Former NBA star speaks locally today
Manute Bol, who at 7-foot-7 was the tallest player when he joined the National Basketball Association in 1985, spoke in Rochester from a wheelchair today.
A serious accident when he was a taxi passenger five years ago has left him in pain daily, but a recent flare-up of arthritis made the former star blocker unable to walk. With his size-17 right foot on the wheelchair’s footrest, his knee reached the height of his chest.
At Walt Disney Elementary School in Gates this morning, he urged his audience of about 300 students in third through fifth grades and a dozen basketball players from Gates Chili High School to listen to their teachers, parents and coaches and to appreciate having a home, food and schools in America.
Bol said he didn’t go to school or play basketball until age 17. He said that children in Sudan use sticks to write in the dirt and mud because they don’t have schools. Some walk three or four miles to get to a teacher.
“They sit down like you guys — in the mud,” said Bol, looking out over the children seated on their school auditorium floor. “They have no shoes,” Bol said. “When they go back (home), they might not have food. That’s why I help.”
He planned to deliver four speeches in Rochester today to rally support for Sudan Sunrise (sudansunrise.org), an effort to build schools in his war-torn homeland of Sudan, including a public talk at University of Rochester tonight.
“Work hard,” he told the students in Gates, saying that few Sudanese children graduate high school. The two-decade civil war between the mainly Muslim north and the Animist and Christian south has killed more than 2 million people, rebels estimate, and displaced more than 4 million people. A peace agreement was reached in 2005 but suffering continues, while attention has shifted to the separate conflict that broke out in Sudan’s western region of Darfur in 2003.
Bol, now 47 and living with his family in Kansas, planned to get treatment for his arthritis through University of Rochester Medical Center before a scheduled trip to Sudan next week.
Pollster John Zogby of Utica, who was so inspired by Bol’s story that he joined the school-building effort, introduced Bol as “a genuine hero on a world stage” for donating his millions in basketball earnings to help people in Sudan.
Bol played for the Washington Bullets, Golden State Warriors, Miami Heat and Philadelphia 76ers. He and Romanian George Muresan are tied as the tallest-ever NBA players.
After speaking to children at Mt. Hope Family Center in Rochester and to the Rochester Rotary, Bol will give a free public talk from 7 to 8 p.m. tonight at the Interfaith Chapel, 550 Joseph C. Wilson Ave., on University of Rochester’s River Campus.
