Utah Jazz inspired by owner's ordeal

Last Friday, the Jazz announced that their longtime owner had undergone amputation surgery to remove both legs from about six inches below the knees on down.

On Monday, the entire team — losers, at the time, of three straight games, which seems so inconsequential in the scheme of things — visited, and was uplifted, by him.

And on Tuesday night his eldest son, Greg, revealed something few know: One week earlier, the Jazz almost lost Larry H. Miller.

Again.

"We had a close call a week ago (Tuesday) where some of the infection (in Miller's feet) began to spread throughout his body," Greg Miller said, "and it got bad enough the doctor told my mom to call all the kids and get 'em up to the hospital, because they weren't sure he was gonna make it."

It was his fifth brush with death since last summer for Miller, whose amputations were prompted by his ongoing battle with type-2 diabetes.

And that was what ultimately convinced Miller, son Greg bared in a poignant recounting of his father's travails, to have the surgery.

"I think he's struggling, on one hand. It would be tough, for me, I know, if I were to wake up and find that a significant part of my body was no longer with me," said Greg Miller, who last summer — after his 64-year-old father survived a heart attack and endured a hospital stay that lasted nearly two months — was given day-to-day operational control of both the NBA's Jazz and the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies. "But that was a decision that I'm sure he contemplated for a period of weeks before he actually had to make the decision.

"He made the decision with the benefit of a lot of really wise doctors. There was a lot of discussion, a lot of questions, a lot of analysis that was done. And, in the end, the reason he decided to have that operation is because he felt it would be better to try to eliminate the source of so many of his problems — which was the lack of circulation to his feet.

"That was actually a symptom of his diabetes," Greg Miller added, "but that symptom, in a way, became the source of other problems, primarily infection."

And that infection that had him so close to passing proved to be Larry Miller's final straw in a gut-wrenching call.

"That's not the kind of circumstances he wants to be living in — that close to the edge all the time," Greg Miller said.

"So, after talking to the doctors, I think he convinced himself that it would be best for him in the long run to sacrifice that part of his body in hopes that the rest of his body would regain its health.