{lives remembered}


Manute Bol


n


1962-2010


He was a great shot blocker, but off the court his reach was far longer


by Carlo rotella M


anute Bol, who could touch the rim without leaving his feet, could block shots just by extending his arms. He had a wingspan well over eight feet and a feel for angles and timing that made him the greatest shot blocker anyone had ever seen — better, many said, than the all-time great Bill Russell. Sometimes, in practice, he


would block so many in a row that he would start laughing, and then everybody would start laughing. Normally a rejection is one of basketball’s macho occasions, but when there are three, four, five in rapid succession, the tone can shift from aggression to slapstick. The offensive players keep putting the ball up there, and it keeps coming right back at them, and suddenly they’re transformed into a pack of Wile E. Coyotes.


“It was hard to have a practice,” said


Bob Ferry, former general manager of the Washington Bullets, for which Bol played from 1985 to 1988. The Bul- lets’ second team included Bol and Muggsy Bogues, respectively 7-foot-7 and 5-foot-3, at that time the tallest and shortest players ever to play in the NBA. “With Muggsy pressing and Ma- nute blocking shots,” Ferry said, “I don’t think our first team ever beat our sec- ond team in practice.” A deformation of the hands prevented Bol from fully ex- tending his fingers to palm the ball, so he was not much of a scorer, said Ferry, “but the other team talked more about him than about all the star players.” Some bulky tall men, like Wilt


Chamberlain or Shaquille O’Neal, seem like Olympian gods, shoving mere mor- tals aside. Bol, whose impossible height was matched with impossible gaunt- ness (a crash eating program once brought his weight up from 195 pounds to 233), looked freakish rather than su-


perhuman. Because he never adopted the standard body language of a jock, he perpetually seemed like a freshly arrived alien, waving his mantis-like limbs to interrupt the normal flow of action on the court. But he always pre- served his dignity, carrying himself with unbreakable confidence and a regally upright posture rare in tall men. Between his retirement from the


NBA in 1994 and his death in June at 47, of complications from a skin disease con- tracted while visiting his native Sudan, he devoted himself to improving conditions back home. Much of his money went to feeding refugees and building schools in Sudan, and he engaged in various stunts to raise more, including one-shot cameos as a hockey player and a jockey. Awkward and graceful in equally unlikely ways, he managed to make skating, riding a horse or shooting a basketball look absurd, and yet he himself never seemed ridiculous. Bol also made an appearance in 2002 on Fox’s “Celebrity Boxing,” one


32 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | december 26, 2010


of the grimmer evolutionary dead ends in the history of reality TV. The show’s killing joke was that the participants had only the slightest lingering vestige of the shine of celebrity, which made them willing to do anything — even give or take a beating in public — to at- tract the bright lights once more. The athletes’ comedown was especially af- fecting. When they had commanded center stage in their prime, they had set the standard by which bodily grace was judged, but in the boxing ring they looked uncoordinated, desperate, old. The gymnast Olga Korbut appeared


on the same show as Bol, and had her clock cleaned by a star of “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire.” The guy who played Screech on “Saved By the


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