Larry Miller Time (eBook)

The Story of the Lost Legend Who Sparked the Tar Heel Dynasty

Stephen Demorest, Larry Miller (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
338 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-0463-8 (ISBN)

Infos

LARRY MILLER is the tough-as-nails, fun-loving, working class bad boy who in the 1960s saved young North Carolina coach Dean Smith's job by winning his first two ACC titles and a trip to the National Championship game. A two-time All American, Miller was also the first heartthrob of the modern ACC, going on to become 'the Joe Namath of the ABA' while setting the pro league's All-Time Single Game scoring record. And then he simply disappeared. Now, for the first time, North Carolina's foundational player shares priceless stories from his scrappy youth in Lehigh Valley steel country... from the locker rooms, road trips, parties and fights of the teams that established Dean Smith's Tar Heel legacy... and from the raffish early days of modern pro basketball. Larry Miller Time is a candid, immersive narrative for every follower of UNC and classic basketball lore, and a Brigadoon of America's good old days.

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LARRY MILLER is the tough-as-nails, fun-loving, working class bad boy who in the 1960s saved young North Carolina coach Dean Smith's job by winning his first two ACC titles and a trip to the National Championship game. A two-time All American, Miller is still the only Tar Heel ever named ACC Player of the Year twice. He was also the first heartthrob of the modern ACC before moving on to become "e;the Joe Namath of the ABA,"e; setting the pro league's All-Time Single Game scoring record. And then he simply disappeared. Now, for the first time, North Carolina's foundational player shares priceless stories from the locker rooms, road trips, parties and fights of the teams that established Dean Smith's Tar Heel legacy and from the raffish early days of modern pro basketball. It's all here: The charm of yesteryear's tiny Catasauqua, Pa., where a high school hero's blue collar hunger made him the most coveted recruit in the nation The bribes dangled by unscrupulous colleges The mysterious pills that caused young Larry to skip his H.S. All America Award banquet The time he risked getting thrown out of college to save a buddy The party at Kentucky that was so wild Coach Smith threatened to yank the entire team's scholarships The game that so impressed Pat Conroy that he later wrote in My Losing Season, "e;I will never forget the dark fire of Larry Miller"e; - unaware that just hours later Miller almost fell out of a thirteenth-floor window in a girls' dorm The night he upstaged Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels in concert How Coach Smith negotiated a monster pro contract for him Why Larry skedaddled from UNC one credit shy of graduation to escape a Duke frame-up The flower power years in LA, playing 1-on-1 with the great Jim Brown and his staff of naked Swedish girls, dating Clint Eastwood's secretary, winning "e;The Dating Game,"e; and the scuttlebutt behind Wilt Chamberlain's claim of bedding 20,000 women The chaotic management of the ABA and the dark side of colorful coach Bones McKinney Wild times with the early creators of NASCAR, and how he "e;stole"e; a night honoring Richard Petty The jinxed playboy pad where Miller and others nearly died How he outsmarted his vindictive draft board Decades of Dean Smith's letters still coaching his most beloved and wayward player and much, much more. Larry Keith of Sports Illustrated calls Larry Miller Time "e;the great untold story of Carolina basketball a fascinating tale with an unexpected ending."e;Coach Roy Williams says, "e;Larry Miller was one of those mythical figures to me he was one of my heroes."e;Charles Scott claims, "e;Larry was the winner who made Coach Smith a winner. Like Bill Russell started the Boston Celtics tradition, Larry Miller is the tradition that Carolina talks about. Everything starts with him."e;Featuring over 40 vintage photos and original interviews with teammates Billy Cunningham, Charles Scott, Big-10 commissioner Jim Delany, Coach Williams, and many others, Larry Miller Time is a candid, immersive narrative for every follower of UNC and classic basketball lore, and a Brigadoon of America's good old days.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 1

Forging Iron

The day the boy’s life changed began like any other in that golden summer during the Eisenhower years. Banging out of the house, he barely heard something Mom said about a picnic, so eager was he to round up his buddies and escape to the water. But this would be no wholesome trip to the sun-dappled pool in the park. The boy and his cronies were slipping away to an abandoned canal down the hill for a clandestine rite of passage. He was ten years old, a smart aleck, and a thief . . . doling out cigarettes stolen from his father.

The play was simple: You took a deep drag, sank underwater, and then blasted a lungful of bubbles that broke the surface with little pops of smoke to the cheers of your pals. Taking turns, he was just another guppy blowing smoke and spouting nonsense . . . until the laughter died and the boy looked up to see his old man glaring down at him.

“Up here,” the man ordered.

Instantly the boy knew a whipping was coming and, sure enough, his father kicked him mercilessly up the hill, all hundred yards to the car—not sparing the rod, not spoiling the child. By the time they caught up to the family picnic he was too bruised to swim any more.

Eight years later Larry Miller would be on the cover of Parade, the most widely read magazine in America. In those days—back when the nation had just won the world and was bigger, stronger, and younger than anyone around, just like him—he and the country tried to do it right: building your strength, helping your teammates, playing fair, and deserving what you won because you worked harder than anyone else. His generation was told that you could become anything—even All-American—if you worked your heart out for it. Larry Miller is one of those who did. And if you wanted to forge a working class hero for all America, there was no better place for it than right here on this bend of the Lehigh River.

*

Today “Catasauqua” is just another long Indian name signifying nothing to most people, but it wasn’t always that way. Catasauqua was simply a great little town so long ago that, by the time Larry Miller put it back on the map, the rest of the country had forgotten how this area transformed the nation. This is where the Crane Iron Works fired up the first furnace on the new continent for mass producing iron in 1840, arguably making Catasauqua the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in America.

The little settlement that grew in the mud streets around the coal furnace was primitive, most of the workers living in tents at first, and fear of fires discouraged indoor cooking. Instead, everyone heated water and did their cooking over fires in the community burn-pit on Front Street next to the mill. It was a hard life, but in forging what became the hard skeleton of industrial America, Catasauqua soon became known as “The Iron Borough.”

They made iron rails for horse-drawn carts before locomotives were invented to ride them. Six hundred men worked twenty-four-hour shifts producing horseshoes for the British and Russian armies in World War I. And they devised massive cast iron tube segments for the tunnels of New York City. Today, anyone riding Amtrak lines under the Hudson and Harlem Rivers into Manhattan . . . anyone driving in from New Jersey through the Lincoln or Holland tunnels . . . or arriving by taxi from JFK and LaGuardia airports through the Midtown or Brooklyn-Battery tunnels, is protected by Catasauqua iron.

As the town made iron, the iron made Catasauqua rich. The Crane replaced its grubby tent city with solid row houses for its employees. Meanwhile, town patriarchs stepped up to organize and fund public works, including the town’s first electric light plant, designed and constructed by a nearby Jersey guy named Thomas Alva Edison. By 1900—scarcely fifty years after the iron mill’s founding—little Catasauqua had the highest percentage of self-made millionaires of any town in America.

And then, as iron was supplanted by steel, Catasauqua’s preeminence was swallowed by surrounding Allentown and Bethlehem until, today, most residents of the Lehigh Valley are likely unaware that this little borough was the seed from which the entire region sprang. In the aftermath of World War II, though, this area was still ground-zero for toughness. And 300 feet up the hill from the old iron works and its paved-over burn pit, in the row house at 116 Wood Street—so original that some claim it was once the Crane company store—lived the family of Julius Miller.

*

Julius Miller was the son of German immigrants, a veteran, a union man on the assembly line at Mack Truck, and, at 6’3”, a fine enough athlete to make a few extra bucks playing semi-pro basketball for a local sporting goods team. His wife, Mary Magdalene—but everyone knew her as Peggy—had herself played fast-pitch softball in an era when the sport drew thousands of paying spectators to games in Allentown. With a young family to raise at the tail end of the Depression, though, the Millers had to quit playing, dropped out of high school, and Peggy came to like being a homemaker. By all accounts the Millers were nice people, although Peggy—a small lady at 5’4”—was fully capable of throwing her imposing husband out of the house when he missed supper one night and came home drunk. (It only happened once.) The couple’s oldest child, Lorraine, was a good girl called by some “the darling of the nuns.” And then there was the kid, Larry . . . the troublemaker.

It was foreordained that the Miller children would attend St. Lawrence, the neighborhood Catholic school, but as much as young Larry respected his mother and father, his high spirits rattled the strictures of Catholic education, and he always considered his enrollment a mistake. Though he would wind up an honor student, his marks were very poor in the early grades, barely above passing. He never felt comfortable with the priests. He was never an altar boy. And he hated communion and confession so much that he and his pal John McCarty would sit in the back until they could sneak out. When forced to participate, Larry entertained himself by making up bogus sins until, one day, he finally admitted the truth—that all of his previous confessions were lies. That was the last time Larry Miller confessed . . . to a priest, anyway.

His irreverence guaranteed that Larry was always in trouble. (It didn’t help that Lorraine specialized in tattling on him.) Larry would later boast in an autobiographical sketch assigned in high school, “I had evidently chosen the wrong people for my cohort. I acquired a nice, shiny police record and began smoking. At that stage in my life, many people were disappointed in my character. I was not really concerned since I was having a great time.”

We’re talking about a third grader, here.

The mature Miller concedes that, while some of these kids had records, he was only pulled down to the station a couple times for questioning. The nuns, however, were quick to see what hardwood opponents would one day discover—that energetic Larry could be a handful. So when Lorraine aged out of St. Lawrence and headed to public school, the Sisters firmly suggested it was time her little brother moved along as well.

“They didn’t want me around without her to rat me out,” surmises Larry, who was more than glad to go. “They weren’t being mean, they were just being nuns. It wasn’t fun.”

The Cigarette Thief, 1954–55.

*

When an older Larry recalls a happy 1950s childhood, he’s remembering summers of running wild and free with his pals. The families knew where their boys were—“out”—and they’d roam all day through the neighborhood, all doors open to them, going miles in any direction. They had bikes, but mainly they explored on foot. They had the Lehigh River to swim in at the dam. They had Jordan Creek out in the woods if they wanted to fish. And then they’d head for Catasauqua’s spectacular, seventeen-acre town park, a legacy of the early town fathers and the WPA.

You could spend the whole day at the park’s two playgrounds, swimming in a huge twelve-foot-deep municipal pool with three diving boards, playing a little touch football, a little basketball, watching the girls on the tennis courts, and then cooling down with swimming again while waiting for concerts on the lawn. Perhaps best of all, there were no cell phones, so you didn’t have to check in. This was an age of unscheduled days for adventure, pretending, pranking, and soaking up sunshine that would never end.

“With a river, two streams, and all the other kids you didn’t want for much,” Larry says. “When summertime came, you didn’t see me from dawn to dusk.”

. . . Unless he was careless enough to forget a family picnic and his dad came looking for him. Julius quickly put an end to the little tough’s walk on the wild side because Larry’s pilfering had gone on for so long that his unsuspecting father, thinking he was smoking too many Pall Malls, had tried to cut back by eating sweets . . . only to develop cavities instead.

“And all the while it was me,” says Larry, now chagrinned. “That’s probably why he kicked the crap out of me, for what I was doing to him. He was a big person and I was still pint-sized, and he beat my ass so hard that day I couldn’t take my shirt off at the picnic. It took me two weeks to heal. But I didn’t think too...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.8.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-0463-2 / 1098304632
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-0463-8 / 9781098304638