#49 - Reggie Miller is Mikhail Bakunin

Say hello to The Bad Guy! Chico! *toothpick soaked in saliva thrown into your stupid eye* Honestly, there are so many professional wrestlers whose entrance gimmicks would’ve been THE WORST during this pandemic. We’ve got Razor Ramon flicking toothpicks from his mouth into people’s faces, Mr. Perfect batting gum - he was just chewing and spit into the air - into the crowd (maybe the greatest heel gimmick ever), HHH and Gangrel just spraying a full mouthful of liquid as high and as far as they can from their mouth just like everywhere, Bret Hart taking his sweaty ass sunglasses - how were his sunglasses that sweaty?! Was he sweating from his eyes and forehead exclusively? - onto a wanton child’s face/head, and really just a cesspool of COVID spreading. 

Reggie Miller and, actually, hold on… Reggie MOTHERFUCKING Miller and Mikhail the eyepatched Russian merc were bad guys. Bad guys. Villains. And they LOVED IT. Loved. It. There are a ton of professional athletes who get saddled with a villain role or labeled a bad guy and most of them can’t take it or don’t like it, but then others kiss it on the mouth and embrace it and make it their fucking own and become blood brothers with it and just kisses and kissees and all that - they fucking let it become their second skin. Boom. And Reggie had that. And so did Mikhail. 

It’s this mix of true talent, like game-taking-over level talent, that is fueled by this performing for the crowd chip-on-your-shoulder. Michael Jordan is zenith bad guy, ultimate bad guy with all that and, arguably, Kobe Bryant is next on that, the penultimate bad guy. It’s like with every bucket scored, it’s not just 2 points or 3 points. It’s 2 points and fuck you. It’s 3 points and fuck you. It’s a look, it’s a body shake, it’s an arms raised, it’s a word said, it’s something. Like I said in a previous post, Gary Payton was a prolific trash talker and that’s on top of a mountain of prolific trash talkers and they all do it and some guys feed on that energy more than others. Reggie Miller is just one of those competitive guys who is playing to win in a rubbing it in your face, dropping all the numbers on you he can, beat you by as much as possible so that neither of you will ever forget it, beat you in a way that you think you lost twice. I mean it’s something you have to witness. Reggie was beloved in Indiana because he was their great warrior, he was their great killer, he was their champion Achilles, but outside of Pacers’ land - you could respect the shit out of Reggie, but ooooooh you knew he was the bad guy. Kobe is/was a fucking god in LA, but c’mon - there ain’t a player in the league people loved watching get beat more than Kobe. 

Reggie relished being that superstar with Pacers fans frothing for his next kill and every other fan base screaming for his neck, and Mikhail is his symbolic twin with all that. Reggie doing the choke to Spike Lee and Knicks nation after he scored 8 points in 9 seconds is fucking Mikhail giving a wave and a smile to Charlie as he pulls the pin on the grenade and blowing up that window to drown Charlie, and he hoped Desmond as well. AND Mikhail was such a bad dude that he’s even a smarmy bad dude in the parallel universe who simply shows up out of nowhere to be a bad dude who gets killed. Both Reggie and Mikhail had a hell of a villain smirk or straight-up evil smile after they did some devious shit and were doing it for years for one team and one team only - Indiana Pacers and The Others. Reggie was a prolific scorer and one of the all-time great shooters for EIGHTEEN fucking years with the Pacers. And Mikhail was jack-of-all-trades running what appeared to be a half-farm, half-communications hub that he wired with explosives and probably his best trade was being a ruthless killer, which he did for team Others for at least a decade. And I’m talking ruthless like killed Ms. Klugh without a second thought, she did legit ask for it, who played for team Others and then tried to blow his own head off to stop them from being taken hostage. Like dude was for the cause. 

Both were durable as fuck too. Reggie averaged 30-38 minutes a game for basically every damn game of every season for eighteen fucking seasons. Meanwhile, Mikhail survived a sonic blast that made blood erupt out of his damn ears and there was that other time he took a fucking harpoon to the chest and still got up and did stuff like swim and use that grenade as mentioned. I legit thought Mikhail was going to turn out to be some undead type and I also thought for many years that Reggie Miller was going to play professional basketball until he was 50. Just an all around threat, a lingering threat, but both never saw the promise land of a big W. Not even sure what Mikhail thought the overall goal was for The Others, but the Pacers couldn’t get that NBA title. They fought hard for it, but nope. Seriously, such a memorable team from the 90’s that is featured in the Michael Jordan/Bulls doc “The Last Dance” and, of course, in the Reggie Miller doc by Spike Lee called “Winning Time”. 

What’s left? Fuck styles? Well, I think both are freaky. I’d bet there’s some trash talk and it’s probably aggressive and it’s probably them leading the action. But yeah, I think they’ve got some pronounced overarching fetish that needs to be satiated. Not feet. I know that’s what you thought, but I’m guessing it’s not that. That’s too ‘ped’estrian. Um, that’s fine. That’s I guess a Latin joke. I don’t know. I bet they’re really into grabbing hair and eye contact too. Public stuff? Maybe. Maybe not like bending over a picnic table, but car sex sure.