The Chicago Bulls team of the 1990s and what makes the perfect athlete

 
Standard Sport27 November 2013

The winner of the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year will be announced on Wednesday, with David Epstein's fascinating book The Sports Gene - What Makes The Perfect Athlete amongst the contenders.

The shortlist to win the £25,000 top prize is made up of six books, including Sweden striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic's autobiography, I am Zlatan, and Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, by David Walsh.

Standard Sport have an exclusive extract from Epstein's book below:

The Vitruvian NBA player

Long before he became a pop-culture trope, before he dated Madonna or married Carmen Electra, or married himself as a publicity stunt; before he posed for the cover of Sports Illustrated with fire-engineered hair, wearing a metal-studded choker and a smug look and holding blue parrot; before he announced he would start a topless women’s basketball league, and way before he hung out with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Dennis Rodman was just an insecure little boy.

Every night before he fell asleep as a child in the Oak Cliff housing projects in Dallas, he would lie awake and think: “There’s something big out there waiting for Dennis Rodman.” Little did he know at the time, the something big would be himself.

Back then, Rodman’s sisters were the basketball stars. Both would become college All- Americans, while Dennis, the family runt, was short and awkward and struggled to sink a layup. He warmed the bench for a half season of high school basketball and then quit. He was 5'9" when he graduated, and endured taunting by his friends when he tagged along with his bigger, younger, more athletic sisters. After graduation, Rodman took a job on the graveyard shift sweeping floors at the Dallas/ Fort Worth International Airport. One night, he stuck a broom through the safety gate of a shuttered airport gift shop and fished out a few dozen watches that he distributed among his friends.

He got caught. Rodman didn’t last long in that job. But his something big had already started to happen. In the two years since high school, Rodman had grown like kelp. He was working part- time scrubbing cars at an Oldsmobile dealership for $3. 50 an hour when he topped out at 6'8". So Rodman started to play basketball and found that he was suddenly less gawky despite being taller and more muscular. He caught on to the game so quickly it was as if the basketball fairy had left hoop skills under his pillow one night. In his words: “It was like I had a new body that knew how to do all this shit the old one didn’t.”

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A family friend convinced Rodman to try out for a local community college team. He played for a while, but dropped out with academic problems. The following year, 1983, he took a basketball scholarship to South-eastern Oklahoma State, a little- known NAIA school. He dominated there for three years, averaging 25. 7 points and an otherworldly 15.7 rebounds per game. The rest is hardwood history. Rodman was drafted into the NBA and in fourteen years won five championships, was twice named Defensive Player of the Year, and became the greatest rebounder in NBA history. In 2011, the man who played hardly any organized basketball before he was twenty- one was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Only marginally less inevitable than death and taxes during the 1990s was the Chicago Bulls winning the NBA championship.

Dynastic dominance came on the backs of three future Hall of Famers, and three nick-of-time growth spurts. Before the triune pillars of the Bulls dynasty had their height, their skills alone did not elevate them above the crowd.

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There was Rodman, of course. Then there was Scottie Pippen, who had a similar story. He was 6'1" when he graduated from high school and started out as the team manager at the University of Central Arkansas. He sprouted to 6'3" by the end of his first year and started playing for the team. By the end of the following summer, Pippen was 6'5". By his junior season, Pippen was 6'7" and NBA scouts began to swarm the stands to watch unheralded Central Arkansas. Years later, he was selected as one of the fifty greatest players in NBA history and was inducted into the Hall of Fame one year before Rodman.

Michael Jordan didn’t cut it quite so close. Jordan was already a good basketball player in high school — he started dunking as a 5'8" freshman — but he comes from a comparatively diminutive family and was already anomalous at six feet as a high school sophomore. As a high school junior, Jordan was being evaluated by college scouts, but looked like a better fit for a small school. By Jordan’s own reckoning, his 5'7" brother Larry was as athletic as he and held the upper hand in their backyard games, until Michael’s kelp phase. He grew six inches late in high school and dropped baseball to focus on basketball. He earned a scholarship to powerhouse North Carolina. The rest of the story hardly needs telling.

Rodman, Pippen, and Jordan formed the nucleus of a Bulls team that went 72-10 in the 1995–96 season, a feat unequaled before or since, and their biographies are testaments to the primacy of height. That isn’t to suggest that being 6'6" or 6'8" automatically makes a professional basketball player, much less a Hall of Famer. As ESPN personality Colin Cowherd said on his radio show, “Talent doesn’t fall out of the womb . . . there are a million guys in America who are sixfoot- eight who aren’t in the NBA.” But then, that’s not right either.

Based on data from the United States Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, there are likely fewer than twenty thousand American men between the ages of twenty and forty who are at least 6'8". So a Dennis Rodman or a LeBron James is not one in a million— compared to men of equal height— but rather one in a pool the size of Rolla, Missouri.

Height is an incredibly narrowly constrained trait among humans. Fully 68 percent of American men are in just the six- inch range from 5'7" to 6'1". The bell curve of adult height is a Himalayan slope that falls off precipitously on either side of the mean. A mere 5 percent of American men are 6'3" or taller, while the average height of an NBA player perennially hovers around 6'7".

Suffice it to say that there is startlingly little overlap— far less than Cowherd suggested— between the heights of humanity and those of NBA players. While inhabitants of the industrialized world grew taller over much of the twentieth century at a rate of about one centimeter per decade— at least partly because of increased protein intake and the decline of growth- stunting childhood infections, and perhaps because people are mixing genes more widely, with “tall” genes dominating “short” genes— NBA players have been growing at more than four times that rate, and the tallest of the tall NBA players at ten times that rate.

SHORTLIST

The Boys In The Boat: An Epic True-Life Journey to the Heart of Hitler’s Berlin by Daniel James Brown (Macmillan)

The Sports Gene: What Makes The Perfect Athlete by David Epstein (Yellow Jersey Press)

Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: A Journey to the Heart of Cricket’s Underworld by Ed Hawkins (Bloomsbury)

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović by Zlatan Ibrahimović, David Lagercrantz and Ruth Urbom (Penguin)

Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang by Jamie Reid (Racing Post)

Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong by David Walsh (Simon & Schuster)

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