It’s a special delivery for Miller family
Bode Miller won the gold medal in the super combined at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. He also won three silver and two bronze medals in his Olympic career. He was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2018. But those aren’t his greatest accomplishments. No, that came Friday, when he helped deliver his and wife Morgan’s twin boys.
“The birth story was actually one of the more crazy things that I’ve ever experienced . ... none of the midwives actually made it on time,” Miller told NBC’s “Today” show. “They started coming over and by the time they got there, me and my mom were both holding the babies.” His mom? “Yeah, luckily my mom was a midwife, but she hadn’t delivered babies in 20-plus years, and she never delivered twins,” Miller said. “We’re both pretty relaxed and pretty casual, but we were certainly not qualified to be doing an unassisted home delivery of twins.”
The twins were born about a year after Bode and
Morgan’s 19-month-old daughter, Emeline, died in a drowning accident. Morgan Miller said in an Instagram post that “we knew Emmy had her hands in this miracle somehow.”
Of course, you can look at this another way: Morgan Miller does all the hard work, but her husband gets the headlines.
Management skills
There is an ongoing debate in the NBA about the “load management” theory, which is when teams rest a star player on the first or second night of back-toback games in order to preserve their strength. It’s supposed to be tied to an injury, but not everyone believes that is happening.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is all in favor of it though, telling reporters this week that it’s “the best thing to ever happen to the league.”
The Mavericks have given star Kristaps Porzingis games off to rest him in his recovery from knee surgery in February.
“The problem isn’t load management, per se,” Cuban said. “I think teams have to be smarter about when to load manage. I’m all for load management. Worse than missing a player in a [regular-season] game is missing him in the playoffs. It’s all data-driven. We’re not going, ‘OK, let’s just mess with the league and our meal ticket to fans to do something just because it might be interesting.’ We spend so much money, not just on analytics for predictive reasons, but also for biometrics so we know how smart we can be.
“The dumb thing would be to ignore the science.”
Your favorite sports moment
What is your all-time favorite local sports moment? Email houston.mitchell@latimes.com and describe what it is and why, and it could appear in a future Sports newsletter or Morning Briefing.
This moment comes from Jeffrey Spitz:
“I am a transplanted New Yorker, but in the 198687 NBA season I shared Lakers tickets with three friends from law school and one of their moms, one of the biggest sports fans I have ever known. We rotated access to playoff tickets and I was lucky enough to come up in the rotation for the sixth and deciding game of the Finals. The problem, however, was that the game was preceded the night before by the Las Vegas bachelor party for one of my fellow ticket holders, who had the other game ticket. Flying back from Vegas pretty hungover, the plane was delayed and we were concerned about getting to the game on time.
“The moment the plane landed, we rushed to the front, disobeying the standard order to ‘remain seated until the plane comes to a complete stop and the pilot has turned off the seat-belt sign.’
“When we told the flight attendants why we were rushing to the front, however, they let us stay crouched down next to the exit door and ushered us out of the plane on our way to the Forum.
“As it turned out, we arrived just in time for the tipoff. The arena was as electric as any event I have ever attended. The Lakers, of course, won the game, and we rushed the floor afterwards, high-fiving Jack Nicholson and Elton John courtside to celebrate the Lakers championship.”