FAREWELL, MISS MAGIC : Cheryl Miller’s Style Brought Women’s Game Into the ‘80s

Well before Cheryl Miller ever played in her first college game, the Riverside teen-ager was being called the second coming for women’s basketball.

Now that Miller has graduated, it’s clear how wrong they all were. Cheryl Miller was the first coming for women’s college basketball. Now the question for the sport: After deliverance, where do we go?

Women’s basketball had better hope for a Cheryl clone to come along and attract television, sponsors and fans to a sport that Miller exposed to the public.

Sure, there was organized basketball before Miller began to shoot free throws in her driveway, but what can we say of that era? Its legacy lies in Theresa Shank, Lucy Harris, Carol Blazejowski, Nancy Lieberman, Ann Meyers and Lynette Woodard.

Stars, each of them. Each was thought to be the best ever. Each brought to the game an unusual talent, some element that elevated it. Each, in that backhanded compliment, was said to “play like a guy.”

In today’s college scene, those names and that era smell of mothballs. There has been evolution in women’s basketball, not swift but compressed into two decades. Five players on a side replaced the six-woman, three-dribble era. A hanging jumper replaced the two-handed set shot. With each addition, the image of the slow-poke women’s game receded. They don’t play in skirts anymore.

There has been 20 years of change, yet it seems as if Miller was in on every one. “Sometimes, it seemed that Cheryl was in college forever,” said one coach who had to prepare her team every year for the Miller onslaught.

Now that Miller has graduated--she signed this week as a commentator with ABC TV--college coaches are finding themselves in the unusual position of pining for her.

“Cheryl has done a lot for women’s basketball, and obviously, women’s basketball has done a lot for Cheryl,” said Joan Bonvicini, coach at Cal State Long Beach.

“Cheryl was unique--not because she was so talented--but because of her verbal skills and her attractiveness. She used everything she had at her disposal.”

That’s just the thing about the Miller phenomenon. Everything was there for her at just that moment when she first pulled on a USC uniform. Miller’s career was as much about our watching her as about her ability to shine.

Did Miller get so much attention because she got so much attention? Was the fact that a female basketball player was giving more interviews than most of her male counterparts all the more reason to interview her and see what all the fuss was about?

“In my freshman and sophomore years, I think (the attention) was about 80% talent and about 20% personality,” Miller said recently. “Once I became really secure in myself, that’s when the real Cheryl came out. Then I found out I was able to control the crowds, that they were yelling or they were smiling. I never tried to stifle my personality.”

How do you smother a whirlwind? The attention showered on Miller was so widespread and so lingering that readers of sports pages and watchers of jock television could scarcely go a day without Miller. She might have been one of the most media-exposed female athletes ever.

“I don’t think there’s ever been another athlete at USC who’s gotten more attention, male or female,” USC Coach Linda Sharp said. “When I was recruiting her, her mother told me, ‘Cheryl has a certain aura.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. Now I do.”

By now, fans are familiar with the Miller brand of basketball. It’s as theatrical as it is acrobatic; identified by the wrist flip, the blown kiss, the table hurdle and the scoreboard point. It grated on basketball’s nerves for four years, but basketball knew that it sold. Opponent schools need only look to a string of broken attendance records to realize what a draw Miller and the glitzy Trojan team were.

Even when the anti-Miller overkill reached its zenith, when opposing players longed to scratch Miller’s eyes out--and nearly succeeded, in one game, after which she needed four stitches to her eye--everyone knew that had it not been for the razzmatazz and glitter, the sheer force of Miller’s personality, they wouldn’t have had the shoe contracts and the unprecedented budgets that women’s teams were beginning to enjoy.

“What difference has Cheryl made? When I came here, we were playing our games in the Campus Gym,” Sharp said, noting that the move to the Sports Arena was made to accommodate both live-fan and television interest. But then, the Trojans would have played half-court in Blythe if it would have yielded them a clip on the 11 o’clock news.

Which brings up the sticky but pertinent question of timing. Was Miller simply in the right place at the right time with the right goods to show off? Did the overwhelming attention fuel the media engine?

“I think timing has a lot to do with a lot of things,” Sharp said. “She came out of high school as the player of the ‘80s. Things were happening in women’s sports. All the right things happened.”

Consider that this basketball prodigy attended high school in the greater Los Angeles area, not known as a media Siberia. Consider that Miller and other athletes of her time were the beneficiaries of that all-powerful door opener--Title IX. Consider that Miller chose to attend a high-profile, publicity conscious school, USC, to study a high-profile, media-oriented discipline, telecommunications.

Remember, too, that with fashion powerhouses Pam and Paula McGee already on the team, Miller was spared the spotlight’s full glare her first two years. From the twins, Miller learned about the proper application of makeup and the proper projection of herself to reporters.

“I just walked into the right situation,” Miller said. “It was incredible. People were seeing a 6-3, 6-2, 6-2 line (Miller and the McGees) high-fiving it. They loved it. It was wild.”

Most important, with Miller and the McGees, USC’s slick, fast-break team dictated a new style of basketball that simply blew out other teams. Reeling after USC’s two straight national titles, basketball finally woke up and smelled the money.

“Sure, I learned a lot from Cheryl Miller,” Bonvicini said. “A lot of people learned a lot. I saw what they did with Cheryl and I changed. I’ve tried to spruce up our news conferences. Otherwise things are boring. People don’t want to be bored.”

The beginnings of an idea. With USC and Miller to show them how, sports information directors began to promote the sport. Coaches found that in every tiny hamlet from which they recruited, Miller was the common denominator.

“She actually helped our recruiting,” Bonvicini said. “People wanted to come here to play against her.”

Few will deny Miller’s impact on the women’s game. As a four-time All-American, Miller was, for four years, the most dominant player in college basketball. Period. But the debate persists: Was Miller the best women’s player ever?

Sharp says yes. “I think she was as good as everyone said. She won every award there was to win,” Sharp said. “When I say that, I don’t mean to discredit or downplay the other legends we’ve had in the game. But they were the players of the ‘70s, Cheryl is the player of the ‘80s.”

Bonvicini isn’t sure she wants to say Miller was the greatest ever, but she’s a bigger fan now. “I don’t think we appreciated her until we saw what she could do in every game, year in and year out,” she said.

So what if Miller wasn’t the best ever, so what if she was? That’s not the point. The Miller phenomenon was more about style then substance, although she was loaded with both.

The point for the college game is what to do now. In Miller’s slipstream, the game was pulled into a new era. Miller did the work to get the attention, now women’s basketball must find a way to sustain it.

“I don’t think we are going to see another player like Cheryl,” Bonvicini said. “I don’t know if coaches are going to let their players do similar types of things. I think the attention now is going to go to a team rather than an individual. There’s no one player like that.”

Miller wishes the sport well but still feels the stings from the comments of what she considers fair-weather friends.

“For four years all I heard about was ‘Cheryl Miller and her antics,’ ” she said. “Now it’s ‘Miller was a great player.’

“Now they are saying, ‘We’re really going to miss you.’ What they mean is, ‘We’re really going to miss the attention.’

“The only thing that’s necessary is for them to maintain, to stay competitive. I hope it doesn’t take someone coming along every 10 years to help the sport.”

Previews: Southland Women, Page 12; PCAA Men, Page 16.

Friday: Comebacks of former Indiana State Coach Bill Hodges, Notre Dame guard David Rivers.