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Sizing up the competition
My favorite picture this week showed a kid named Julian Vandervelde of Davenport, Iowa, high-fiving his teammates after hitting a two-run homer to help Davenport beat Goffstown, N.H., 5-0, at the Little League World Series in Williamsport. The other kids are stretching, straining, leaping to slap Vandervelde's hand because he is 6-foot-2, 231 pounds and 12 years old. He is a big kid. There is a big kid in every city, every town, every neighborhood in America, isn't there? He is the preadolescent giant who rules his turf as completely as if he were Saddam Hussein walking the streets of Baghdad. Heredity, home cooking, something has enabled him to grow to almost twice the size of every other kid around and he is the home-run hitting first baseman in baseball and the indomitable center in basketball and just about anything he wants to be in football. The parents of the other kids shudder whenever he walks onto a field. Some of these big kids just keep growing and wind up in the pros as, say, Shaquille O'Neal or Randy Johnson or maybe Reggie White. Some stop and the rest of the kids catch up with acne-accompanied growth spurts in high school. It is all interesting to watch. The big kid in my neighborhood was named Walter Esdaile. He maxed out at 6-8 and recently was inducted into the Cornell University Hall of Fame for his basketball career. We have neighborhood reunions now every year -- just had one -- and somewhere in the proceedings, I always pull Walter to the side. "You know," I say to the big kid from my neighborhood, year after year, "I still hate you." Sports Illustrated senior writer Leigh Montville appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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