Albert Olson died in 1940 a few minutes after giving his 5-year-old son, Lute, a haircut. It was a Sunday morning; the family was getting ready for church.
Albert was 47. He died of a stroke at his family’s small wheat farm near Mayville, North Dakota.
Lute became the man of the family when his older brother, Amos, who had returned from college to operate the family farm, gouged his leg on a plow and died of gangrene.
Over the next 15 years, until he graduated from a small college in Minneapolis, Olson worked at the post office, a gas station, drove a 7-Up truck, shucked corn, sorted eggs and even dressed dummies in the display window of a department store.
About the time Albert Olson died, Joe Miller was employed by the Aliquippa and Southern Railroad in Glenwillard, Pennsylvania. His oldest son, John, 6, was stricken with polio and admitted to the Watson Home for Crippled Children.
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Incredibly, 13 months later, John Miller regained the feeling in his legs. He would become the MVP of his high school basketball team, a standout point guard for the Division II Pfieffer University Falcons and, immediately after college, get married and become a high school basketball coach.
Two years later, in 1968, John and Barb Miller’s oldest son, Sean, was born. For the next 17 years, John and Sean Miller were inseparable, basketball junkies one and the same, a well-chronicled father-son saga that intersected with Johnny Carson, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, John Calipari and Jim Valvano.
The upbringings of Olson and Miller couldn’t have been more different. One was born of tragedy, the other of good fortune, but both have become irresistible American success stories in Tucson and elsewhere.
I bring this to your attention because Pennsylvania school teacher David A. Burhenn, a drummer in the school band when John Miller coached and Sean Miller played at Blackhawk High School, has written a book.
“Miller Time” documents John Miller’s career from his diligence playing on an outdoor dirt court to his son’s 1983 appearance as a teenage dribbling wizard on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson.
They have much more in common than sharing a love for jersey No. 3, which John Miller, as a high school shortstop and point guard, and Sean, as a Pitt Panther point guard, wore. Hard-nosed doesn’t begin to describe the family’s rise through the basketball ranks.
“My dad was tough, real tough, on all of us,” John Miller says. “He wouldn’t have done me any favors by taking it easy on me.”
John taught Sean the same work ethic, which has been apparent in his eight seasons at McKale Center.
Sean told Burhenn that rather than sit on the sofa during the western Pennsylvania winters, he would shovel the snow off the outdoor court and say “I’ll show him; if he wants me to shoot 100, I’ll shoot 500.”
Before a Blackhawk Cougars game, Sean would dribble to the gymnasium, about 2½ miles across Route 51, through the Pappan Family Restaurant parking lot, down an old alley and finally down Blackhawk Road. He’d dribble right-handed for a few yards, then left-handed. Over and over, all the way to school.
Someone should’ve written a song about it.
A few years ago, Burhenn approached John Miller not about writing a book, but about helping Burhenn’s 5-year-old son, Ben overcome a communication disorder. Burhenn was so impressed by Miller’s Drill for Skill Academy that he thought he could help Ben.
“Here is this guy, 73 years old, running around the gym with all the energy in the world, genuinely concerned about what his sixth-grade girls team is doing,” Burhenn says. “You’d think he’d take a break or rest on his laurels (Miller coached Blackhawk to four Pennsylvania state titles), but he took my son under his wing, got him to talk, listen to and follow directions.”
In the end, Miller did some coaching with Burhenn, too.
“I had never written a book and was a little overwhelmed,” Burhenn says. “But John told me to take it one day at a time, one chunk today, one chunk tomorrow, and before you knew it I had 255 pages.”
The 255 pages are basketball-centric, but it’s what you read between the lines that make it a worthy (and well-written and -researched) project.
After recovering from polio, John Miller bumped into a benevolent hardware store owner in small Glenwillard, about 25 miles from Pittsburgh. Bob Mytinger helped the local school kids build an outdoor basketball court. He donated the materials for backboards and to smooth down the dirt and grass. He even paid to install lights. That dirt court became the genesis of John Miller’s basketball career and, as it follows, Sean’s.
By the time Sean was 5, he, too, became a basketball gypsy.
“It was every day,” Miller told Burhenn. “It was what we wanted to do. It was every single day, working out in the gym, working on it to the nth degree. Our motto was, ‘We’re going to be the hardest-working guys out there.’”
“I wish there were cellphones then, because I could do stuff that you wouldn’t believe. I could’ve gone anywhere in the country and done halftime shows.”
The halftime shows and training paid off. By the sixth grade, Sean Miller averaged 23 points for the Purification Catholic School of Elwood City. As a senior at Blackhawk High, he scored 52 one night against Slippery Rock.
The ballhandler became a ballplayer and ultimately a notable college basketball coach.
“I really wanted to be known as a player first,” Miller told Burhenn. “To a degree, the trick dribbling helped me to become a good point guard, but really it was like a fork in the road. At some point, you have to choice to pursue the game for real or pursue being a showman. The two really don’t mix. It opened a lot of doors for me.”
Burhenn’s book “Miller Time” is published by Word Association Publishers (wordassociation.com). It will be available later this month for $19.99.
Greg Hansen
Columnist
