There’s a story that goes about Manute Bol and it’s always stated with great certainty that as a young man in the villages of what is now South Sudan, he killed a lion with a spear. Never one to let a myth go unchecked, Charles Barkley publicly questioned it.
But whether the lion myth is factual or overblown doesn’t really matter. What it captures is the kind of character Manute Bol was: someone whose physical reality was so extreme, so far outside any normal frame of reference, that even the stories associated to his name sounded plausible.
The question of Manute Bol swimming is its own version of that narrative more grounded, more physics-driven, and somehow much more compelling. Bol stood at between 7 feet 6 and 7 feet 7, depending on which official measurement you choose.
When strength coaches at the University of Maryland first evaluated him, he weighed about 200 pounds by the time the NBA was done with him, which, distributed across that kind of physique, gave a body mass index that was quite concerning. When he got there, he could only lift 44 pounds on a bench press. He had a 31-inch waist. In the strictest meaning of the word, he was a human being constructed along lines that are uncommon in nature.
In the sea, the certain body type exhibits an odd behavior. It’s probable that most people assume that tall people are naturally buoyant due to their larger surface area, greater lung capacity, or an innate sense that height equates to buoyancy. That isn’t exactly how it operates.
Coaches and trainers who worked with exceptionally tall athletes in the 1980s were just starting to comprehend how bone density, the distribution of muscle mass, and the sheer length of the limbs confound the physics. For Bol in particular, swimming wasn’t a logical extension of his athleticism because his body fat was practically nonexistent and his long limbs produced a great deal of drag. It was a completely different issue.
There’s a sense that the sport of basketball, even at its most demanding, never really tested Bol in the way water would have. On a court, his height was the answer to every inquiry. In a pool, that same height becomes drag. His arms the wingspan that allowed him to record 397 blocked shots in a single rookie season, still the second-highest single-season total in NBA history would have needed a stroke mechanics that human swimming simply isn’t designed around.
Bol may or may not have taken official swimming instruction, but the general idea remains the same: the more you comprehend extreme body proportions and hydrodynamics, the more you understand why exceptional swimmers tend to cluster in a relatively small range of heights.
Bol was descended from the Nilotic Dinka people of the Nile Valley, who are known for having among of the tallest inhabitants on the planet. His mother stood 6 feet 10. According to reports, his great-grandfather stood seven feet ten inches tall. Growing up in Turalei, he ran away from home twice to avoid ceremonial scarification.
It wasn’t until a newspaper photographer in Khartoum saw him on the street in his late teens that he discovered basketball. That environment had the river and the Nile, but it also included a way of life centered on survival and cattle herding rather than recreational sports.
It’s difficult to ignore how Bol’s final existence was largely unrelated to the physical life his Dinka ancestry and South Sudan’s topography shaped. He was taken in by the NBA and asked to perform amazing physical feats. strengthening exercises.
shooting three points. blocking shots at a rate that the league had never witnessed. If swimming had ever been a component of any training regimen, it would have been a further adaption that this Turalei guy was required to learn in a nation that had nothing to do with his home country.
He never ceased to astonish others. Every time he touched the ball close to half-court, fans chanted “shoot” at him. He was utilized by coaches in ways that revolutionized the capabilities of a 7-foot-7 player on a basketball court. Whether Manute Bol could swim may be an unanswerable issue. But the more essential truth is that almost nothing in his life followed the standards that were meant to apply to a man built like him.
i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manute_Bol
ii) https://www.nbcsportsphiladelphia.com/news/a-picture-of-manute-bol-swimming-and-another-of-larry-brown-coaching-an-aba-game-in-denim-overalls/302472/
iii) https://9gag.com/gag/a1Pr6PR
iv) https://imgur.com/gallery/manute-bol-swimming-SWJt7