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Heights of hilarity
Posted: Wednesday June 20, 2001 12:41 PM
When the NBA held its annual pre-draft camp in Chicago earlier this month, even the studliest prospects got the raw-recruit treatment. "They pinch and poke and prod you," says out-to-pasture studhorse Bill Walton, who has long insisted that he's an honest 6-foot-11. "Then they put the calipers on you. It's like submitting yourself to one of the Big Five accounting firms."
This being basketball, one measurement trumped all others. Everyone at the camp was measured in his shoes. But since most late-model sneakers have the kind of chassis you'd expect on a sport-utility vehicle, each prospect was measured in stocking feet, too -- and the league issued a list that included both heights.
 Plenty of smoke-blowing got smoked out in the Windy City. Though several campers turned out to be bigger than advertised -- North Carolina's Brendan Haywood, listed as 7-foot in college, is, in fact, 7-1 1/2 in his shoes; Duke's Shane Battier turns out to be 6-9 shod, not the 6-8 at which the Blue Devils had him -- most came up short. "These days, the difference between 'with shoes' and 'without shoes' is running an inch and a half," says Chris Ekstrand, who works as a consultant to the NBA for the draft. "The schools almost always go with the higher, shoes-on measurement."
It's logical that someone would try to give the impression he's taller than he really is. But I've encountered more and more guys who either underlist themselves or seem to shrink with the passage of time. Here are a few altitudinal curiosities over the years, documented and suspected:
The Timberwolves' Kevin Garnett, though widely thought to be 7-foot, is listed at 6-11 at his insistence. Why? He doesn't want any coach to get the notion to stick him at center.
Virginia senior Donald Hand was listed at 5-11 1/2, which makes you wonder if he was angling for the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award, given annually to the best collegian under 6-foot. But Hand didn't want to bag the award at the cost of scaring the scouts off. Hence, I'd guess, that half-inch.
The agent for former Memphis State star Sylvester Gray, trying to get him a gig in the Philippines, once billed his client as 6-6 -- until he was told that a rule barred anyone taller than 6-4 from playing in the league. Suddenly, Gray was 6-4 in his bare feet.
North Carolina had a parade of not-quite-7-footers, including Brad Daugherty (6-11 3/4 in the press guide) and Warren Martin (officially 6-11 1/2), until Matt Wenstrom matriculated at Chapel Hill in 1993 at 7-1. Why didn't Dean Smith round up for all those years? According to one pale-blue source, the Tar Heels coach long feared that a listing at 7-foot carried with it the pressure of outsized expectations. With Wenstrom he apparently had a change of heart, and Smith went on to list Kevin Salvadori, Eric Montross and Serge Zwikker as 7-footers.
If Earl Boykins hadn't billed himself as 5-8 coming out of high school, no one would have recruited him. He is really 5-5, but his coach at Eastern Michigan, Ben Braun, wouldn't let him be listed at anything below 5-7, lest Braun's peers think Braun -- the only coach to offer Boykins a scholarship -- was nuts. Only as a senior in Ypsilanti did Boykins feel he could 'fess up to his true size.
If they aren't smoked out at the pre-draft camp, padded heights get exposed at USA Basketball team trials. It was in the run-up to the 1992 Olympics that the world finally learned what the cognoscenti had long suspected -- that Charles Barkley was more like 6-4 5/8 than 6-6, and Magic Johnson closer to 6-7 than 6-9. Likewise, it was a measurement in 1988 before the Games (citius, altius -- but not unduly altius) that exposed Danny Manning, who had been a 6-11 freshman at Kansas, as a 6-9 NBA draftee-to-be.
The psychology of all this can be fascinating. During his struggle to be taken seriously as an NBA player, Dana Barros made like Boykins, listing himself several inches taller than he really is. Then Barros made the All-Star Game as a 76er and subsequently landed a sweet free-agent deal with the Celtics. Suddenly, he was secure enough to say, You know what? I'm not 6-foot. I'm not even 5-11. I'm 5-9.
"If you were to see John Stockton in the mall, you'd say, 'There's a runty, skinny guy,'" says Ekstrand. "If you were to see him play, you'd say, 'There's a Hall of Famer.' We could be like the NFL and simply refuse to draft a quarterback because he's not 6-1. But then we'd miss out on guys like Barkley and Stockton."
And that would mean missing the, well, bigger picture. "Heights really only matter when people aren't sure if a guy can play -- not when you're talking about the great talents," Ekstrand says. "[Michigan State's early-eligible swingman] Jason Richardson turns out to be 6-4 3/4 without shoes, and 6-5 3/4 with. But the guy can jump out of the gym, so it doesn't matter. In the end, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog."
Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, which will be published in January 2002 by Warner Books. Send comments to thehooplife@aol.com.
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