MGCCC Hall of Famer Eddie Miller dies

PERKINSTON — Eddie Miller, a member of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College Athletics Hall of Fame, passed away April 29.

Miller was inducted into the Hall of Fame for 2007. He was a member of the Gulf Coast basketball, baseball and track teams during his time at Perk from 1962-64.

Visitation will be held Monday at Trinity Methodist Church in Gulfport from 9:30-11 a.m. A funeral service will follow at 11 a.m., with a reception at the Miller residence from 2-4 p.m.

At 6-foot-3, Eddie Miller was a natural for several different sports. So the Gulfport native used his height on the basketball court, his speed on the track and his skills on the baseball diamond. 

Miller played for the first team coached by legendary Gulfport basketball coach Bert Jenkins. At Gulfport, he set a high hurdles record at the 1962 state meet that stood for 16 years. Only one thing stood between him and enrolling at Perk: a shot at the big leagues.

"I went to Laurel because the Los Angeles Dodgers were having open tryouts," Miller said. "They offered me a deal, but my father wouldn't let me go." The Dodgers' loss was Perk's gain. As a freshman, Miller played forward for Bob Weathers, one of Perk's legends.

"I could shoot the ball, and I could jump pretty well," he said. "But I wasn't a very good ball-handler, so I played forward. In my freshman year (1962), we played Southwest in the state tournament. We had beaten Southwest twice during the regular season, but in that game, I think we shot something like 11 percent, Coach Weathers was frustrated, so he called a timeout, took the ball and threw it up against the backboard to see if it would actually go in the hoop."

That same year, Miller traded in his basketball sneakers for track shoes and won the Mississippi Association of Junior Colleges title in the high hurdles and placed second in the high jump. Those achievements earned him the track team's 1964 Most Valuable Player award.

As a sophomore, Miller began the year back on the hardwood. This time the Bulldogs won the state title by beating archrival Pearl River at Poplarville 65-60. The state crown was the first of nine for Weathers. Once again that spring, it was onto the track and more honors. At the state meet, Miller took second in the high hurdles, second in the high jump and was a member of the state championship 440-relay team, He also placed in the pole vault and chipped in for track coach George Sekul when an extra runner was needed.

"Coach Sekul asked me to run in the 220," Miller said. "I actually did pretty well. I was leading the race, until 'the bear' caught me. I think I finished third. The guy who won the race set a state record. Both Coach Weathers and Coach Sekul were good guys. They worked us pretty hard."

If Miller's life was not interesting enough, he went on to get his college degree from Mississippi State University and a law degree from Ole Miss. After that, he spent four years working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a special agent. His two stops as a fed were in St. Louis, Mo., and West Palm Beach, Fla.

"I actually worked during the J. Edgar Hoover days," he said, "I worked a lot of bank robbery cases back then. In fact, one of them was easy to solve, because the robbers left a trail of money from the bank to their safe house."

Miller eventually moved back to Gulfport where he was a lawyer for decades. He and his wife, Diane, who taught at Gulfport High School, have one son, Owen, who is the men's basketball coach at Gulf Coast.

Miller said his time at Perk could easily be summed up by former baseball coach Ken "Curly" Farris. "Coach Farris told me I could've been a great baseball player, but I loved playing the guitar too much."

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