Ninety minutes before the Jets and Colts renew acquaintances Sunday, another New York/Indianapolis story line will be playing out - cinematically - at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It will feature the Knicks and Pacers; three consecutive years of playoff battles that were more street fights than basketball games; and a protagonist named Reggie Miller, the sweet-shooting, gum-flapping guard who was equally gifted at annoying people and hitting huge shots.
In a riveting, 68-minute film called "Winning Time," Dan Klores, PR-man-turned-filmmaker who grew up playing ball in Brooklyn's Second Street Park, reminds you how long it's been since the Garden pulsed with playoff drama, and brings fresh insight into the multi-layered tensions that the Knick-Pacers series engendered.
Who knew that John Starks' mother angrily approached Patrick Ewing, after Ewing whacked his teammate in disgust following Starks' infamous head butt of Miller in Game 3 of the 1993 series?
"Don't you ever put your hand on my son like that again," Mrs. Starks said.
Replied Ewing, "Mrs. Starks, if he head butts him again, I'm going to smack the living daylights out of him."
DN: I understand the idea for the film actually came from a photo (above) on your office wall. Is that true?
DK: It is. Donnie (Walsh) sent it to me years ago. It's hilarious, because it shows Reggie making a shot in the Garden, and the faces around him are in total horror. Initially I was going to do a film on the photo, but I started doing research (on the Knicks and Pacers) and realized this is bigger than the basketball thing because it's about the conflicting cultures of the Midwest and the big city - about two once-proud franchises, neither of whom had won a championship since 1973 - and their journey to try to get back to the top.
DN: Reginald Miller is credited as a producer of the film. Reggie Miller is the center of the story. Why did you decide to center the film around him?
DK: I saw him as a performance artist as few great athletes are. To me, the movie is about his psychological need to overcome the overwhelming feeling that he's second rate - that he's never going to measure up to his sister Cheryl. She was a huge star. Reggie had braces on his legs until he was 5 years old. He was not going to be Cheryl, or his older brother, Darrell, who was a catcher for the Angels. He says, "Against the Knicks, it was Cheryl all over again." To me that was the most beautiful, telling line in the film. That was the psychological dynamic. I love that stuff."
DN: There is a scene that explores the pressure Donnie Walsh - then-GM of the Pacers and current GM of the Knicks - felt to take Steve Alford, a Hoosier folk hero, in the 1987 draft. Instead, Walsh drafted Miller, and you have footage of Alford and family looking completely stricken when Miller's name is called.
DK: (laughing) Donnie announced Reggie's name as fast as he could and then got off the stage so he wouldn't get shot.
DN: Patrick Ewing is unguarded, expansive, funny in ways that newspaper reporters rarely saw. Any back story there?
DK: Everyone told me, "Ewing will be terrible," or "You'll never get him." He was great. I think it helped, first of all, that (Jeff) Van Gundy and (Mark) Jackson called him and told him, ‘This will be fun.' Maybe Reggie called him also, I'm not sure.
Think about (Ewing). He's a kid who is from the islands. He moves to the States and plays for a father figure (John Thompson) at Georgetown who is all about Us vs. Them. Then the biggest influence on his pro career (Pat Riley) is Us vs Them. What's going to be his influence?
To me, this is the real Patrick Ewing.
DN: Early in the film you focus on Miller-Starks and the head butt. Miller says it all started with Starks refusing to shake his hand before a game - buying into Riley's we're-going-to-war mentality.
Miller tells you from that point on he wanted to embarrass Starks, and then we see him baiting Starks and even milking the head butt by acting "like I got hit by a tank."
Did you feel empathy for Starks, a guy with an almost childlike passion for the game, that Reggie played him this way?
DK: I feel and felt empathy for Starks. He's a terrific young man, and I actually feel some personal connection with him, because when I would play in the park, there was one guy in particular who knew how to get under my skin. That's a lousy thing to happen all the time.
Reggie knew where to go - and there's a brutality to that method.
DN: Cheryl Miller describes her brother as "a maddening human being." Ewing calls him "a con man" and says, "I hated Reggie." But you convey the idea that Reggie's on-court persona was totally calculated.
DK: Reggie was a renegade. In real life, he is quiet and humble and serious and private. But as a performer, he was the bad boy. I asked him, "Why do you talk (trash)? Is it to rev you up, or to psych out the opponent?" He said 70% of my talk is to get me started and 30% percent is to get inside the opponent's head.
DN: You build the film around four episodes - the head butt; Miller's 25-point fourth-quarter and his by-play with Spike Lee in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals in 1994; Game 1 in 1995 when Miller scored eight points in nine seconds; and Ewing's finger roll that rimmed out at the buzzer in Game 7 of 1995, the end of the Riley Era. Why did you do it this way?
DK: The movie really is about two forms of parallel resentment: Midwesterners' resentment towards New Yorkers, and New Yorkers' resentment towards Reggie Miller. The irony about Reggie is that he has all the personality traits that are attributed to New Yorkers - brash, bold, talks a lot - and yet the people in Indianapolis seem to revere him.
If you put Reggie Miller in New York, he would be detested by those people in Indianapolis.
DN: A strong undercurrent in the film is Riley's stated mission to make the Knicks "the best conditioned, hardest working, most professional, unselfish, toughest, nastiest and most disliked team in the NBA." On the other sideline, Larry Brown's team was equally unselfish and unyielding. The animosity between the teams is almost palpable.
DK: To me, that's what made the rivalry. My contention is that rivalries like that - Knicks-Pacers, Knicks-Bulls, Knicks-Heat, don't exist anymore. Players come and go too frequently. There's not enough of the old-style, personal competitiveness. Last year the Celtics and Bulls played a seven-game series in which six of the games went into overtime. It was probably the most memorable series in the history of basketball, and who talks about it, other than maybe some people in Chicago and Boston?
You've got to want to win, not just want to play.
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