One morning in July, at the airport in Newark, I saw Bol Bol on an escalator. I had been walking behind my fourteen-year-old daughter, observing the wristband that had just been affixed to her wrist that said “Unaccompanied Minor.” She was on her way to summer camp. She walked ahead of me confidently while carrying a laundry bag covered in pink and black dots with the words “My Stuff” written in fat yellow letters. We stepped onto an escalator, going up. “I can’t believe I am bringing this bag,” she said. “I got it when I was, like, ten.”

I was enjoying the singularity of my purpose—get my daughter to the gate, see her onto the plane, and wait, per instructions, for fifteen minutes after the plane took off. The purpose of this waiting, I understood, was so that in the off chance something went wrong, and the plane had to return to the gate, the unaccompanied minor could be handed back to the adult who brought her. On another, less rational level, I felt this mandatory witnessing would help assure that the plane didn’t explode in flames. I thought of the Space Shuttle Challenger, whose launch in 1986 I watched live, in a room full of college friends. I had stepped away at the key moment when the camera hovered on the faces of the proud parents of the astronauts and then caught their flinch of horror when the shuttle exploded. 

“What happened?” I asked when I came back into the room to see a sky full of smoke. It was explained to me, with emphasis on the parents’ reaction. I had to imagine it, which in turn means I have remembered it. 

It was in this state of mind—anxious yet serene—that I got onto an escalator, going up, and saw a tall young man up above. Long-sleeved T-shirt, sweat pants, feet in white socks and sliders, a backpack, headphones. A late-adolescent American man, of an especially tall and lanky variety. He turned to glance down, in our direction. It was Bol Bol. Or I thought it was Bol Bol. 

There should have been no ambiguity. Bol Bol is seven feet, two inches tall and very slender. He is the color of black coffee. His hair was, when I last saw him on tv, in short dreads, the same as the man on the escalator. Then there is Bol Bol’s face. It is highly distinctive—ambiguous in mood and even, in a way, gender, which is to say that I have always felt his face has a womanly quality. I don’t mean feminine, exactly. It is some combination of sensitivity, beauty, and sadness. The overall effect of the face is most distilled in his eyes. 

Because he was wearing a mask, his eyes were all that was available. Had he not been wearing a mask, I would have been more certain that it was, or was not, Bol Bol. Had I been with my son Alexander, age ten, and a budding basketball enthusiast, I might have called out, “Bol Bol!” and immediately had confirmation that it was or wasn’t him based on his reaction. If it was him, I would have asked to take a picture of my son with him. I did this once with Steven Adams, the fierce, Poseidon-esque center from New Zealand, just a few months earlier, when I spotted him sitting in the back of a white pickup truck outside the cvs on Prytania Street in New Orleans, tussling his dog, a young German shepherd. He gladly got down from the truck to chat with us, but at the exact moment I tried to take the picture of him and my son, my phone died. I was tapping a black screen. 

It was nevertheless an extremely gratifying experience to have my son meet and stand next to one of the players that he had seen on tv and also from the nosebleed seats at Smoothie King Center. The sheer size of the man registered in person. It helped with my predicament, which by then had been going on for a couple of years, in which my son would now and then ask me if I was better than this or that nba player. I had been increasingly forceful in my explanation that no, not only was I not better than the player in question, but any athlete in the nba was on an entirely different level than me, that there was a continent of talent between me and nba-caliber players, and so on. I had made this point over and over, and he had asked less and less frequently, having first given up on the marquee stars—James Harden, Kevin Durant, and the like—and then gone down the bench. The Adams encounter more or less quashed these questions, but Bol Bol would further this education in reality. But then, one of the things that confused me about the man on the escalator was that while the man on the escalator was tall, he did not look seven feet, two inches tall. But, I thought, never underestimate the power of the slouch. 

Since I was with my daughter, who doesn’t much care about nba basketball and who at age fourteen was especially sensitive to her father acting strangely or drawing unnecessary attention to himself, which, in fairness, I do now and then, I left the matter alone. Or, rather, I refrained from calling out. Had I been sure it was Bol Bol, the matter might have ended there. But I wasn’t sure. The man on the escalator had Bol Bol’s eyes, I felt. And his feet were in socks and sliders, as had been the case the one time I had met and spoken with Bol Bol. 

*

Basketball has always been the province of the tall. But tallness is not enough, or rather it has been joined in recent years by other, related metrics. The nba’s defensive schemes have come to emphasize length, wingspan. The goal is to field a team whose arms make a defensive thicket through which it is impossible to thread the ball. Bol Bol is very long. He combines this length with a graceful quickness. Watching him play, you can’t quite believe your eyes. He looks as if he is unraveling when he runs. Yet he does not unravel and often performs remarkably intricate moves with a nimbleness and fluttering of feet that suggest deer hooves scampering. In his brief nba career to date—his first year lost mostly to injury, his second and third spent mostly out of the rotation, with the Denver Nuggets—he has accumulated a highlight reel that includes instances of him blocking a shot, collecting the ball, dribbling it the length of the floor, including behind his back once or twice, and then, his feet moving with a gazelle-like quickness and lightness, coming to a stop just behind the three-point line, where he rises and drains a three. Or leading a fast break and threading a bounce pass to a cutting Mason Plumlee, who finishes with a dunk. Or corralling the ball on defense, going coast to coast, and finishing with a drive to the basket. He rises up over a defender at what seems an impossible distance from the rim, extends his incredibly long arm, and dunks the ball. 

I am not alone in my interest in Bol Bol. These highlights gather millions of views online. Someone in the analytics community should come up with a metric that measures tweets and Youtube views per minute played.  The attitude toward him is always giddy, as though he were the product of a mad scientist, a basketball Frankenstein, which is, I am aware, not a happy analogy, given how Frankenstein felt about himself. Further more, though the stars of the league drive fan engagement –tweets, Youtube views and the whole tangle of the NBA hive mind as manifest on glowing screens – there has always been a spot reserved in these giddy eruptions for the freak. Almost all of these highlight moments come in garbage time. The closest analogue to the excitement- which in fairness to Bol Boll is not just an internet phenomenon, there is palpable enthusiasm bordering on elation in the arena when it looks like Bol Bol will get minutes – he generates is probably the seven foot six inch Tacko Fall of the Boston Celtics.

Bol Bol is part of a current crop of extremely long and tall—and painfully skinny and twiglike—basketball players who are highly skilled and dexterous. Chet Holmgren (seven feet one) and Victor Wembanyama (seven feet two) are touted as potential number-one draft picks in 2022 and 2023. Then there is the nineteen-year-old Serbian, Aleksej Pokuševski, who just completed a promising rookie season for the Oklahoma City Thunder. This is Team Giacometti, distinguished from their slender basketball peers by the sinuous, almost unhealthy fragility of their extremely long limbs and their ability to handle the ball like a guard and shoot from distance.

Bol Bol arrived on the national scene in high school, already seven feet tall, with basketball skills and a famous name. He played a year at the University of Oregon for a short while before getting injured. The trajectory toward the nba became more complicated when, having been predicted as a top-five draft pick when he came out of high school, his stock fell precipitously in the run-up to the 2019 draft. 

The valuation of young basketball players is an industry, hugely funded, highly scientific, and at the cutting edge of data analysis. It’s also faintly medieval and superstitious, a scene of negotiation and haggling as chaotic as a medieval bazaar on the Silk Road. Reputations rise and fall because of injuries, because of skepticism about motivation, and maybe because of the complicated legacy of families. The NBA has become more and more dynastic: Curry, Grant, Hardaway, Sabonis, Nance, Brunson, Anthony, Rivers, the list of second-generation players goes on and on. More than any of these other players, one cannot discuss Bol Bol without discussing his father. 

* 

Manute Bol was such an unfamiliar, iconically strange figure when he played in the nba.  He was an anomaly in shape, size (seven feet, seven inches), attitude and affect. He was one of the league’s first Africans, along with Dikembe Mutombo and Hakeem Olajuwon. He was one of the tallest nba players ever. Having spent most of his ten-year career specializing in blocking shots, he then developed a three-point shot. He was one of the first extremely tall players to take, and make, that shot. He was also one of the first nba players from a foreign country to make activism—on behalf of his native South Sudan—a central part of his identity as a professional athlete. 

Manute Bol remains a vivid physical presence, for me and many people, despite, and maybe because of, his early death from a rare skin disease. His difference went beyond the physical. A stranger to the culture and fanfare of professional sports, he seemed to regard it with a kind of bemused detachment. It wasn’t that he didn’t take the game seriously, but Bol’s standards of masculinity had been shaped by experiences in his native South Sudan, a world away from Nike commercials. As Carlo Rotella wrote in the Washington Post when Bol died at age forty-seven, in 2010, Manute Bol “had never been invested with the conventional athlete’s aura.” 

Rotella describes Manute Bol’s appearance on a ghastly sounding and short-lived tv show, Celebrity Boxing, where he was paired against William “The Refrigerator” Perry:

Perry had entirely gone to pot since retiring from football. . . . The aura of good-natured Herculean potency that had once surrounded him was long gone.

Bol, by contrast . . . looked just as tall and thin as ever. He had an odd fighting stance, but his long history of scrapping with beefy opponents who tried to push him around had given him a general idea of what to do. He stood off and poked long lefts at Perry, occasionally throwing a right with some force, catching him with a couple of shots to the head.

The crowd grew restless because it wasn’t seeing the flailing that makes incompetent fighters fun to watch, and the referee warned both men that neither would get paid unless they fought harder. Bol, who had agreed to appear on the show only if the name and address of one of his Sudan-aiding charities appeared on the screen, threw a few more punches and took an easy victory by decision.

Perry’s feeble blows had not touched Bol, and, somehow, neither had the awfulness of the show. Just by carrying himself as he always had, holding some part of himself aloof from the lucrative childishness and triviality around him, he had managed to pass through “Celebrity Boxing” without humiliation.

Bol Bol is connected to his father by his name, and by basketball, of course, and also through their physical similarities, which are acute, though Manute was five inches taller. There is a photograph of Bol Bol swimming in a motel pool that I am obsessed with, for example—he is entirely underwater, and his long, undulating shape looks, at first glance, less like a man in a pool than a shadow of a man. Or the shadow of some sea creature. An eel. But it’s not a shadow, or an eel. It turned out that is not even a picture of Bol Bol. Someone misidentified it as such on Twitter. Only when I researched the photograph did I learn it was a picture of Manute Bol. What is so striking about the picture is the way the figure in the pool, aglow with the analog atmosphere of a motel pool in the pre-digital age,   looks like a silhouette—there but not there.

The two Bols are connected in the way that children who lose their father or mother at a young age have a bond with that parent, a bond forged in the negative space of absence. I lost my father at about the same age Bol Bol lost his father, which was age ten. This is part of why my attention has always been drawn to Bol Bol, and why I was looking at the man on the escalator so intently. 

It was an unusually brief escalator ride, thirty seconds at most, and yet there must have been something about me, or my stare, that got his attention, because he glanced back several times. 

I am six feet five (and a half). I was wearing basketball shorts and sneakers. Perhaps I looked like a member of that tribe—scouts, coaches, former players, journalists, avid fans—who make up the country of basketball. Perhaps he expected, with mixed dread and anticipation, that I would provide that hit of worshipful recognition which, however boring and unpleasant in the particulars, is like a kind of placenta that encases the life experience of nearly every young prospect onto whom fantasies of fame and riches can be projected. Or, he might have wondered,  was I just looking at him intently because he looked strange? A moment after he looked away from us, he turned back. I would say his eyes betrayed a sense of alarm when they met mine, but Bol Bol’s eyes are very expressive. Unlike his father, he is an American and carries himself more or less like an American athlete, complete with the dead-eye, impassive gaze that by design has a hint of defiance, as if to say to every player, coach, fan, “You doubted me?” Yet Bol Bol’s eyes often seem to be holding some secret emotion within them. In this case the emotion might have simply been, “Why is that guy on the escalator staring at me like that?” When the man on the escalator looked back a second time, our eyes met. I stared into his eyes, wondering if the memory of his father was part of the stuff he carried.

 *

Airports are places of possibility. One of my earliest memories was of my father being called over to a table in a lounge somewhere at the then newly built JFK, where he was asked to witness a document—a wedding license or a will. Everyone at the table wore a jacket and a tie, as a matter of course. I remember feeling proud of my father that he was so evidently a figure of importance and good standing that he would be singled out for this honorary role.

Flashing forward several lifetimes, I once lost my daughter in an airport  when she was three years old. She sprinted away from me in the opposite direction from our gate. I ambled after her as she scampered down the concourse, little feet on the granite floor. I wasn’t in a rush. Where could she go? She turned off the concourse and entered the waiting area of an unattended gate. A few moments later I arrived and scanned what now seemed to be a lacuna in the airport’s architecture, a room of its own. I saw rows of empty seats fixed in place, and here and there, along the wall, door bolted shit. Portals to nowhere, or anywhere.  I scanned the room and saw no little girl. Suddenly I was in a horror movie, or a Didion book: “Life changes in an instant.”

 The horror lasted for a minute, and then I turned around and saw her running back up the concourse, halfway to the gate and her mother. She was fine. But, for a moment, anything seemed possible. Airports are weightless that way. 

The few occasions in my life when someone asked me if I once played “in the league” were in airports. The most memorable of these moments took place when I was traveling with my family and wearing, for reasons I cannot recall, a two-piece suit and high-top sneakers. Perhaps it was that we were returning from Italy and I wanted to keep the atmosphere a bit longer, and so was wearing the suit I bought in Rome. I was also wearing a long scarf. The most relevant detail must have been my beautiful, raucous children rushing around the baggage-claim area, my pretty wife, my bemused nonchalance, along with my height. Some young guy appraised all of this and, with a touching kind of reverence, asked me, politely and absurdly, “Were you in the league?”

Height is confusing when encountered in real life. Six feet five, if you stand up straight, might seem tall in a subway car or crowded room. In an airport, where anything can happen, you might see a six-foot, five-inch person and wonder if they were or had been a professional basketball player. But six feet five is the statistically average height of an nba player.

 On the escalator in the Newark airport, I stared at the dark-skinned man above us, his dreads, his pants, his backpack, and his eyes. Also, his feet, in flip-flops, or sliders to be more accurate. 

Bol Bol has European feet. The one time I spoke to him, in the visitor’s locker room of the Smoothie King Arena, he was in street clothes. His feet were in white socks in slides. Within the sock you could see the strange architecture of his big toe, which hung over the ledge of the slider. He had been injured, had had foot surgery, and was recovering. He stood in the middle of the room, not far from the buffet by the door, and I greeted him. “How are you?” I asked. 

He responded with something along the lines of “I am fine, thank you,” as though we were in a language class and were practicing dialogue, a feeling that was amplified by his smile. But when I asked him how his rehabilitation was going, it was as though I had strayed from the assigned exercise.

“I can’t talk about that,” he said, almost apologetically, as though he had been given instructions that he did not want to disobey, which I later learned was most certainly the case. A major breach of etiquette since the status of injured players and their recovery is a highly guarded secret. One with enormous financial implications, given the amount of legalized gambling that now encases sports.

A faint atmosphere of underachievement and even truancy has been attached to Bol Bol throughout his brief career. He was predicted to be a top-five selection in the nba draft but, in the end, fell to number 44. After showing flashes with the Nuggets when they convened in the nba Bubble, he didn’t play much in the playoffs when they made an astonishing run to the conference finals behind the play of another player whose body shape and style sit far outside the norms of nba play, Nikola Jokić, who would go on to win the league’s Most Valuable Player (mvp) Award. One could say of Jokić, too, that he has “never been invested with the conventional athlete’s aura.”

In Bol Bol’s second year he played a few meaningful minutes but then dropped out of the Nuggets rotation. If you are not in the rotation, you are supposed to play hard in practice and stand up and wave a towel at appropriate moments while sitting on the bench. You are supposed to maintain focus, keep despair, or just boredom, at bay, stay ready for your opportunity. Bol Bol didn’t do these things. He appeared only in garbage minutes at the end of games already won or lost. “No one knows what’s going on with Bol,” said a journalist in Denver who covers the team. “They think he’s not a hard worker. I have heard he refuses to learn the plays and frankly doesn’t care.” The team is open to trading him, he said, but not to another team in the Western Conference. “They think he has too much talent.”

In the end, they did trade Bol, midway through his third season. His coach, Michael Malone, had been out with Covid, and an assistant, Popeye Jones, took over the head coaching duties. Jones played Bol meaningful minutes in a game against Houston; he had a career high 11 points in that game, after which Jones, the interim coach, said of Bol, “I knew your father. Rest in peace to him, a good man. I said, ‘Anything I can do to help your career.’ I think he is a really, really good person.”

Those two “reallys” suggest, to me, the tone of someone who is having trouble convincing another person of the value of Bol Bol – not as a person, but as a professional. That unconvinced person was surely Michael Malone. Malone was obviously impatient with if not disgusted by Bol’s seeming lassitude or disinterest. Is it too outrageous for me to claim that Bol Bol sometimes seemed depressed? Malone seems to value self-motivation and toughness and despise self-pity. On Malone’s first day back from Covid quarantine, Bol was traded. Another move made by the Nuggets at more or less the same time was the signing of the once fearsome DeMarcus Cousins, the bruising center and one time All-Star who had played for Malone in Sacramento, where he had been a favorite of Malone.  Cousins, who has his own baggage physically and emotionally, is nevertheless the antithesis of Bol in body and in attitude-- ferocious, strong, irate. If Bol Bol resgistered as contact, and conflict averse, Cousins thrived on both.

In the larger scheme of the NBA, with his breathless anticipation of the next big trade, the transition between a former all-star trying to regain his footing in the league, and the willowy distracted youngster trying to find a place in it, was of no great consequence in the world of basketball, but it nevertheless had a darkly poetic quality that reminded me of the end of Kafka’s story, The Hunger Artist, when the emaciated man is finally removed, dead, from his cage, and replaced by a leopard.

The man on the escalator glanced behind him just before he got off the escalator, and there saw a young girl, my daughter, clutching her pink laundry bag with the words “My Stuff,” and beside her a man who was probably her father. It struck me that Bol Bol is closer in age, and personal development, to my fourteen-year-old daughter than he was to me and to most of the other professionals he would deal with as an NBA player, such as his coach, Mike Malone, who has willfully retained his tough-guy New York City accent in Denver, an accent he surely inherited from his father, Brendan Malone, a longtime New York Knicks assistant coach. Sometimes I feel as though I am projecting father-son drama onto the nba, and then you simpl pay attention.

 I searched his eyes. Bol Bol has intense eyes. I think I project a kind of sensitivity and sadness onto Bol Bol’s face, just as I projected a meaning onto the Giacometti shape of his body, which seems fragile. But these projections are grounded in real moments, such as his visible disappointment at the nba draft. And it comes from knowing about his father, Manute Bol, the original Giacometti in the nba. Knowing about his father’s career and life, and his father’s early death. Watching the indelible clip of Bol Bol as a young boy of five or six sitting beside his father, Manute, folded onto the couch behind him. Manute’s face is oddly cherubic, his knees as high as his son’s head, beaming with delight as his son responds to the interviewer’s question, “Is he a great dad?” 

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I love him.”

The father interjects, “I love you too.”

I always felt about Bol Bol that he carried the burden of his father’s life and also his death, the way all sons carry such things. 

“I’ve been thinking about my dad these last few days, while I’ve been making my college decision,” Bol Bol wrote in an article in the Players Tribune announcing his intention to play at Oregon. “I wonder what he would have done if he was alive right now.” 

I believe these words even as I sense a performative obligation—the tying up of a loose thread.

When we got to the top of the escalator, I sought out the direction of our gate and saw Bol Bol, already some ways ahead, going in some direction other than ours. He turned and looked behind him one last time. There was a hunted look to him, as though he were spooked at the thought a fan was onto him, and also a kind of longing, as though wishing I was a fan who knew exactly who he was, as opposed to someone who was staring at him because he was so tall, so slender. Maybe he was dreading the thought that I would approach him and ask, “Did you play in the league?”

I couldn’t help but wonder if I would ever see him again—a sentiment both overblown and true to life, since so many young athletes who are fawned over, practically salivated over, in their youth, all the way up the draft, fade so quickly from sight. The flip side to the astonishing rise of Nikola Jokić, the number-41 pick in the draft, to mvp is how many of the players drafted ahead of him vanished from the league. 

*

For days in the immediate aftermath of this encounter, I attempted to verify that I had seen Bol Bol. Was he in the New York area in the days leading up to the moment on the escalator? Had he arrived somewhere, anywhere, on that day? I called his agency, caa, where I was put through to the client services desk. There, a young woman, surely a summer intern, asked me to repeat myself when I explained my mission. Then she asked me to spell the name. 

“Have you ever heard of Bol Bol?” I asked. 

She only paused a moment. No, she said.

For a moment I teetered on the edge of obsession. But I recognized this as folly. To see Bol Bol on an escalator in an isolated part of an airport, or to imagine seeing him, amounts to the same thing, really—an opportunity to float in the enigmatic cloud space of Bol Bol.