Phil Jasner: Remembering the best of times with former NBA player Manute Bol

SOME PEOPLE said Manute Bol was 7-6. Most said he was 7-7. All I know is that he was and always will be bigger than life.

The former 76ers center - a renowned freedom fighter for his native Sudan - died of kidney problems and a rare skin disease Saturday in Charlottesville, Va. He was reported to be 47.

And that's part of the magic, the charisma, the lore of the Dinka tribesman. Some of what we know about him is fact, some is legend, stories told through the years. There are times when it's virtually impossible to separate fact from legend, and all you can do is laugh. Which is what Bol always did. He would tell stories, set up pranks, be the subject of pranks, then laugh. Invariably, he would laugh with you.

I was in the old Salt Palace in Salt Lake City when Bol, then a Sixer, stepped in to jump center against Mark Eaton, the Utah Jazz' massive 7-4 center.

"Man, you are big," Eaton said.

"No mon," Bol said in that hard-to-describe twang of his. "You are big. I am just tall."

I was in the Sixers' locker room at Saint Joseph's, then the team's practice site, when Bol giddily picked up a colleague's briefcase and hung it from a water pipe along the ceiling, leaving it several inches out of my colleague's reach. I remember the look of anguish on my colleague's face, then the subsequent sigh of relief when a 6-10 teammate of Bol's stepped out of the shower and volunteered to help.

Jim Lynam, then a rookie head coach with the then-San Diego Clippers, tried to draft Bol in the second round in 1983. Don Feeley, a former coach at Sacred Heart, had been in Sudan working for the U.S. State Department and helping as an assistant with the Sudanese national team and had seen Bol.

"He said they kept telling him about the big guy from the bush," Lynam recalled. "He had never seen him. Then, one day, the door opened and in stepped what he said was 'the biggest guy he ever saw.' ''

The Clippers' management told Lynam they wouldn't "waste" a second-round pick on this guy. Lynam waited until the fifth round. But the NBA wouldn't allow the pick. The executives overseeing the draft had never heard of Manute Bol.

Bol's passport said he was 21, but somebody somewhere came up with information that the age was incorrect. And under Bol's passport photo, it said he was 5-7.

"He said, 'They took my picture when I was sitting down,' '' Lynam recalled.