Reggie Miller

Reggie Miller celebrating win over Heat (http://www.bballone.com/reggiem/pacers/images/pacers17.jpg)

My hero is Reggie Miller. He is one of the greatest NBA basketball players ever. He played for the Indiana Pacers as a shooting guard. Reggie inspires me because of his determination to play even when there were times he couldn't.

Reggie was born August 24, 1965 in Riverside, California. Reggie was born with a hip deformation that caused his feet to be deformed. Because of this, he couldn�t walk until age five. He had to wear leg braces before that that could fix his legs until age four. The doctors weren�t positive if he would ever walk again unassisted. He quickly proved them wrong. Once Reggie could walk he played his two favorite sports all of the time. Every day he would stand in his driveway and shoot baskets. If he made it he would take a step back and shoot another one. When he missed he would start over. These streaks sometimes went all the way to his neighbor�s driveway.

Reggie also played baseball until he was in high school, and he was really good. When he was twelve he batted over .500. That is a really good batting average. He played this until he attended Riverside Polytechnic in high school. There he became the great basketball player that he is. When he graduated from high school, he attended UCLA. There he scored 2,095 points, second on the all- time school list to the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

In 1987, the Indiana Pacers selected Reggie as their first overall pick. Some Pacer fans weren't happy with this, but they were soon proven wrong. In his rookie year he scored ten points per game and he broke Larry Bird's rookie record of 61 three pointers in one season. By his third year he was scoring 24.6 points per game. He continued to be the Pacers leading scorer for ten years in a row. In 2000 the Pacers went to the NBA Finals. They played against the LA Lakers. They played well and Reggie helped them win a few games but they were eliminated in the sixth game. Reggie never won an NBA title.

Reggie retired after playing his last game on May 19, 2005 against the Pistons. He got a standing ovation after he came out in the last ten seconds of the game. He is greatly remembered as the all-time 3 point leader with 2560 made �threes�. He was the greatest free-throw shooter ever in percentage and shots made and 12th on the all-time scoring list in NBA history with 25,279. Reggie is a great basketball player and a nice person. Those are two of the many reasons he is my hero.