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Larry Miller, a two-time ACC player of the year for North Carolina and 2022 inductee in the College Basketball Hall of Fame, has died. He was 79. The UNC athletic department said Miller died Sunday in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. No cause of death was given. An athletic department spokesman said Miller was in hospice care and dealing with medical issues for some time. Miller, a native of Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, was a star forward on coach Dean Smith's first two Atlantic Coast Conference championship and Final Four teams in 1967 and 1968. He earned first-team All-America honors both seasons and was a consensus pick in 1968 along with UCLA's Lew Alcindor, Houston's Elvin Hayes, LSU's Pete Maravich and Louisville's Wes Unseld.
Mike was larger than life thanks to his tireless work ethic and marketing from Nike. Then in 1993, he left the game behind with no one knowing if he’d ever return. In the midst of Mike’s baseball sabbatical, an imaginative H sold Knight on a vision even the founder couldn’t see: Jordan Brand. “It wasn’t just me,” White defers. “Tinker [Hatfield] was on board, we brought Larry Miller on, and I knew perspective. There are so many things that are ridiculous to do, but there was a small band of people that believed.” Belief in selling the inspirational story of Jordan years after Mike hung up his own Air Jordans. It’s a testament to White being able to see what can’t be seen.
“Intimidation and profanity-laced tirades” were cited in the investigation among Olshey’s methods of management. “I heard a number of stories about how badly people felt Neil treated them,” Larry Miller told The Post. “It got to a boiling point and it’s something that Jody and Bert should have been well aware of and done something about it.”
Carlos Boozer said there was no pressure replacing Karl Malone in Utah, because Andrei Kirilenko was already very good, he was joined in free agency by Mehmet Okur, and the team drafted Deron Williams a year later to form a talented core: “I had a blast here. I had a great time, man — this is one of the best teams I ever played on. We were like a family. Coach Sloan made sure of that, Larry Miller made sure of that. My kids would be running up and down the hallway, all our kids would be doing the same thing. We had a really unique team where everybody was an option.”
Late at night on Sept. 30, 1965, Edward David White, 18, walked toward his family’s rowhouse in the West Philadelphia neighborhood after his shift at a suburban diner. Known as David to his family and friends, he had a son who was 8 months old, and his girlfriend was pregnant with their daughter. They planned to marry in the spring. Mr. White did not make it home. A 16-year-old gang member, drunk on cheap wine and seeking retribution for the stabbing death of a member of his crew, shot him with a .38-caliber handgun, piercing his heart and his right lung. Mr. White, who was unarmed and had no police record, was left to die in the street. His killer went on to a prosperous life as a sports and marketing executive. He is Larry Miller, now 72, a former team president of the Portland Trail Blazers and the head of the Michael Jordan brand at Nike. He kept the secret of his murderous past for more than half a century, revealing it in a recent Sports Illustrated interview and a forthcoming book.
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Mr. Miller wonders in the book how he became fortunate enough to leave his old neighborhood. But he never names his victim in an advance copy of the book viewed by The New York Times, and he spends little time reckoning with the devastating implications for Mr. White, who never got a chance to hold his daughter, to see his son become a high school basketball star, to spoil his grandchildren. Fifty-six years after Mr. White’s death, his family members say they have been blindsided again by Mr. Miller and left grieving anew, caught unaware that the magazine article and the book were going to be published.
A family member saw the Sports Illustrated article by chance online. Mr. White’s name was mentioned in the article, and Mr. Miller said he planned to reach out to the family. But relatives say they still have not heard from Mr. Miller. They are upset that he did not mention Mr. White’s name or details of his life in the book. Mr. White remains thinly drawn as an anonymous victim, a stranger, “another Black boy.”
You could spend hours admiring it all, without a single hint of the dark chapter that preceded the journey. Of the years Miller spent in prison, or the horrifying act that put him there. Of a September evening in 1965, when Miller, just 16 years old, stood at the corner of 53rd and Locust streets in West Philadelphia, and fired a .38-caliber gun into the chest of another teenager, killing him on the spot. It’s a secret that Miller, 72, has guarded for more than 50 years. Even as he ran an NBA franchise and then oversaw the transformation of the Jordan Brand, nearly doubling its revenue during his tenure, he kept it from Jordan, Nike founder Phil Knight and NBA executives. He had already, for decades, been holding the truth from his friends and even his own children, for fear its exposure might destroy him. But it is a story Miller now feels must be told, and will be detailed in full in a forthcoming book, Jump: My Secret Journey From the Streets to the Boardroom, cowritten with his oldest daughter, Laila Lacy, set for release by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, in early 2022.
In a 90-minute interview with Sports Illustrated, Miller described being haunted by the killing, which he described as utterly senseless. He did not know the victim, identified in the news then as 18-year-old Edward White. “That’s what makes it even more difficult for me, because it was for no reason at all,” Miller says. “I mean, there was no valid reason for this to happen. And that’s the thing that I really struggle with and that’s—you know, it’s the thing that I think about every day. It’s like, I did this, and to someone who—it was no reason to do it. And that’s the part that really bothers me.”
For the last several months, Miller has been gradually informing people in his inner circle—including Jordan, Knight, NBA commissioner Adam Silver and several Nike executives, including Hall of Fame coach George Raveling, another close mentor—to ensure they would hear it from him first. “I've been blown away by how positive the response has been,” Miller says, calling the process “a real freeing exercise.”
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Guns were rare back then, but Miller had previously acquired a .38 from his girlfriend. So he grabbed the gun, downed a bottle of wine with three friends and went searching for anyone affiliated with the rival gang. He shot the first person they encountered. “We were all drunk,” Miller says softly. “I was in a haze. Once it kind of set in, I was like, ‘Oh, shit, what have I done?’ It took years for me to understand the real impact of what I had done.”
In a statement to SI, Silver said he was initially “stunned” at the disclosure, having never heard even a “rumor or whisper” of any criminal past. “I then went from stunned to amazed that Larry had managed his long and very successful professional career, operating at the highest levels in our industry, with this secret firmly intact, and was ultimately left with a feeling of sadness that Larry had carried this burden all these years without the support of his many friends and colleagues,” he said.
From the Miller Family: “It was an honor and a privilege to have one of the greatest and most respected coaches in NBA history coaching our team. We have appreciated our relationship with Jerry and acknowledge his dedication to and passion for the Utah Jazz. He has left an enduring legacy with this franchise and our family. The far-reaching impact of his life has touched our city, state and the world as well as countless players, staff and fans. We pray his family will find solace and comfort in Jerry’s life. The Miller family and Jazz organization will be proud to honor him with a permanent tribute.”
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