This man hates exercise just as much as you do.
  • This man hates exercise just as much as you do.

Previous to winning the golden ticket and getting press access to the Blazers, I just assumed all NBA players were blessed physical specimens with flawless genetics that never required any additional exercise. Considering that they played basketball for the majority of the day, any outside workouts would be excessive and most likely limited to rehabilitating injuries.

Nope. Turns out that every player engages in some sort of intense regiment off the court—from Travis Outlaw’s post-game weight lifting sessions, to Brandon Roy’s love of swimming—well, every player but Andre Miller. According to this TrueHoop piece (written by Mercury freelancer Andrew Tonry), the NBA’s least-injured player (over 600 consecutive games and counting) is just now, at age 34, learning about calories. He also takes pride in not doing a damn thing when the season ends:

“I have no regimen,” Miller says. After the season ends, so does Miller’s working out — no weights, no cardio, no nothing. “I really don’t pick up a basketball.”

Eating right also falls by the wayside. “(My diet) isn’t healthy at all,” Miller says. “Hamburgers, hot links on the Fourth of July, all that.”

To control his weight, however, Miller uses old-fashioned discipline. “I starve myself,” he says.

Seriously? “Yeah, I’m just starting to learn about calories and all that.”

All of this is maddening when you consider how naturally the game comes for Miller, and how on a team full of injured players, he has managed to stay perfectly healthy for the entire season. You see that, Oden? No more exercise for you.

Ezra Ace Caraeff is the former Music Editor for the Mercury, and spent nearly a third of his life working at the paper. More importantly, he is the owner of Olive, the Mercury’s unofficial office dog....

7 replies on “Andre Miller Stays Healthy By Refusing to Exercise”

  1. Why any of this should be maddening to anyone is beyond me.

    He’s the healthiest player in the NBA today for a reason.

    Perhaps it’s all the other players continuously breaking their backs “trying to say in shape” over the off-season who are doing it wrong?

  2. I love Dre more every day. The hair, the elegance of his dribble, his 52 point game this season, his inability to suck no matter how bad the Blazers are playing around him. A while ago I looked for an “Andre Miller fan club” but the google results just showed me that he had warrants for some traffic bullshit.

  3. @Jackattak: “Drexler said every offseason would include him bench pressing 300 pounds, sprinting in pursuit of a 4.1 second 40-yard dash, and squatting to maintain a 43-inch vertical leap. He would jump rope, one leg at a time, with ankle weights attached. And he would play basketball, sometimes up to six hours a day.”

    It worked out pretty well for Clyde.

  4. @ tk –

    Go find out the workout regimens for BRoy, Batum, Pryz, G.O., Travis, Rudy, and any other injured player on our long list this year and you might have something relevant.

    My point was that our players are dropping like flies. Except Miller.

    Perhaps he’s on to something.

  7. It’s really spooky! I guess people have been giving him crap about it for his whole life, since his nickname on the Clippers was “young richard” [ http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writ… ] He’s a fascinating individual, I think his aversion to exercise just adds to the dre mystique. His patented “slow quickness” is the best in the NBA since Chris Mullin — another only-sorta-athletic baller who rarely worked out.

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