just to see if they’d crack. A touch foul would leave Miller stumbling backward like he’d been slugged by Mike Tyson, his arms flailing, his gaze directed at the official as if to say, “Can you believe the abuse I’m taking?”

He relished it. He embraced it. Miller’s old AOL email address started with the letters TT — short for trash-talker.

“Whenever he’d shoot an air ball on the road, all the opposing fans would give it to him, ‘Air ball! Air ball! or Che-ryl! Che-ryl!’” Montieth says. “Then he’d start playing better. I always wondered, did he shoot that air ball on purpose? Just to get the crowd on him?”

Miller was one of the best s— talkers ever, spewing the right mix of vulgar and vicious. He owned the game within the game, and by the mid-1990s, the string bean shooter from the small market team had the loudest mouth in the league. Miller wasn’t just loathed everywhere outside the state of Indiana — he was feared, too.

“I was only 175 pounds when I came in as a rookie,” he once said. “I needed to have a little bit of an edge. My mouth was my edge.”

It was. Some terrific theater followed. With the Pacers back in the playoffs, here are some of the greatest trash-talking moments of Miller’s Hall-of-Fame career, culled from interviews with teammates, opponents, coaches and Miller himself over the years, as well as his 1995 book, “I Love Being The Enemy,” of which Miller concludes the acknowledgments page with a warm note to Knicks fans.

“Thanks for booing.”

(Miller, through a TNT spokesman, declined to be interviewed.)


Before he developed his gift of gab as a commentator, Reggie Miller was one of the NBA’s top trash-talkers. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)

UCLA: ‘You were paid off, Booker’

Miller played four years at UCLA, not without incident. During a game at Arizona his junior year, he went off on official Booker Turner. Why? Because Miller detested Arizona coach Lute Olson and didn’t believe the game was being called fairly.

Olson had called Miller a dirty player after a game the previous season in which Miller was assessed an intentional foul for elbowing one of Olson’s players. “Obviously, he can’t handle frustration,” the coach said. “A person with courage wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Booker was a very fair referee, but I had so much bad history with Olson that it wouldn’t have mattered who was officiating that day … I went up to Booker and said, ‘Booker, you know what?’ ”

“No, what Reg?”

“This is the worst game I’ve seen you officiate in my life. You know what it seems like to me? Seems like all these (expletive) in here paid you to referee a game like this.”

“I can’t believe you said that, Reg.”

“Booker, I don’t want to hear it. You got paid off.”

Then, Miller wrote in “I Love Being The Enemy,” he turned to the crowd and rubbed his thumb against his pointer finger, doing the money sign.

“You were paid off, Booker.”

Turner gave him a technical. Bruins coach Walt Hazzard rushed on the court, grabbed his star shooting guard and asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Coach, that (expletive) was paid off!” Miller shouted.

Michael Jordan, Part I

At the start of Miller’s rookie year in 1987, the Pacers met the Bulls for a preseason game in Cincinnati. Jordan, according to Miller, spent the first half “going through the motions.” He had just four points at the break; Miller had 10. That’s when teammate Chuck Person got in his ear.

“Can you believe that’s Michael Jordan, the guy everyone’s talking about?” Person told Miller. “The guy who’s supposed to walk on water? And you’re out here killing him, Reg? You should be talking to him, Reg.”

Miller was young. He took the bait.

“So you’re the great Michael Jordan?” he remembers needling Jordan.

Jordan said nothing, merely shaking his head.

Miller kept talking.

“I’d make a shot and yell at him, ‘Take this (expletive)!’” he remembers. “Layup. ‘Don’t get me started, (expletive)!’ Or if he’d hit a jumper, (I’d say) ‘Is that your best shot?’”

Jordan decided to teach the rookie a lesson. He scored 20 straight at one point and by the game’s end had 44.

Miller finished with 12, getting outscored 40-2 in the second half.

“I remember (Jordan) walking off the court,” Miller said, “and he was like, ‘Don’t ever talk trash to Black Jesus again.’ ”

Larry Bird: ‘Rook, you gotta be kidding me’

Miller watched most of the epic Lakers–Celtics duels of the 1980s from his dorm room at UCLA. He idolized Magic Johnson, but it was Larry Bird who he molded his game after. Bird also happened to be one of the greatest trash-talkers in league history — and Miller’s future coach with the Pacers.

During Miller’s rookie season, in a tight game at Market Square Arena, Bird was fouled late, the Celtics clinging to a four-point lead. As Bird attempted his first free throw, Miller blurted out, “Hey! Hey!” in hopes of getting him out of rhythm. The three-time league MVP  let him have it.

“Rook, you gotta be kidding me,” Bird snapped after coolly draining the first free throw. “I’m the (expletive) best shooter in the league right now. In … the … league. Understand? And you’re up here trying to say something?”

Bird drained the second. His teammates, including Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge, nearly fell over with laughter.

“I’m thinking, ‘What a dumbass I am,’ ” Miller remembered. “You’re up here talking s— to Larry Bird.”

Michael Jordan, Part II

Jordan talked plenty himself but rarely lost his cool. He did once with Miller. It came in a game at Market Square Arena in February 1993 after Miller and Jordan first got tangled up after a Bulls’ fast break. Miller claimed the contact was incidental.

“I went over to him (and asked), ‘Dog, you all right?’ ” Miller remembers. “He looked at me crazylike. I think he thought I purposely tried to trip him.

“Mike, you all right?”

Nothing.

“So,” Miller remembers, “I said, ‘(Expletive) you, then.’”

Next trip down the court, out of the view of the refs, Jordan gave Miller an elbow to the throat.

“The refs weren’t calling anything,” Miller remembers. “I started thinking they were gonna let him get away with it.”

On the ensuing Pacers’ fastbreak, Pooh Richardson missed a layup. Miller followed with the tip-in, and after his momentum carried him past the baseline, he gave Jordan a nice little shove — undeniably a cheap shot.

Jordan didn’t like it.

Enraged, he came charging at Miller, pointing his finger in his face, reaching for his throat and swinging at him with a closed fist. Teammates had to pull him off.

Miller was ejected and fined $6,000. Jordan was later fined and suspended for one game.

“I had scratches and blood coming down and told the refs, ‘Look at me, I got thrown out, and there wasn’t even a scratch on him,’ ” Miller said.

After the loss, he took another shot at the Bulls.

“Trade Michael Jordan off that team and who do they have?” Miller told reporters. “Nobody.”

Miller would earn a bit of revenge on Jordan five years later with his infamous push-off in the 1998 Eastern Conference finals, shoving Jordan before hitting the game-winning 3-pointer in Game 4. But Jordan’s Bulls would outlast the Pacers in seven games, a series Jordan would later admit was the toughest of the Bulls’ six-championship run.

He vented on facing Miller in a 1998 issue of ESPN: The Magazine: “I don’t really dislike anybody in the league, but playing Reggie Miller drives me nuts.”

John Starks: The Headbutt

A few months after the Jordan incident, the Pacers met the Knicks in the playoffs for the first time — the opening act for what would become one of the NBA’s best rivalries of the 1990s.

Miller relished his matchup with shooting guard John Starks, whom he knew he could get inside the head of. “When you play against them,” Miller once said of facing the Knicks, “you got to play like a d— sometimes.” Miller embodied that credo.

Starks wanted his presence felt from the opening tip. So on their first trip down the court in Game 1, he elbowed Miller in the back.

“(Expletive), it’s going to be like that all series,” Starks told him.

Miller stored it away.

“It was the last time Starks was stupid enough to call me b—,” he wrote in “I Love Being The Enemy.”

Miller went for 32 that night, at one point looking up at the scoreboard and mentioning to Starks, “Miller 26, Starks 5. You ever gonna score tonight?”

Nothing. So he kept talking.

“You never should have touched me in the first place,” Miller said. “In fact, I think you like me.”

But the Pacers trailed 2-0 entering Game 3. Facing elimination, he decided to pull out all the stops. In the third quarter, after Starks drained a jumper over him, Miller started yapping.

“That’s kind of sweet,” he said, elbowing Starks for good measure. “John, look at your stat line. You’re supposed to be a starting shooting guard in this league. This is embarrassing.”

As he later wrote, Miller knew “this was going to be the perfect opportunity to bait this (expletive) into something.”

He was right.

Starks snapped. He charged at Miller, then headbutted him.

“‘If you look at the video tape, you’ll see him running at me, pointing at me like some psycho man. It was hilarious,” Miller wrote.

“John’s little hollow head didn’t hurt. I did some Academy-Award-level acting … it was a great fake fall. You would have thought I’d been shot in battle, that I’d suffered a concussion, that I needed a CAT scan.”

The outburst enraged the Knicks, particularly Patrick Ewing, who scolded Starks after he was ejected.

“Reggie Miller is a great, great basketball player,” Knicks coach Pat Riley said later. “But if you stop and think, he’s the only player who got Michael Jordan (suspended). So there ain’t a better talker around, if he can take the best player and most disciplined player in the league and get him upset.”

Years later, in an interview with MSG Network, Starks opened up on the incident: “I was so mad. I wanted to take my fist and put it through his face. We just close and, BAM, just tapped him like that, and he goes dramatic, Hollywood.”

Miller laughed off the incident in typical fashion.

“I don’t think I did anything to make John mad,” he grinned at reporters after the game. “I think maybe something happened early in the day to make him mad. Maybe his room service was late?”

Spike Lee and 25 points in the fourth

Miller’s greatest moments against the Knicks would follow. In Game 5 of the 1994 Eastern Conference finals, the series tied 2-2, he erupted for 25 fourth-quarter points in the Pacers’ 93-86 win. It all started, Miller said, after Knicks superfan and acclaimed director Spike Lee shouted, “That’s luck, man!” from his courtside seat after Miller drained his first 3 of the quarter. Then Miller hit another and stared in Spike’s direction.

“Put a wig on! Cheryl Miller’s out here playing!” Miller remembers Spike shouting.

Miller drained another, then flashed Spike the choke sign. Then he grabbed his privates.

“I grabbed my neck with both hands and looked at the crowd, telling it that New York was gagging, that it had no balls,” he said.

Then he hit two more. The Pacers pulled away. Spike grew quiet. So did the Garden.

“OK, if you’re gonna talk, and you’re gonna pay all this money for these expensive seats, you’re gonna be part of the game, Spike,” Miller said years later. “And I made him part of the game.”

The Knicks were shocked.

“After that third 3,” Miller said, “I could have tried a hook shot from half court and it would’ve gone in.”

Charles Smith: ‘Talk when the game is still up in the air’

Miller’s clashes with the Knicks weren’t relegated to the postseason. During a game the following year, he got into it with New York forward Charles Smith, whom Miller wrote, “talks s— about as well as he shot against the Bulls in the 1993 Eastern Conference finals.” Smith famously had his shot blocked three times on the same possession in a gutting Game 5 loss to Chicago that season. 

With the Knicks up 12 late in the game, Miller lost control of the ball on a drive to the basket, fumbling it out of bounds. Smith followed with an elbow. Miller elbowed him back. As Knicks forward Anthony Mason separated the two, Miller told Smith, “You ain’t nothing but a big (expletive). You’re the biggest (expletive) on the team.”

As Miller later described it, trash-talking is fair game when the result is still undecided. In this instance, Smith was pouring salt in an open wound, knowing the Knicks had the win wrapped up.

“You know me, I’ll talk (expletive) the entire game, whether we’re up or down,” Miller said. “Smith hadn’t said a word the whole game and got real brave with about 20 seconds left and the Knicks ahead by 12. Anybody can talk (expletive) then, but it means nothing. Talk when the game is still up in the air.”

Miller waited for Smith in the tunnel after the game, then shoved him. Smith shoved him back. Again, they had to be separated.

The reporters poured into the Pacers’ locker room a few minutes later, wanting to know what Miller had said to him that started the scuffle.

“I told them I was congratulating Charles on a good game,” Miller told them.

8 points, 9 seconds

The Knicks and Pacers met that spring in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Late in Game 1, Miller remembers teammate Mark Jackson walking up to Ewing and saying, “Look at that Patrick, you have nine points and I have nine points. You suck.”

“Mark and I were always on the same page,” Miller said.

Still, the Knicks led 105-99 with under 20 seconds left. Then came the theatrics: Miller hit a 3, stole Mason’s inbounds pass, then hit another. The Knicks were stunned. The Garden was stunned. Miller’s teammates were stunned.

A minute later, Starks went to the free-throw line with the game tied. He bricked the first.

Right after the official passed Starks the ball for his second attempt, Miller piped up.

“Hold on, wait a minute,” he said, looking in Starks’ direction.

“Oh, never mind. I forget.”

Starks missed the second — “wasn’t even close,” Miller remembers.

After grabbing the rebound and getting fouled, Miller drilled two free throws at the other end and the Pacers escaped with the most improbable win in franchise history.

“The Garden was stone silent,” Miller said. “You could hear sweat hit the floor.”

And he couldn’t help but gloat. To the NBC cameras: “Mason choked and threw it to me, I hit a 3. John Starks choked. We came up big.” Then as he jogged into the tunnel: “They don’t want it!” Miller screamed at Knicks fans, “they’re choke artists!” Then, in the Pacers’ locker room, to his own general manager, Donnie Walsh, who quit watching the game with 20 seconds left because he was convinced it was over: “Don’t you ever give up on us that early!”

Miller’s trash-talking cooled across the back half of his career. As Montieth put it, “Reggie knew he couldn’t back it up anymore.” Nonetheless his name belongs right there with Bird, Jordan, Gary Payton, Charles Barkley and Kevin Garnett, all considered among the greatest trash-talkers the sport has ever seen.

Reggie Miller wasn’t just fearless on the court, he was ruthless, too. Especially in the biggest moments. Especially away from home.

“If it was quiet on the road,” he once said, “I’d die.”

(Top photo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)



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