'do You Play Basketball?' 'no, I Wash Giraffe Ears'

No one is all of a piece, seamless as a tabletop or a glass egg, but we tend to describe people that way. Pretty Boy, Nice Guy, Mr. or Ms. Success, Bore (or Boor), Rich Kid, Animal, Tough Guy, Fool—the terms we use to define the people around us show our need, however unjust, to focus and condense, to label and move on. Thus, 7'2" Artis Gilmore is defined: Tall Man.

Oh, certainly, the 31-year-old Gilmore is more than that. He's the starting center for the Chicago Bulls, 240 pounds, a three-time NBA All-Star, an ABA All-Star in each of his five years in that league, the 1972 ABA Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player, a performer homing in on 16,000 career points and 12,000 rebounds. He's a quiet man, sensitive and gentle, with a degree in physical education from Jacksonville University obtained—how rare this has become among pro stars—on schedule; a player of backgammon; a devoted family man with three daughters and a lovely wife, Enola Gay (named after the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima); a jazz buff; a scuba diver with size-16 fins.

But all that is fluff, mere detail. Gilmore is a Tall Man. That's how people see him; that's how he must confront a society built for Average Man. Consider: Gilmore is sitting with his agent, Herb Rudoy, in a downtown Chicago lounge. "Lean over here, Artis," says Rudoy, who's 5'10". Gilmore bends across the table, and Rudoy brushes white specks from his client's slightly receding Afro. Rudoy examines them. "Part of the ceiling," he says.

Or this: Gilmore is appearing in one of the few TV commercials he has been signed to do, making a plea for Chicago-area Commonwealth Edison customers to turn down their thermostats. A nearly emotionless Gilmore—he hates being in front of cameras: "What can I play in the movies besides a giant or a clone or something?"—says, "I know where my head is at. And it's hot up here." The camera pulls back to show Artis' heated brow high in the corner of a normal-ceilinged room. The Tall Man looks unhappy, bored, bizarre.

And then there's this: Gilmore is in Cleveland, and a woman asks him if he plays basketball. He says, "No, I wash giraffe ears." Gilmore doesn't like to be flippant, but it's one of the few ways he can protect himself. "I try to be polite to people," he says, "and if they ask me something courteously, I'll answer them that way. But I can't let people take advantage of me anymore. I try to keep my close friends to a minimum, to be more cautious. I've learned something from everything that has ever happened to me."

Gilmore, whom Dave Vance, general manager of the defunct Kentucky Colonels, Gilmore's ABA team, once described as "maybe too nice a guy for his own good," lives in a world that regards his kind oddly and with something that might be called unintentional hostility. Indeed, beyond exploiting the Tall Man, society deals him little but blows, most of them to the head. Chandeliers, pipes, heating ducts, exit signs, the standard 6'8" doorways that catch Gilmore almost at mid-lip—all are messages sent by Average Man. "Those new sprinklers are the scariest," says Gilmore. "The star-shaped ones that hang down. They're very dangerous. They can scalp you." Airplane lavatories, phone booths, bus seats, beds, clothes, drinking fountains, mirrors, bicycles—there's no end to the reminders to shorten up.

Gilmore considered customizing his house in suburban Glenview, Ill. to fit his own dimensions—something Wilt Chamberlain did a few years back—but decided against it. The house would be too safe, womblike, he concluded, and ultimately dangerous. "I'd still have to go out into the real world," he says. Indeed, the Tall Man can't afford to be complacent. Wariness gets him through the day. It's what makes him seem so reserved, aloof and finally lonely.

Numbers set the Tall Man apart. There are not very many American men who stand more than 7'2". In his entire life Gilmore has encountered only five taller than he, two black, three white. One of the blacks is a fellow pro and friend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Los Angeles Lakers. Gilmore has played in Abdul-Jabbar's shadow for years, and as a consequence he has been criticized somewhat unfairly—"He's Kareem without moves," says one scout—but he bears Abdul-Jabbar no ill will. "The difference between Kareem and me is that he's got one incredible offensive weapon—the sky hook," says Gilmore. "It's unstoppable. I don't have anything like that." The other black man is 7'4" Ralph Sampson, the 19-year-old center for the University of Virginia. Gilmore dozed off while watching Sampson on TV recently and remembers little about him except that he's "very, very thin but quick."

One of the white men is 7'2½" Tom Burleson, now of the Atlanta Hawks, whom Gilmore met while Burleson was attending Avery County (N.C.) High in Newland and Gilmore was at Gardner-Webb Junior College in the same state. "I walked into a high school gym and had to bend way over to get through the door," says Gilmore. "Then I saw this other guy come in and he had to bend even more than me. I was amazed." The other two taller men were more or less freaks. "One was a giant I paid to see at the Florida State Fair," says Gilmore. "And the other was this man who drove a car from the backseat, a kind of promotion, I think. He was about 8'2" and old, but he could stand under a rim and just drop a basketball through."

Well, yes, thank God for basketball then, the only sport other than horse racing, with its diminutive jockeys, to reward a man so directly for his size. In high school Gilmore at first wanted to play football—to be the first 6'5", 145-pound freshman tight end in the Florida panhandle, where Gilmore's hometown of Chipley is located. But his father, Otis, a 5'7" pool player and fisherman who provided for his 10 children and 6-foot wife, Mattie, without any visible means of support, vetoed the idea. The Gilmores couldn't afford the required insurance. There wasn't even enough money for food, and Artis worried that he was suffering from malnutrition and that, as a friend told him, he was growing too fast and his "bones were in trouble."