Height Is Only a State of Mind If You Are Not Too Shortsighted

When the Atlanta Hawks run onto the floor some nights, it seems at first as if they have forgotten something important--like a fifth player.

Most of the lineup is as highly visible as the New York skyline. One guy is so big his nickname is Tree. Another looks like the World Trade Center with arms. None of the other starters look as if they could get out of a Volkswagen without a blowtorch.

So, you wonder why No. 4 in this cast of high rises isn’t carrying a mop or an armful of towels. You have to resist the temptation to ask, “And whose little boy are you?”

You figure if the police found him out after dark, they would take him to the station, sit him on the desk, ply him with lollipops, put the captain’s hat on him and get him a coloring book while they telephoned around the neighborhood to see how he got out of his playpen.

It isn’t only that Anthony Jerome Webb is short--although he’s that, all right. It’s also that he’s got the guileless, cherubic face of a kid who’s just written a letter to Santa Claus.

You look at Spud Webb and you’re surprised that he can even pick up a basketball, never mind dunk it. It’s as big as he is. At his stature he should be having trouble dunking a large doughnut.

He looks like something that dropped out of Tree Rollins’ pocket. When he brings it up court, he doesn’t dribble the basketball, it dribbles him. His biggest trouble is not getting into the game, it’s getting into the arena. More than one locker room guard has tried to shoo him away.

He has one of those faces that’s going to look 10 when he’s 50. There have been small players in the National Basketball Assn. before, but Spud Webb is the only one who looks as if he should come with a rattle and a bonnet or a teething ring, in a baby carriage. Calvin Murphy, after all, was a towering 5-9. Bob Cousy was a stratospheric 6-1.

The secret of Spud Webb is, he doesn’t believe he’s 5-7. Height is a state of mind, too. Like, do you think Napoleon believed he was 5-2? Does any great man ever believe the evidence of his mirror? The testimony of his enemies? Even his own eyesight?

Spud Webb believes his instincts. And they tell him that, when he walks onto the court, he is 6-11 and climbing. He does this by playing a game that’s as mid-air as a trapeze act. He’s got more hang time than the crew of a pirate ship.

“When I was a kid, they always told me to take up some other sport,” he says. “They said, ‘Hey! Those guys are 7 feet. They won’t even know you’re there!’ ”

The only reason they wouldn’t know Spud wasn’t there was because they could never get a good look at him, because he was never anywhere very long. They knew he must have been there from the stat sheets after the game. His figures were taller than he was and taller than most of the 6-footers he played against.

“When you read the sheet, you pictured a guy 6-11 with a wing span like a condor,” a recruiter said. “When you met Spud, you thought there must be some mistake.”

On the playgrounds of Dallas, in junior college and at North Carolina State, Spud’s feats outdistanced nature but, the Detroit Pistons chose to believe their eyes, not the figures, after drafting him.

“They never really gave me a chance,” Webb said the other night as he stood enveloped by a bath towel in a locker room where it looked as if he might have to jump to turn on the shower.

The Atlanta Hawks were a team that had as formidable an attack force as any in the league, with the towering Rollins, the massive Jon Koncak and Kevin Willis and the devastating Dominique Wilkins, a man who could dunk a safe in a fifth-story window if you could get it to him on time.

But they had to bring the ball up court by fourth-class mail. So, Coach Michael Fratello, who won’t be confused with John Wayne or an NBA center himself, looked at the statistics instead of the dimensions.

Spud Webb could not only get the ball up court swiftly and invisibly, he frequently deposited it in the basket himself when he got there. He was the sport’s identified flying object.

Still, when he won the slam-dunk contest at the All-Star game, a lot of people reacted as if there must be something wrong with their TV sets--or their eyesight. But others remembered how Anthony Webb had come by his nickname--it’s a corruption of the word sputnik , as the Soviets called the first little artificial satellite.

When you can jump 42 inches straight up from a standing start, and chin yourself on air, you only need about 66 other inches to work with. From now on, whenever a guard stops the Atlanta Hawks at the door, and spots the one who looks like something off a Christmas tree or who looks as if he should have a Mouse hat on, he opens the door wide and says: “Come right in, Mr. Webb. I assume these oversize guys are all with you!”