Gregg Doyel | IndyStar

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Gregg Doyel/IndyStar

WEST TERRE HAUTE – Reggie Miller is 2 feet tall and exquisite, except for the gash on his shoulder. It is gruesome and getting worse, and here in a well-disguised art studio on a decaying side of West Terre Haute, Bill Wolfe is lovingly rubbing his hands over the gash, over the shoulder, smoothing out the clay as the sculpture survives another day. But the days are running out. Reggie is collapsing under the weight of himself, of gravity, of time.

This is nobody’s fault.

What happens next to Reggie Miller is a mystery, but it’s one that I can probably solve right now: Reggie will continue to fall apart, much like the neighborhood around him. Next to Bill Wolfe’s studio is an auto repair shop with a roof that caves in and Christmas lights that dangle as the calendar flips from June to July. Behind the studio, a row of mobile homes disappears down a hill.

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This converted old house in this depressing area of town is not where you’d expect to find a 2-foot-tall Reggie Miller, 2 feet of gray clay, hurriedly but somehow calmly shooting a jumper off the wrong foot. Everything about the sculpture seems wrong, and yet it is right. Art is often that way.

Bill Wolfe is telling me about his 2-foot Reggie Miller, why it happened and what he’d like to see happen next. It was a labor of love, he’s saying, and I don’t have it in me to tell him: Sometimes, a heart gets broken.

* * *

Bill Wolfe’s art is splashed all over the state, and sprinkled around the country. He’s the painter behind the four large murals in the Vigo County Courthouse, and the sculptor behind bronze memorials to U.S. veterans in Avon, Carmel and Terre Haute. His work leans toward history and military, with nods to JFK and Abraham Lincoln and World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, but down deep he’s just another kid from Indiana who loves basketball.

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He played the sport as a boy, even if he had to make the basket himself. Found an old rim at a Terre Haute salvage yard, took it home and nailed it to the walnut tree in his yard. As a boy he was Rick Mount shooting jumpers and Billy Keller driving to the basket. He used his hands to stretch out his sweat socks so they’d sag around his ankles, because that’s how they looked on Pistol Pete Maravich.

Five years ago Bill Wolfe made the sculpture of a lifetime, a 15-foot bronze of Larry Bird shooting his forever jumper outside the Hulman Center at Indiana State. Wolfe was obsessed with the project, skipping meals and losing 25 pounds and occasionally falling asleep as he worked on the clay mold deep into the night.

“I’d wake up, and I was still sculpting,” Bill says, closing his eyes and showing me his hands smoothing over imaginary rough spots, then jolting awake: “Oh well – I must have fallen asleep. But I like what I did!”

Wolfe was meticulous about detail, giving his bronze Bird that wispy mustache and parting his hair in the middle and afflicting his right pinkie, the one Bird broke badly on a softball field at Indiana State, with its ugly hook.

A few years ago when Vigo County officials commissioned those four courthouse murals, they gave him a list of names to consider for the panel on famous local residents. Wolfe finished the panel, exhausting work with more than 50 portraits, and signed his name in the lower right corner. He was ready for the official unveiling when he decided the mural needed one more face, one more portrait.

“It was weighing on me,” he says. “I can’t send the mural without Slick Leonard on it.”

The mural had room in just one place of prominence: The lower right corner. And so Bill Wolfe painted former Terre Haute Gerstmeyer star Bobby “Slick” Leonard over his own name, and found a smaller spot to sign. He’s telling me that story in his humble studio in West Terre Haute when he recalls meeting Slick at the Larry Bird statue dedication in 2013.

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“I shook Larry Bird’s hand, I shook Mel Daniels’ hand – Bill Walton was there and I shook his hand – but when I shook Slick Leonard’s hand …” Wolfe pauses. He puts his hand to his mouth, and his eyes are watering. “When I shook his hand, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.”

A basketball junkie, this guy, and he cherishes the Pacers. So when someone came to him about doing a Reggie sculpture …

“He jumped all over it,” says Dave Searle.

Who is Dave Searle? The someone who came to Bill Wolfe three years ago about doing a Reggie sculpture. The whole idea was a lark, an emotional reaction by Pacers fans to the announcement in March 2016 that the city’s other major professional franchise, the Indianapolis Colts, were building a Peyton Manning statue outside Lucas Oil Stadium. Over at @MillerTimePod, one of the most popular nooks of Pacers Twitter, Searle started a #ReggieStatue conversation that raged until he was looking for pricing info, because Pacers fans were talking about raising the funds for it themselves. A Google search provided the name of a West Terre Haute artist named Bill Wolfe, and Searle reached out.

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“Literally I didn’t know if it would cost $50 grand or $2 million,” he says. “Bill and I talked a few times, and we met and – have you met Bill?”

Yes, I’m telling Searle. Just spent 90 minutes at his studio in West Terre Haute.

“He’s a character,” Searle says, and he’s laughing fondly. “He jumped all over it.”

Wolfe got to work on a mock version of the sculpture – he envisions a 10-foot Reggie Miller in bronze – carving No. 31 out of gray clay on a wire framework. It took him about two months. Meanwhile, Searle was reaching out to the Pacers to see if they wanted the sculpture and …

And this is where the story could go sideways, but only if you take it there. Who’s you? You. I mean: You. This story, the exact one you’re reading and the general story of the 2-foot Reggie Miller, isn’t a call to action. It’s not a cause, and it’s absolutely not an outrage. Only reason you’re reading about it, ever, is because a friend in Terre Haute told me about a tiny Reggie Miller sculpture sitting in a studio in West Terre Haute, and would I be interested in that? To which I said: Does a bear … well, anyway. Yes. I would be interested.

After visiting with Bill Wolfe, I spoke with three Pacers officials about the Reggie statue, and I can tell you: The Pacers are in a tough spot here, because honoring their legends is a franchise decision, and a delicate one at that. Pacers president Rick Fuson told me this week that he'll be "happy to personally take a look" at the statue, but here's something he didn't say, something I'll say: Putting a statue of Reggie Miller (or anyone else) at Bankers Life Fieldhouse is a decision that should start at 125 S. Pennsylvania, and nowhere else.

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Reggie Miller is the highest-scoring Pacer of all-time and arguably the greatest player in franchise history. Roger Brown’s star didn’t burn long, but it burned red-hot from 1968-74. George McGinnis was league MVP in 1975, producing one of the most remarkable individual seasons – 29.8 points, 14.3 rebounds, 6.3 assists per game – in ABA or NBA history. Center Mel Daniels was good for 20-and-15 on three ABA championship teams. And what of Slick Leonard? He coached those title teams, remains beloved on the radio, and with his wife Nancy is the primary reason the Pacers survived in Indianapolis after the ABA-NBA merger.

All are in the Hall of Fame, and all have had jerseys retired, and more honors are coming. That’s all I can say: The Pacers aren’t finished honoring their legends, but they will do it in their way and in their time, things you need to know when I tell you what happened when Dave Searle says he contacted someone within the organization about the Reggie sculpture in 2016, and when Bill Wolfe says he reached out to someone else in 2018:

Nothing happened.

It’s OK.

* * *

We’ve been talking for more than an hour, and the whole time I assumed we were sitting in 63-year-old Bill Wolfe’s actual studio. The 2-foot Reggie is on a table in front of us, next to a stack of books with “Landscapes by Andrew Wyeth” on top. Paintings are propped up against various walls. On another table I count three dirty coffee mugs and a single Triscuit cracker. Artists, you know?

“Here comes the place you really need to look,” Bill Wolfe says, getting up and heading toward a door that leads to the garage, which isn’t a garage anymore. This is his main studio, though it’s like walking into an art museum. Larry Bird’s enormous head is sitting on a table, as are a handful of Abraham Lincoln pieces. Near the various ages of Abe is a bronze sculpture of a mountain man with a turkey slung over his shoulder. I could go on, but there’s just so much in here, all of it hand-crafted by a veritable artistic genius. A messy one. Who eats Triscuits.

Here is where Bill Wolfe keeps the foam where he’d like to carve out a 10-foot Reggie Miller, and the clay he’d like to cover him with. Here is where he keeps the knives and paintbrushes and cans of turpentine. Sponges, clamps, wire cutters … it’s just so surreal. Outside the garage, West Terre Haute is falling into ugly disrepair. Inside, beauty happens.

This is where Bill Wolfe decided the essence of Reggie Miller was in a game’s final moments, not merely that iconic ending against the New York Knicks in 1995 – eight points, nine seconds, you remember – but all those endings where Reggie had the ball. This is where Wolfe decided the essential Reggie Miller was a hurried shot off the wrong foot, off-balance and yet perfectly balanced, art imitating art. He studied pictures of Reggie rising for a shot, all muscle and bone and hard angles, and saw the resemblance to a lightning bolt.

“Like this,” Wolfe is telling me, zig-zagging his hand downward, and I’m looking again at his 2-foot-tall Reggie, and I’ll be damned: a lightning bolt, indeed.

“This sculpture isn’t any one last shot by Reggie,” he’s saying. “It’s Reggie’s every last shot.”

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I’m nodding and thinking aloud: Your interpretation, I’m saying, of Reggie at the buzzer.

“You might have just named my sculpture,” he says.

Reggie at the buzzer?

“I like it,” he says, nodding.

Alas, barring something unforeseen, this project won’t go any farther than where it is today: 2 feet of clay over a wire skeleton, both shoulders cracking under its own weight, the breakdown hurried along by the hot temperature of a studio he cools only when he’s here. Permanence is bronze, but the sculpture Bill Wolfe envisions would cost about $93,000, plus a base that could push the overall bill beyond $100,000. There is no demand at the moment for such a pricey piece, and Wolfe sees the gashes in the shoulder getting larger, the arms starting to stoop. Right before his eyes, Reggie Miller is decomposing.

“Reggie has been nudging me for two years, every time I walk into the studio and see him,” he says, “but the nudging is getting harder because the clay is getting softer. It’s falling apart. It’s time to get this going, or it may not happen.”

Well, it may not. Time is running out on 2-foot tall Reggie Miller, eyes locked on the basket, confident and courageous even as everything around him is falling apart.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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Indiana Pacers legend Reggie Miller