Review: Winning Time: Reggie Miller Vs. The New York Knicks

Yes, Michael Jordan was the best player during that era. Ever, in fact. Yes, the Bulls were the best team during that era. But Reggie Miller was the game’s gutsiest, most clutch performer. Pat Riley was its toughest personality, and he imposed his will on his Knickerbockers. Because of these two men, the toughest two teams in the NBA were the Knicks and Pacers, not the Bulls. And they hated each other.

That hatred, the frustration of being under Jordan’s thumb, and the chance to get out from under it at the other team’s expense fueled possibly the most underrated rivalry in the history of professional sports. Knicks fans and master storytellers Spike Lee and Woody Allen couldn’t have written a better script.

During the years most of this documentary’s action took place, 1993-95, I was a 15-17 year old who was captivated by the NBA. 6-foot-4. Skinny. Played basketball until my fingers bled from blisters. I was troubled — I actually had been sent away to boarding school in Northern freakin’ Idaho — and basketball kept me out of trouble. If basketball gave me something to do, Reggie gave me hope.

I knew his story; how he was the basketball Forrest Gump who grew up with brackets on his legs, in his sister’s shadow, only to be booed on draft day by the fans of the squad that had drafted him. That’s what made what Reggie Miller did so unfathomable. It would have been unthinkable for even Michael Jordan to pull off these feats in Madison Square Garden. For anybody else, it would be impossible. Or so we thought.

Reggie provoking the John Starks’ headbutt. Spike Lee inciting Reggie’s game-winning 25-point fourth-quarter riot. The Davis Boys vs. Mason & Oakley Inc. Reggie’s 8-points-in-9-seconds MSG magic trick. The Patrick Ewing in-and-out finger roll. It’s all in there.

But what else was in there that I especially appreciated was how much this fucking meant to fans of each team. How much tension was in the air — it was tangible. Screw the NBA Championship. That was just a trophy, and one that lost some of its luster in the wake of Air Jordan’s premature retirement. This was personal. It was Indiana and Reggie Miller vs. New York City. There’s no place on earth where basketball matters more than those two places. It was a god damn hardwood war.

This film captured that rivalry’s essence — no easy feat. For me, it was almost like a time warp at times, as I found myself sitting up, heart pumping, cheering and gasping out loud. Wait, I said to myself, this shit happened 15 years ago. Not in my heart it didn’t. Those games still play over and over in my head, crystal clear. I grew up, and remain to this very day, a Lakers fan. But like I mentioned above (and a billion times before…shut up already), Reggie Miller was my boyhood idol.

Almost all Reggie fans are this cuckoo. All that mattered was Reggie back in his day. He’s like a basketball Frodo or something, the unlikeliest of heroes (insert joke about him looking like Gollum here), but in the end the One Ring somehow always ended up in the fires of Mount Doom. He made us all believe that if we never quit and worked harder than everybody else, that we too could be special. During the film, I was saddened by the fact that I will never get to watch perhaps the most clutch last-second athlete ever play again. At the same time, I was overjoyed that the filmmakers felt passionately enough to preserve this chapter in basketball history.

Because of Winning Time, I will someday be able to show my kids just how intense this rivalry was and why Reggie was a hero to so many. Nonetheless, that era is always going to be one of those “you had to be there” moments in time. For fans of those two teams, there will never be anything like that again. The Hicks vs. the Knicks Thugs in Shorts. Neither words nor pictures can describe what transpired during that great rivalry, but this excellent 70-minute doc from filmmaker Dan Klores and ESPN comes about as close as possible. For a little over an hour, it felt just like Winning Time again.

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