SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
KLMNO OBITUARIES
MANUTE BOL, 47 Former Washington Bullet was a singular force in the NBA by Matt Schudel Manute Bol, who became a
basketball sensation in the 1980s as a skeletally thin shot-blocking giant with the Washington Bul- lets and other professional teams, and who devoted his post- basketball life to improving the lot of his fellow natives of Sudan, died June 19 at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Char- lottesville. He was 47. His cousin George Bol said Mr. Bol had internal bleeding and other complications from Ste- vens-Johnson syndrome, a rare skin disease that he contracted from a medication he received in Africa. Mr. Bol, one of the two tallest
players in NBA history, was also one of its most exotic and endear- ing — and surely the only one to have killed a lion with a spear. His unusual journey to basket- ball stardom began in southern Sudan, where he was a cattle- herding member of the Dinka tribe and never touched a basket- ball until his late teens. After catching the eye of an American coach working in Sudan, Mr. Bol made his way to the United States without knowing a word of English.
When the Bullets drafted him in the second round in 1985, he was measured at 7 feet 6¾ inches in his bare feet — usually round- ed up to 7-7 — and he weighed a mere 190 pounds. Mr. Bol had limited basketball skills, but with a fingertip-to-fingertip wingspan of 8 feet 6 inches, he proved to be unusually adept at one aspect of the game: blocking opponents’ shots. Standing flat-footed, he could extend his hand above the rim of the basket 10 feet off the floor. The Bullets put Mr. Bol on a regimen of weightlifting and piz- za, adding 17 pounds to his frame before he made his NBA debut in October 1985. In his rookie sea- son, despite playing about 25 minutes a game, he led the league with 397 blocked shots, still the second-highest total in NBA annals. Don Nelson, who later coached
Mr. Bol with the Golden State Warriors, said simply, “He’s the most amazing shot blocker I’ve ever seen.” His exceptional height and shot-blocking talent made Mr. Bol an instant phenomenon, but fans and players were also drawn to him because of his sunny per- sonality. Attendance shot up in NBA cities whenever the Bullets (renamed the Washington Wiz- ards in 1997) came to town. Mr.
career with 2,086 blocked shots and 1,599 points — the only play- er with more blocks than points scored.
Although he didn’t speak a word of English until he was 20, he managed to master the NBA art of trash-talking. “Don’t you have cable?” he would say after blocking an op- ponent’s shot. “Didn’t the other guys tell you? Nobody dunks on Manute B-O-L!” There is no precise record of
Manute Bol’s birth, but he said he was born near the village of Tula- rei, Sudan, on Oct. 16, 1962. He descended from tribal chieftains, and one of his grandfathers was said to be taller than 7 feet. Once, while herding cattle in his youth, Mr. Bol saw a lion lurk- ing nearby and killed it with a well-aimed spear. He twice ran away from home
to avoid ritual scarification of his head and the removal of six lower teeth, but he eventually submit- ted to the gruesome procedures to please his father. In the United States, he wore false teeth. He could speak several lan-
guages, including Arabic, but he could not read or write any of them before moving to Khar- toum in his late teens to play bas- ketball. His unusual height and ethnic background made him the target of repeated slurs. He de- veloped a reputation as a fierce fighter, often using a tree limb as a weapon. A U.S. college coach conduct- ing clinics in Khartoum recom- mended that Mr. Bol sharpen his game in the United States, but the experiment was fraught with missteps. He was drafted by the NBA’s San Diego Clippers in 1983, only to be declared ineligible. When he tried to enroll at Cleve- land State University, the school was sanctioned for giving him il- legal financial support. In 1984, he ended up at the
JEFF FISHBEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST At 7-foot-7, Manute Bol made even 7-footers like New York’s Pat Ewing look shorter than usual.
Bol routinely called sports fans “friends.” “He’s so proud, almost noble,” then-Bullets General Manager Bob Ferry said in 1987. “He’s com- pletely at ease with himself, which is hard to believe when you consider . . . well, he’s 7- foot-7.”
Some people feared that Mr.
Bol’s stick-thin frame would nev- er stand up to the physical de- mands of pro basketball, but he proved surprisingly resilient. When an opposing center for the Chicago Bulls tested his mettle by throwing a punch, Mr. Bol flat-
A LOCAL LIFE:ED PEERY, 75
Taught students how to pin down success
by T. Rees Shapiro Throughout his 27 years as the
U.S. Naval Academy’s wrestling coach, Ed Peery churned out league champions, All-Ameri- cans and even a medal-winning Olympian — not to mention a few four-star admirals and gen- erals. Mr. Peery, 75, who died of pan-
creatic cancer June 15 at his home in West River, demanded hard work from his Navy wres- tlers but promised excellence. Despite the disadvantages of coaching at a service academy — recruits had to be academically proficient and be willing to en- dure the rigors of the military life —his wrestlers did exceptionally well. Between 1960 and 1987, he coached 28 All-Americans, an NCAA national champion and one wrestler, Lloyd Keaser, who went on to become an Olympic silver medalist at the 1976 games in Montreal. His midshipmen collected eight league champi- onships, and his overall coaching record was 311-90-13. He was the 1968 NCAA coach of the year. Some of his wrestlers went on to prolific careers in the military, including Gen. Charles C. Kru- lak, the 31st commandant of the Marine Corps; Adm. Richard W. Mies, the former head of the U.S. Strategic Command; and Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the former director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At 5-foot-5, with a lithe body, booming voice and reflexes like a cobra’s strike, Mr. Peery pos- sessed a swagger on the mat that belied his stature and command- ed respect from his mids. In 101 matches as a competitive wres- tler, Mr. Peery lost only twice. Much of his team’s success on
the mat came down to his re- cruiting. He desired athletes to possess specific qualities to be members of his elite squad. “You want an aggressive, hun-
gry-type kid,” Mr. Peery told The Washington Post in 1970. “And he has to be nasty, nasty in a way that may not even show in every- day living. He has to kind of like to hurt people, to find satisfac- tion in applying a hold clean and hard and with force. He has to be a vicious competitor.” His wrestlers donned rubber suits to run the stairs of McDo- nough Hall and sometimes cut as much as 35 pounds off their frames to compete in a lower weight class.
Once his wrestlers had oppo- nents on their backs, they’d be able to read a taunting sign that hung from the rafters: “IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU ARE PINNED.” Edwin Clark Peery was born
on March 22, 1935, in Stillwater, Okla., where his father was a wrestler at what is now Okla- homa State University. When his father, Rex Peery,
walked off the mat after winning his third NCAA championship, he was handed a telegram an- nouncing even better news: the birth of his second son. To honor the day’s momentous achieve- ments, the elder Peery named his newborn after his wrestling coach, Edward Clark Gallagher. Mr. Peery’s father became the wrestling coach at the University of Pittsburgh and taught his sons the finer points of grappling as they grew up. They both later wrestled for him in college. Mr. Peery often said that his most important match was his last. Both his dad and brother were three-time national cham- pions and were watching in 1957 as Mr. Peery was down three points in the 123-pound national
FILE PHOTO/THE WASHINGTON POST
Ed Peery, left, the U.S. Naval Academy’s wrestling coach for 27 years, demanded hard work from his wrestlers but promised excellence.
title match against Harmon Les- lie of Oklahoma State. With time about to expire, Mr. Peery chased down Leslie and tied the score to go into overtime. The wrestlers tied again, and it came down to a referees’ vote to declare the champion. It was Mr. Peery. The Peery family’s nine nation- al championships are still an NCAA record. Mr. Peery graduated from Pitt with an engineering degree and served for two years in the Army. He joined Navy as an assistant wrestling coach in 1959 and took over as head coach a year later. He retired from the Naval Acad- emy as a professor in the physical education department in 1999. A son, Neil, died in infancy. A daughter, Laurie Jackson, died of cancer in 1990.
Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Gretchen Miller Peery of West River; two children, Mar- tie Milliken of Annapolis and Greg Peery of Merritt Island, Fla. Mr. Peery considered wrestling one of the toughest sports men- tally and emotionally for athletes and often had a hard time con- soling his wrestlers after a diffi- cult match. “There’s no defeat probably
like one you take in wrestling,” Mr. Peery said in 1982. “It shouldn’t be that way, and I often tell kids: ‘This is not the ultimate thing in life.’ But a guy takes a physical beating in a one-on-one encounter really hard. I had diffi- culty coping with each time I ever lost. Unbelievable trouble. I lost twice.”
shapirot@washpost.com
tened him with a single blow, prompting a bench-clearing brawl. “When I play, I try to make friends, with my team and the other,” a nonplused Mr. Bol said. “If I wanted to look for a fight, I’ll go to Libya and join the Marines.”
Killing a lion
In 1987, when the Bullets signed 5-foot-3 Muggsy Bogues, they had the shortest and tallest players in NBA history on the team at the same time. Mr. Bol was traded to Golden State be- fore the 1988-89 season, when he
again led the league in blocked shots. At Golden State, Mr. Bol devel- oped an awkward but crowd- pleasing three-point shot that oc- casionally found its long-dis- tance mark. He later played with the Philadelphia 76ers and Mi- ami Heat before briefly returning to Washington in 1994 to tutor the Bullets’ new big man, Ghe- orghe Muresan, from Romania. Muresan may have been a centi- meter or two taller, but both were listed at 7-7. Mr. Bol appeared in his final NBA game in 1994 and ended his
University of Bridgeport in Con- necticut, where he gained na- tional notice for his remarkable ability to block shots and grab re- bounds. He left college after one year and played with a summer- league pro team in Rhode Island before being drafted by the Bul- lets.
Exile and refugee
Throughout his career, Mr. Bol remained devoted to his home- land and its customs. When he proposed to his Dinka wife, Atong, he gave her family 80 cows as a gift. He sometimes protested out- side the Sudanese Embassy in Washington to draw attention to the protracted civil war in Sudan,
Richard S. Starnes LAWYER
Richard S. Starnes, 61, a highly
decorated Vietnam War veteran who became a lawyer in North- ern Virginia, died May 21 at his home in Falls Church of compli- cations from a stroke. Mr. Starnes was an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Ar- lington County in the mid-1980s and then worked in private prac- tice for a few years in Alexandria and Manassas before retiring early on disability related to his military service. He had post- traumatic stress disorder, his family said.
During the Vietnam War, he
served in the Army and was a pi- lot on a Cobra helicopter gun- ship. His decorations included the Silver Star, which he received in 1969 after participating in a low-level strafing run over hos- tile territory. “During the first target attack,
Chief Warrant Officer Starnes’ turret mounted minigun jammed, leaving his aircraft without a defensive weapons sys- tem,” his citation read. “In spite of this handicap, he pressed the attack on the enemy unit, slow- ing and confusing its advance with extremely accurate rocket fire.
“He made repeated low level
attacks on the enemy force in or- der to achieve the maximum ef- fect with his aircraft’s limited ordnance. The enemy continued a heavy but steadily diminishing volume of fire which finally ceased. A subsequent ground sweep of the area revealed 156 enemy dead.”
Richard Sterling Starnes was born in Washington and spent part of his childhood in New York, where his father was man- aging editor of the old New York World-Telegram and Sun. He was a 1966 graduate of
Yorktown High School in Arling- ton. He received a bachelor’s de- gree from George Washington University and was a 1984 gradu- ate of Case Western Reserve Uni- versity Law School in Cleveland. Early in his career, he was a re- porter for the United Press Inter-
which pitted the Muslim elite of the north against the Christian and animist southern peoples, including Mr. Bol’s Dinka tribe. The troubles later spread to the region of Darfur in western Su- dan. “You know, a lot of people feel
sorry for him, because he’s so tall and awkward,” Charles Barkley, a former 76ers teammate, once said. “But I’ll tell you this — if everyone in the world was a Manute Bol, it’s a world I’d want to live in.” Mr. Bol’s highest salary in the
NBA was $1.5 million. When he returned to Sudan in 1998, he supported a large extended fami- ly and had other homes in Egypt and the United States. He donat- ed an estimated $3.5 million to a Dinka-led rebel group, lost mon- ey in business deals and was forced to sell his houses and fur- niture. His wife divorced him and moved to New Jersey with their four children. By 2001, he was almost desti-
tute. He sometimes appeared in embarrassing promotional stunts, such as celebrity boxing matches, to raise funds for his homeland. “I don’t work for money,” he said in 2006. “I work to save peo- ple. I can always make more money, but you can’t bring back those that are gone.” In Sudan, where plural mar-
riage is not uncommon, Mr. Bol married two younger women and had five more children. After a political dispute with his one- time supporters, he became a vir- tual exile in his own country. In 2002, Mr. Bol was admitted to the United States as a religious refugee and moved to West Hart- ford, Conn., where his rent was paid by a Catholic charity. Two years later, he was critically in- jured in a taxi accident near Hartford in which his driver was killed. Mr. Bol recovered from a coma and broken neck, then set- tled in Olathe, Kan., where he had lived for the past few years. He suffered other maladies, in- cluding joint pain that limited his mobility, and was hospital- ized in May with kidney failure after Stevens-Johnson syndrome left him unable to eat for 11 days. Yet even amid setbacks, Mr.
Bol never lost his optimism or his gratitude toward a game that had taken him so far in the world. “I had a good time with the American people,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2001. “I hope they remember me as a good guy who played hard. I wasn’t Michael Jordan, but I was somebody called Manute Bol.”
schudelm@washpost.com
national wire service in Rich- mond and then for a newspaper in Warren, Ohio. His marriage to Deborah Wat-
son ended in divorce. Survivors include two sons, Daniel Starnes and Joseph Starnes, both of McLean; his mother, Nancy Starnes of Cock- eysville, Md.; his father, Richard T. Starnes of Bradenton, Fla.; and a brother.
—Adam Bernstein
John R. Roberts AIR FORCE COLONEL
John R. Roberts, 74, an Air
Force colonel who retired in 1987 as a senior staff member at the Pentagon, died June 10 of cancer at his home in Culpeper, Va. He was previously a resident of Fair- fax County for more than 25 years.
Col. Roberts was commis- sioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Force in 1959 and flew more than 250 helicopter combat missions in the Vietnam War. In 1978, he helped pioneer the use of night-vision devices in flight operations as the com- mander of a special operations squadron at Hurlburt Field, Fla. He was promoted to colonel in 1980 and moved to the Pentagon in 1982, where he was responsi- ble for special operations world- wide.
Col. Roberts’s military decora- tions included the Legion of Mer- it; two awards of the Distin- guished Flying Cross; three awards of the Meritorious Serv- ice Medal; five awards of the Air Medal; and three awards of the Air Force Commendation Medal. In retirement, he worked as a
defense contractor and consul- tant. John Rogers Roberts was born
in Jefferson City, Mo. He graduat- ed from Kansas State University in the late 1950s. Survivors include his wife of 44 years, Elizabeth Hawes Rob- erts of Culpeper; two children, Sarah Goyea of Pittsboro, N.C., and John Daniel Roberts of Ar- lington; a sister; and three grandchildren.
—Emma Brown
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