Stretch

Olajuwon, as captain, meets with the referees at center court before every game, and lately he has been taking Nevitt with him. "What are you doing here, Chuck?" the head ref will ask him. "I'm here to translate for Akeem," says the honorary cocaptain. This in itself is funny because Olajuwon, who is from Nigeria, speaks perfectly good English.

"Chuck's just a good guy to have on your ball club," says Patterson. "I think he'll be with us next year too. When I picked him up before the season started, I kidded him that I had to, because it was the only way I could get the money back he owed me for wrecking my car a few years ago—the car I lent him skidded in the rain at a stop sign. He and I were so friendly even back then that the players called him Ray Junior. But he's that way with everybody. One of the things I like best about him is the way he handles his height. You know, a lot of big guys resent the public, but Chuck is very comfortable with himself. I have to give his folks a lot of credit for that."

Nevitt grew up in Marietta, Ga., the son of John Nevitt, a 6'7" engineering professor, and Marcia, a 6-foot-tall registered nurse. Chuck's older sister, Lynne, is 6'3", and his two older brothers. Jack and Steve, grew to 6'7" and 6'8". "I pretty much knew I wasn't adopted," says Chuck. The Nevitts still have a detailed growth chart on one of the walls in their home, and Chuck also keeps his own miniature chart in his wallet. He hit 6 feet at the age of 13, and from Feb. 26, 1974, when he was 14, to March 6, 1976, he shot up from 6'2¼" to 6'10¼". Says John, now in his last year of teaching at Southern Tech, "When Chuck was about six feet tall, he was having such bad growing pains that we sent him to an orthopedist, and he told us that Chuck was going to be over seven feet tall." Because of the growing pains. Chuck never did play much basketball as a youngster, though Lynne was a basketball star at Memphis State and Jack played at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Ala.

"They might have gotten their height from me," says John, "but they sure didn't get their basketball ability from me. I played at Lehigh, but I was pretty bad." As for the Nevitt children's pride in their height, John credits his wife. "She always told them that being tall was a gift and not something to be ashamed of, and that they should hold their heads up high."

While Chuck had to put basketball on hold, he was honing his joke-telling skills. "He was kind of shy at home," says his mother, who is now retired. "So it came as something of a surprise when a woman I worked with told me that her child said Chuck always kept everybody laughing on the school bus."

He didn't play much at Sprayberry High in Marietta, but his height interested a few schools, especially N.C. State, which was then coached by Norm Sloan. By the time he entered college. Chuck was 7'1" and 175 pounds, not much wider than a basketball stanchion. His Wolfpack career wasn't particularly notable—he didn't start until his senior year—although his car was. "I had given him my Ford Maverick," recalls Lynne, who now teaches English at Pope High in Marietta, "and he had taken out the front seat so that he could drive from the back. He also rigged up this microphone in the car, with a speaker on the roof. I seem to remember that he got in some trouble with the car, and Norm Sloan made him take it home." As Chuck recalls, "I lent the car to one of my teammates, and he made some impolite remarks over the speaker. Coach Sloan did make me get rid of it. One time, when I was driving my dad in the car, he picked up the microphone and said, 'What's this?' I told him, and he got a big kick out of telling cars to move out of the way."

Nevitt wasn't much of a student, either, at N.C. State, although he was an All-America partygoer. During his senior year he worked at a popular bar off campus as a sort of bouncer and ID-checker. One night he and the bar's manager tried to liven up a Ladies' Night by performing an impromptu striptease on stage. Nevitt in skivvies is quite a sight, and unbeknownst to him, his future bride was in the crowd that night. He didn't meet Sondra Childers, though, until a few weeks later, when he kept her ID so she would talk to him. "It was blackmail," she says. One of the things that impressed Chuck about Sondra was her height. "My mother would never allow me to bring home a girl under 5'10"," he says. "I once dated a girl who was 5'3", and my mother lectured me on all the tall girls who were sitting home alone, waiting for someone taller to come along, and here I was, going out with a girl who was two feet shorter."

As a senior at N.C. State, Nevitt averaged 5.5 points, 4.4 rebounds and 2 blocked shots a game for coach Jim Valvano, but that's not what the NBA scouts noticed. Jack McCloskey, now the Pistons' general manager, recalls the first time he saw Nevitt in college. "I was scouting another player at an N.C. State game. During a timeout, I always watch the huddle to see how the players relate to the coach. This guy in the back of the team was leaning way over, listening intently. I thought to myself, 'There's a dedicated player. He's standing on a chair and leaning over to hear his coach.' But when the huddle broke up, there was no chair. I couldn't believe it. He was so big."

The Rockets took Nevitt in the third round of the 1982 draft, and the only reason he went that high was because the player Patterson thought he was going to get in the third round had already been taken. So Patterson turned to assistant coach Carroll Dawson, the only one in the organization who was then high on Nevitt, and said, "You can have your big guy." But the Rockets decided Nevitt was too much of a project. So they placed him on waivers on Oct. 22 and he was claimed by Milwaukee. Six days later, the Bucks gave up on him and he was a waiver case again.

The Rockets gave Nevitt another chance and re-signed him as a free agent in June of '83, but they waived him again in November. Nevitt spent the 1983-84 season playing for the Houston Flyers, an AAU team, in a YMCA downtown, supplementing his income by working at the King Size Company, a clothing store for big and tall men in Houston. Clovis Goodwill, who still works at the store, recalls that Nevitt was a pretty good salesman. "He did O.K.," says Goodwill. "He'd tell the customers these corny jokes, and if he had them laughing, I knew he had a sale. I didn't know he was back in Houston until I turned on the game the other night. I saw him and said, I sold clothes with that man.' The real shame of it was that nothing in the store fit Chuck."