Are short people any good at sport? Part 1
How a 5’3’’ star made it in the NBA, and other reasons for cheer
“You've gotta keep yourself small. Innocuous. Be the little guy... Look at me. Underestimated from day one. You'd never think I was a master of the universe, would you?”
- Al Pacino (5’7’’) in The Devil’s Advocate
By this stage, we’ve covered some of the silly everyday experiences of a world not set up for short people. That’s the trivial bit. But we’ve also covered the not-so-silly impact of height in the developmental, professional and political worlds.
In the name of balance, let’s return to the trivial, and even occasionally optimistic. Because, even in the world of top-level sport, where you might think size would matter above everything else, it sometimes doesn’t.
In some professions, height differences can be jarring. Take the big screen. When people say I “bang on” about height, I ask them to Google an actor.
Almost without fail, it will autofill the next word as “height” or “how tall”. (Predictive algorithm nerds: it did this even before I started work on Small Stories).
There is a solid argument that physical measurement is relevant in that profession. Actors are very much defined by their relative physical standing to fellow cast members. Size becomes relevant to the product; the ability to tell a convincing story that the audience enjoys. That is, after all, what actors are paid to do.
But what about Tom Cruise, you might ask. He’s really short and he’s really successful, you might say. For the record, Tom Cruise is 5’7’’. By the standards of the general population, that is not that short at all, given the average height for a US male is 5’9’’. He is in the 25th percentile, meaning 1 in 4 US males is shorter than him.
But Cruise was also a man who, when he called for action to save the ‘big’ screen during the coronavirus lockdown, was somehow accused of overcompensating, like simply saying the word ‘big’ put him in the same Venn diagram as a middle-aged man buying a Porsche.
As previously mentioned, I am five inches shorter than Tom Cruise. However, I do not bemoan that I have yet to be cast as a Hollywood hunk. My character would not be sufficiently believable. If The Terminator was played by an emaciated British teenager rather than an Austrian bodybuilder, one would struggle to fathom why heroine Sarah Connor was fleeing his pursuit with such vigour.
As mentioned, we instinctively know that certain positions in society tend to be filled by taller people, or at least not by anyone very far below average height. Murderous robot-human is probably one of these.
I know that such a plausibility gap exists, because I have tripped face-first over it myself.
I am a massive American Football fan, a life choice that leaves the majority of my fellow Brits nonplussed. The 2005 film The Longest Yard is an admirable attempt at telling the story of a sporting fall from grace followed by redemption through the medium of cinema, as former NFL pro Paul Crewe leads prison inmates in a victorious game of football against the jail’s cruel and corrupt guards. Winding up behind bars after being indicted in a match-fixing scandal, Crewe finds fresh purpose in sacrificing his own chances of release by defending the honour of his new comrades.
My gripe is not with the plot. It is that the star quarterback is played by the 5’9’’ Adam Sandler. Acting ability aside, I just couldn’t get over my scepticism that a real-life Paul Crewe would like be much, much taller than a real-life Sandler. The average league height for the quarterback position is around 6’3’’, or a smidgeon higher. Picking the 2015 season at random, only one quarterback, Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks, was under 6’, and even then only by a single inch.
If Sandler had been fortunate enough to be drafted into the real NFL, that lack of inches would matter. Height, arm span and vertical leap are just a few of the metrics that are taken by headhunters in the annual NFL Scouting Combine. Even if a potential recruit into the league has had a sub-par career in college, they can improve their “draft stock” if they can show themselves to be a “workout warrior” - a colloquial term for a player who may not yet have lived up to their potential yet, but ups their desirability when factors like size and strength are taken into account.
It’s not just coaches and managers that care about bodily dimensions. For an idea of how fascinated fans are with height differences between opposing American Football players, you need look no further than the plentiful supply of videos on Youtube of gamers increasing the height of attackers on popular American Football simulator Madden and pitting them against diminutive defenders, or vice versa. The results are a comical mixture of complete domination by giant attackers and unexplained failure to catch the ball as the computer tries to adjust to the strange new graphics.
There have, of course, been shorter-than-average players to grace the turf in the past. Back in the early 2000s, I used to get disproportionately excited watching 5’ 6¾’’ (note the ¾) running back Maurice Jones-Drew tear through defences for the Jacksonville Jaguars, much assisted by his ability to run the 40 yard dash in 4.39 seconds - a tenth of a second quicker than the NFL average for his position. He went to the Pro Bowl gathering of elite players three times, and led the league in rush yards in 2011. For the uninitiated, the long and short of it is that he was pretty useful.
I’m sure at some point though, a young Maurice was told he wasn’t big enough to play pro football. They also said Michael Jordan (6’6’’) was too short to make it in the NBA. A documentary about his career, The Last Dance, which aired in 2020, features a great clip of his coach when he was drafted into the Chicago Bulls team, saying that “we wished he was 7’”, before he had any idea what a remarkable player he would turn out to be. Scouts also probably thought that Welsh rugby stalwart Shane Williams (5’7’’) couldn’t stand up at the international level. Eggs, meet faces.
But my all-time favourite example of a short person going the distance when it comes to professional sport has to come from the world of basketball. In his 1994 book In The Land Of Giants, the smallest man to ever play in the NBA, 5’3’’ Tyrone ‘Muggsy’ Bogues, reflected on how he managed to get picked number 12 in the draft, hold on to a professional basketball career for 14-seasons, and play for four different teams.
For once, me and the ‘short’ people I am writing about are actually the same size (nearly). That’s quite life affirming from my point of view, but now makes me feel like I have significantly underachieved by not becoming an elite-level athlete.
Muggsy was bullied at school. He was trash talked. He was ridiculed for wanting to play basketball, the game he loved. The short jokes were hurtful, he admits; it is refreshing that he doesn’t pretend otherwise. You can see why people commented on his stature though; in his rookie season, he played on the same team as 7’7’’ Manute Bol, the joint tallest player in the league’s history. Bogues basically came up to Bol’s waist, no higher, but is always smiling in photos of the pair.
Muggsy still managed to score points. Make assists. Steal the ball. Play a key part of whichever team he was on, and finish his career with figures plenty of more physically gifted players would be envious of, averaging 7.7 points, 7.6 assists, and 1.5 steals a game. He even managed to lead the Charlotte Hornets to their first ever playoff berth during his stint with the team. Better still, it seems widely agreed that he shunned the egomania and braggadocio of the professional league, and was well-liked by those who met him for his chipper demeanour.
Baltimore-raised Muggsy, who started his career in 1987 when the average height of an NBA player was 14 inches taller than him, is also the author of one of my favourite quotes: “My heart was bigger than my height, so I didn’t have any hang-ups believing that I belong with the best of the best because my heart was just as big as theirs.”
Strictly speaking, no one has a 5’3’’ cardiac muscle. If someone was walking around with one, we would probably have heard about it. But still, big up Muggsy, is all I can say. While no-one has quite lived up (or should that be down?) to Muggsy’s 5’3’’ frame in the NBA since, there remain strong performers around the 5’9’’ mark in the world’s leading basketball league.
Muggsy’s achievements look all the more spectacular when you discover the average height for the point guard position, the ball-carrying role that tends to be reserved for smaller players, now averages out at 6’3’’.
There is still some evidence to suggest that, for the same position, it remains an advantage to be slightly taller in basketball. According to the Fantasy Basketball 101 website, players over 6’9’’ tend to contribute the most points to fantasy rosters - i.e. they get more points, rebounds, steals or assists - and have slightly widened that gap over their shorter compatriots in recent years.
In 2011, Sports Illustrated's Pablo Torre drew on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data to give an estimate of the impact your height has on your chances of making it into the NBA. According to that nationwide sample, there were only around 70 men in America of basketball playing age above seven foot. Compare this to the 42 US-born basketball players listed at 7’ or more who debuted in NBA games over the two decades to 2013, and you get a 17 per cent probability that an American male between 20 and 40 who is taller than 7’ will in fact be a professional basketball player.
That’s compared to a mere 0.07 per cent chance of gracing the league for those between 6’6’’ and 6’8’’, because there are just so many more men across America who fall into that band.
“Every year, I watch the NBA Draft and its parade of young men who appear to have won the genetic lottery, or at least a sweepstakes for overactive pituitaries,” former Forbes contributor Dan Diamond wrote a couple of years later. “And every year, I come away with the same conclusion: Thanks to pro basketball, being 7 feet tall is the world's shortest path to becoming a millionaire.”
But the proportion of players above 6’9’’ in the NBA has actually ticked down in recent years. And the likes of Muggsy are always the ones to prove that an exception to a rule can exist.
What if short and tall athletes performed exactly the same? Would they be treated any differently? Silver lining over: they almost certainly would.
An NFL quarterback rated as handsome, given the same statistical output as a demure colleague, earns $300,000 more. Given all the evidence suggests we link attractiveness to height, shorter players would be less able to hit this beauty boost to their income.
Still, I am heartwarmed to hear that while scouts retain an intense obsession over the size of a quarterback’s hands every time new players get drafted into the league, there doesn’t seem a clear correlation with outsized vertical measurements and success in the pivotal attacking position.
There are obvious reasons why a quarterback who only measured 5’5’’, say, would not get very far. They wouldn’t be able to see deep enough down the field to throw the ball where it needed to go because of the relative giants ahead of them. But being monster tall doesn’t seem to add much in passing ability, which, after all, is a good part of what a quarterback is paid to do.
At just under 5’10’’, Kyler Murray was the shortest quarterback in the NFL ahead of the 2021 season. He shook up the league no end. What surprised many critics was not just how fleet of foot he was, but also how well he could launch the ball down the field when the situation called for it. See Drew Brees and Russell Wilson as other prime examples of a beautiful game played by beautifully-proportioned, under 6’ humans with cannon-like arms.
Brees and Wilson both happen to have massive hands. Patrick Mahomes of Kansas City, the league’s outright deity in recent years, does not. As the game evolves, such discrepancies have really shown the value of recruiters looking past brute physical statistics to the character and aptitude of the individual players that sit behind the numbers to see who really will be the most valuable asset.
Next week: some more examples.