Monthly Archives: July 2013

Did Lee Lazelle Continue Growing Taller After 30?

Someone today left a comment on the website linking to a guy named Lee Lazelle from the UK who had a DailyMail UK article entitled I Can’t Stop Growing written about him back in 2001 saying that even at the age of 30 he was still growing at a rate of 1 inch per year.

Now he would be  42 years old. Someone did ask what happened to this guy (source) who was said to have some type of incurable condition which makes him not have the ability to stop growing. If he kept up that rate of 1 inch per year, and after 12 year later, since 2001 to the current 2013, he would be 8 feet 3 inches now, a serious contender for the world’s tallest man.

This guy is clearly visible from being so tall, and if he did grow to anywhere close to the tallest man in the UK record, which stands at 7′ 7″ – 7′ 8″ right now, he would have been noticed buy anyone who saw him and the Guinness Records people would have found him, or at least a few new channels would have done at least another story about this guy.

I think the overall conclusion is that Lazelle did actually stop growing and if I was to guess, he ended up with a height around 7′ 4″- 7′ 5″. There is no more information on this British guy that I found anywhere else from doing a quick google search on his name.

Young Yao MingThe reason why I give this guy another 1-2 inches of his reported height back in 2001 is actually based on the height/ growth pattern seen in Yao Ming, another giant. China’s past record on falsifying their Olympic athletes’ ages aside, lets assume that Yao Ming’s real age reported when he was drafted as #1 to the Houston Rockets back in 2002 was true. Currently Yao is 32 years old. He was born in Sep of 1980. Back in June of 2002 when he was drafted, he would have been almost 22 years old. Yao’s growth pattern shows that over the span of the last 2-3 years of his growth, he averaged about 1 inch of extra growth each year. In the 2000 Olympics Yao was first noticed and his height looked to be around 7′ 4″ – 7′ 5″.

Most males stop growing taller around the age of 18-20. Yao’s genetics meant that he probably had another couple of extra years of open growth plates. He was listed at 7′ 5″ when he came into the league but his height was elevated another 1 inch around the end of his NBA career to 7′ 6″. There is only anecdotal stories and evidence that Yao grew taller by 0.5 inch from the age of 21 when he got drafted to maybe 22-23 when he supposedly stopped growing taller.

I am going to try to take the growth progress of Yao and transpose it to the growth of this british guy and this is why I say that he grew at most 2 inches. The other thing to recognize is that this guy had severe bone pain in his body. It seemed that he was suffering from arthritis, which is a symptom in mainly people who are much older. If I was to guess at his condition, it seems that he went through an accelerated rate of growth earlier in life. My guess is that this guy suffers from a similar condition like that of Zech Devits. I wrote a post about the connection between Zech Devits, Matt McGrory, and Siah Khan in the post The Connection Between Matt McGrory, Siah Khan, Zech Devits, And The Tallest Filipino Leads To Proteus Syndrome And Much More (Important!)

The bone pains is NOT from growing longitudinally in the bones. This is what most people would think is the pain but it is not. People who experience growing pains usually are the type who grow 8-10 inches a year, not the type of person who grows only 1 inch a year. His pain is coming from a result where he is said to not even be able to hold onto a cup from hand cramping. Hand cramps can come from either from muscle problems or joint problems. It could be that he could not send the electrical signal to tell the muscle in his hands to close down on a cup. I would guess the better reason is that the joints in his hands could not move in the right way without pain. The joints became locked and stiff. This signals the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, where he is lossing articular cartilage in the synovial joints of his hands. This is the same things as what happened to Zech Devits. Devits also had extreme problems with bone pain and advanced aging of his bones.

So why do I think that Lazelle stopped growing?

I refer to the PubMed article Fundamental limits on longitudinal bone growth: growth plate senescence and epiphyseal fusion. The study/ article shows that at least one of the primary reasons why humans stop growing is due to simple physics and mathematical principles. Over time, the number of cells/chondrocytes that are possible to be used for hypertrophy slowly drops and there is only 1 inevitable ending, where all the cells are used up.

There is one other possibility on how it is possible that this Lee Lazelle guy could have grown. This is if he had a serious problem where the chondrocytes in his growth plates did not have the estrogen receptors, either alpha or beta. There have been three studies written and posted in the PubMed database which show this type of medical disorder where it really is possible for the person who has it to still be growing. It is due to the fact that the cartilage in the long bones have not been able to go through the chondro-osteogenic process yet.

I wrote a post The 3 Men Who Lacked Estrogen Receptors Who Did Not Stop Growing to show that it is possible.

However for the 2 cases of men who were around 6′ 8″ around the 30 years old range and still had open growth plates, the main negativity that resulted from their disorder was that they were sterile and could not have children. However the article on Lee Lazelle showed that he had a 12 year old daughter back in 2001. If this guy had a daughter when he was 18 years old (he was 30 years old when the article was written) then he clearly did not have any problems with child bearing, so he was not sterile like the medically documented cases.

The thing about having the estrogen receptors being inactive or gone in the other cases showed that it would have been close to impossible to have children. This shows that Lee Lazelle did NOT have the problem where he was suffering from the same condition, where his growth plates could not close due to him lacking the receptors or the receptors not functioning.

He was a normal guy going through the normal endochondral ossification process. He just happened to have growth plates that stayed around a lot longer than average, just like Kosen and Angus. So why did his growth plates stay around even at the age of 30?

It was due to another endocrine system mechanism which I do not know of right now, although I suspect that it happens to a lot of people who have pituitary adenoma. Kosen was said to be around when he grew again another 2 inches. Angus grew until she was around 29 years old, when the weight on her body caused the vertebrate to curve, reducing overall height and removing any phenotypical evidence that excess GH in her body resulted in adult stage height increase, even if it did happen.

So did this Lazelle continue to grow taller even after being in his 30s? No, he stopped growing.

However, the most interesting thing for us researchers is to find out what mechanism or endocrine process could have caused his body to be able to prevent full growth plate closure until he was in his 30s. That would be a very helpful thing to know.

Is Being 7 Feet Tall The Fastest Way To Get Rich In America?

This is a article I found from Forbes.com entitled “NBA Draft: Is Being 7 Feet Tall The Fastest Way To Get Rich In America?” written by a Dan Diamond and posted in 6/27/2013.

Interpretation: This type of article that is posted for the website of one of the most foremost magazines on fortune, business, and the professional life does make me and the other people who come to this website take a step back from our endeavor to see just how even the extreme high end of height is good for you, even if there are inconveniences like increased likelihood of heading one’s head and airplane seats not having enough leg room.

The Issue Over Winning the Genetic Lottery…

Sometimes I get frustrated with people who feel somehow bad that they were so lucky to win the genetic lottery and feel like they don’t deserve what they have and did not work hard for. There are billions of people who would kill to be in the position they are in, however they were unlucky. The most famous speech ever made by a person is probably Cameron Rusell who got a disproportionately large applause to her rather weak speech on TED.tv.

In a rather famous YouTube video where the writer Neil Strauss tries to develop rapport with Jessica Alba in the Jimmy Kimmel Show (HERE) he states to the rather oblivious Jessica “In LA everyone’s beautiful. If you are beautiful you come to LA to try to make it, right? ….So you are beautiful, so what? so you got lucky in the gene pool, so what?…”

This technique is he doing is to make Alba start to qualify herself to him and reverses the values of each other’s roles. A rather classic pick up artist strategy where the NLP technique of reframing the situation is done.

I think Jessica misses the main point. If we remove the idea of of a omnipotent god who used intention and had a specific reason to create us, humans, and don’t believe in anything that is associated with the idea of intelligent design, then the factor that would be the biggest determinant in detemining the quality of the life of existence is randomness and PURE DUMB LUCK. The fact is that while Strauss may try to use words to negate the major factor, which is that Jessica Alba got lucky on the genetic lottery, if we look at the situation completely objectively we can see that being physically attractive is going to get most girls very far in life, even if they lack a substantial amount in the other areas of life like intelligence, personality, etc. If Alba was born as a girl in some remote tribe in the Amazon, she will not have the type of fame and money she has now. If Alba was born in some village in Bangladesh she probably would have been a mother at 15 and be forced into a life of being a farmer. If she was born with osteogenesis imperfecta she will never get the main role in a romantic comedy movie, no matter how great her personality was.

My main point is, the cold hard fact is that winning the genetic lottery is probably the only thing that matters in any of our lives.  If you got lucky and won, then your life is set. If you are unlucky and go the short end of the straw, there is really very little you can do to change anything, even if you work your ass off. That is how life is. Life is very unfair.

Here is the article he wrote below…

Every year, I watch the NBA Draft and its parade of young men who appear to have won the genetic lottery, or at least a sweepstakes for overactive pituitaries. And every year, I come away with the same conclusion: Thanks to pro basketball, being 7 feet tall is the world’s shortest path to becoming a millionaire.

These newest, lankiest pro players have worked hard to develop elite basketball skills, of course. But they’ve also benefited from a years-long, worldwide search to identify and maximize talent unlike any other industry.

And as a result, a disproportionate number of the planet’s tallest men already work in the NBA, with players like Nerlens Noel, Alex Len, and Cody Zeller poised to join them tonight.

The extraordinary advantage of being 7 feet tall

Drawing on Centers for Disease Control data, Sports Illustrated‘s Pablo Torre estimated that no more than 70 American men are between the ages of 20 and 40 and at least 7 feet tall. “While the probability of, say, an American between 6’6″ and 6’8″ being an NBA player today stands at a mere 0.07%, it’s a staggering 17% for someone 7 feet or taller,” Torre writes.

(While that claim might seem like a tall tale, more than 42 U.S.-born players listed at 7 feet did debut in NBA games between 1993 and 2013. Even accounting for the typical 1-inch inflation in players’ listed heights would still mean that 15 “true” 7-footers made it to the NBA, out of Torre’s hypothetical pool of about 70 men.)

Many 7 footers also profit by getting into basketball relatively early. While scouts canvas the globe for super-sized warm bodies – “I’ll check up on anyone over 7 feet that’s breathing,” NBA scouting director Ryan Blake told Torre in 2011 – they usually haven’t slipped through the cracks. In a nation like China or Germany, a 10-year-old who shows extreme growth potential will be recruited into a national basketball academy; in the United States, clumsy young giants are often funneled into the sport thanks to some variation on the following conversation: “Do you play basketball? If not, you should.”

There’s a clear reason why extreme height is so prized in basketball: At worst, it’s still an unteachable asset. Even a relatively unskilled 7 footer can simply stand near a basket and alter an opponent’s shots just by his presence.

And given the market need for players who can protect the rim, there are extra rewards for this extra height. The league’s median player last season was 6 feet 7 inches tall, and paid about $2.5 million for his service. But consider the rarified air of the 7-footer-and-up club. The average salary of those 35 NBA players: $6.1 million.

(How much does one more inch matter? The 39 players listed at 6 feet 11 inches were paid an average of $4.9 million, or about 20% less than the 7 footers.)

And once a 7 footer has made it to the league, his height offers tremendous job security — the basketball equivalent of tenure. A tattered reputation didn’t stop Eddy Curry (more than $70 million in career earnings) or Jerome James ($44 million) from getting huge, multi-year contracts. A lack of skill didn’t stop Ryan Hollins ($10 million in career earnings) or Keith Closs ($6.2 million) from carving out a lucrative niche as backups.

Extreme height also induces teams to take flyers on marginal players who would otherwise never warrant a second look. Back in the 1990s, 7 foot 1 Matt Wenstrom, who averaged 1.6 points per game in his college career at North Carolina, somehow played two seasons in the NBA – which was two seasons more than Donald Williams, who was Wenstrom’s college teammate and the most outstanding player of the 1993 NCAA Final Four.

Even though NBA teams are starting to get a little smaller, with the rise of non-traditional lineups often used by the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA Draft is paradoxically expected to grow a bit bigger this year. At least seven players who are listed at 7 feet or taller are projected as first round selections on Thursday night, which would break a five-year-old record.

Whether or not this draft is historically huge, the annual parade of young giants like Noel, Len, and Zeller will be a powerful visual reminder: While being incredibly skinny doesn’t make you a model, and being unusually short or fat doesn’t get you much at all, being tall – like, off-the-growth-charts tall – can make you very rich while very young.

The Origin And Validity Of The Story Of How Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson Made A 20 Year Old Man 12 Inches Taller

Most people who have done any type of research on the possibility of trying to grow taller from using hypnosis, neuro linguistic programming and anything related would have heard of the legendary story of how the late great hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson managed to get a supposed 20 year old man to grow 12 inches taller in one year from using a specific type of visualization technique.

I have written about and referenced at least two post about this unique case. The original post was  “Milton Erickson’s Legend of 12 Inch Height Increase“. The subsequent posts like about praying, wishing, NLP, hypnosis, and hypnotherapy, this specific case was referenced multiple times to show that maybe there is something to hypnosis.

I remembered back to this specific case and wanted to do some research to find out whether this story was true or not and find the exact origin of where this story came from.

The first clue I got was from the article I had originally published about Milton Erickson. There was the title of a certain book which I didn’t even realized I had copy and pasted in the 1st post. It was entitled “Ericksonian Approaches“. I checked Amazon.com and found that the title referred to a specific reference manual on Erickson’s methods. It is “Ericksonian Approaches: A Comprehensive Manual”. The cost of it was 26 British Pounds.

I searched for a free PDF copy of the book looking on Google and found none so I spent $35 of my own money to buy the Kindle Version of the book. I set up a Kindle Reader for my Mac OSX and Apple computer and started to search through the entire book trying to find the exact passage of the original. It would turn out the passage does exist.

Exceptional Growth

Erickson recognized the importance of healthy body imagery. He used hypnosis to help at least two young women allow their breasts to grow in response to their own hormones. They had previously inhibited such interaction, considering themselves unfeminine and unattractive (Erickson and Rossi, 1980b, p. 183–5).

In 1960, he told me about a 20-year-old man who grew 12 inches in height in the span of one year. In hypnosis, at the start of therapy, this stunted young man looked out on his world as though unwilling to grow, a modern-day Peter Pan. For example, he described a room as though he were standing beneath a table. Similarly, a cow on his farm was visualized as though it were ten feet tall; his eyes were on a level with cow’s udder. Growth began to take place when Erickson encouraged the man to hallucinate his world as though he were standing part way up a staircase. I said, “Why have you kept this report out of the literature?” Erickson smiled and said, “No respectable editor of a scientific journal would publish such an impossible thing.” “Dr. Erickson,” I answered, “You are the editor of a respectable journal.” He smiled again and said, “I would like to keep my job.” (Cheek, 1982, p. 282.)

Erickson did some things that bordered on the unbelievable!

I. Posthypnotic Behavior

Me: I am not sure which page it is on but the passage is there. What is most important is the fact that the exact passage is referenced and it points at another book on Erickson’s Methods. The reference is…

Cheek, D.B. (1982). Some of Erickson’s contributions to medicine. In J.K. Zeig (ed.), Ericksonian approaches to hypnosis and psychotherapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

  • Study/Article Author: Cheek, D.B.
  • Article Title: Some of Erickson’s contributions to medicine
  • Year the article was published: 1982
  • Book Name: Ericksonian approaches to hypnosis and psychotherapy
  • Book’s Author/ Editor: J. K. Zeig

Currently I am outside the USA and the place I live in does not get any type of packages. Even if I buy the book, I will never be able to receive it. I would like to request one of the readers of this website to kindly pay the $6 to get it from Amazon and tell me what exactly is on page 282?

The link below is an Amazon Associates link so if you buy from the link, I do get a small commission fee of roughly 25 cents. That’s right, I am get a nice quarter for all of my work on this research.

Click HERE! –> Ericksonian Approaches to Hypnosis and Psychotherapy – Editor: Jeffrey K. Zeig – Cost: $6

Conclusion:

I can not continue any further with the research because I can not get any copy of the book entitled “Ericksonian Approaches to Hypnosis and Psychotherapy“. It seems that Google Scholar and Google Books does not have a copy of this body in electronic or PDF form yet. Can Anyone help in seeing just how valid is the idea of increasing height from using hypnosis really is? The story have been validated to be true since it is in a professional manual written. Traced back a little further, it seems that the real origin of the book is from another Ericksonian Techniques Manual or Guide.

 

 

When Is The True Last Age That A Natural Growth Spurt Is Possible?

I get emails from people asking me whether they can still grow anywhere from 1 inch to 9-11 inches all the time and for some of them, I answer it is possible and for others I don’t even reply.

Like I said multiple times before, the growth plates are the main thing that the average person needs to consider if they want to know if they are going to grow taller or not. Now I am not talking about growth spurts, but only a slight increase.

I actually think it is very unreasonable to believe that one would be able to get 9 inches of extra height in a few months from any type of technique or method, although there have been some cases where people have grown at this rate, although I think it is extremely strange.

So when is the true last age that a natural growth spurt can still happen?

I want to move the reader away from the idea that they are going to be lucky enough to get a 7 inch growth spurt in a few months just because they want to be taller since that doesn’t happen. If it does happen, that is wonderful and this website is something that one should not need to refer to. I write this website for the people who are the majority, the people who are slightly older and never get the type of height boost that they want, but are concerned that maybe it is already too late for them.

The question should be changed from “When is the true last age that a natural growth spurt is possible?” into “Is it possible that I can still get a growth spurt?” to the real question that can be answered. “Can I still grow?”

Technically growth spurts are just the phenomena where the vertical increase in height is slightly higher than what is predicted to be average by an pediatrician or endocrinologist during a short period of time.

Growth spurts turn out to occur very rapidly and happen usually in a range of just a few short months. They usually happen during the summer time where a person can grow around 4-5 inches over a 2-3 month time range. It happened to me and it happened to other people. For some people, they never get the increased vertical growth but increase in height at a very steady rate, at around 2-3 inches every year, until they are finished. If that is the case, then we can say that this person never technically had a growth spurt, but that their growth rate was constant.

So the better question, and the question I can answer would be “What is the true last age which a person can possibly grow?” which can be rewritten in the more personal way “I am a certain age, can I still grow?”

To answer this question, click on the post…

“Hi, I’m ENTER YOUR AGE years old. Am I Still Growing? Can I Still Grow Taller?”

In Related News… 

In a recent interview the actor Armie Hammer (played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network) with Conan O’Brien said that during the summer between the 9th and 10th grade, probably when he was either 15 or 16 he increased his height by 9 inches within the span of a few short months, or as he says it, 1 summer. Whether that meant he grew in 2 or 3 months do make a difference. Armie talks about all the growing pains he would feel in his legs at night as his bones were being stretched out. In 9th grade he was shorter with a small gut, and looked pudgy.

Conan states in the video below that he was sort of a short kid in high school and that he grew overnight and that somewhere in the late sophomore year, within the period of 2 months, he grew like the Hulk. The same thing happened to Armie Hammer in terms of the growth, and it seems that the exact same thing happened to both of them, where it happened over night.

The bad part of this insane growth period is the amount of pain they went through. They talk about the leg cramps. Armie stated that his hips even popped out of their socket, which is even more interesting. From just ordinary walking, the hips would just pop out.

Increase Height And Grow Taller Through Cartilage Regeneration Through Stainless Steel Strength Osteogenic Tissue

In what I would call one of the most seminal posts I have ever written for this website which is “Why Growing Taller With Closed Growth Plates Is So Difficult To Figure Out And Impossible To Almost All People” I had proposed that there is really two possible ways that we can achieve the ultimate goal of height increase if the people are truly extremely adamant on the fact that we must always be searching for a non-invasive/ minimal invasive solution or approach, which I personally don’t agree with.

The two possibilities are to either…

  1. Turn a band of the bone tissue in a long bone like the femur into cartilage tissue, and then manipulate that cartilage into the right type of cartilage we want, then add the chondrocytes into the cartilage, get them to align in columns like the way natural growth plates work.
  2. Somehow get the bone cells like osteoblasts to be able to expand out through hypertrophy and push against the organic & inorganic formed bone extracellular matrix and pull them apart. 

At this point, I have stated that it takes a tremendous amount of force, around 25,000-30,000 Lbs to pull the average adult human male femur steadily apart to the point where it has a chance of plastically deforming instead of snapping back in its original length due to the extremely high Young’s Modulus value.

Personally, I can’t figure out any idea or way to get the bone cells to be able to expand/ hypertrophize with enough force per area to push the matrix of the bone to a point where the entire bone structure would stretch out. I wonder just how strong in terms of the Surface Tension is the outer membrance of the osteoblasts. Can the surface of the osteoblasts, osteoclasts, and osteocytes have a high enough surface tension to be able to actually pull apart the ionic bonds that form between the calcium phophates minerals aka hydroxyapatite so that the entire matrix, environment around them is expanded out ward?

I can’t see how, and that is why I would say that at least right now, and not any time in the foreseeable can I see any type of scientific or biomedical idea or theory which can accomplish this task.

What is left is that idea of whether we can turn the bone tissue into cartilage tissue. This turns out to be the hardest step.

Like I said in the previous post, we would be going in reverse against the natural differentiation path of cells in the human body.

Natural way: Cartilage Cells Differentiate into Bone Tissue Cells or die from apoptosis leading to hollow cavities filled by bone tissue cells.

What we are trying to do: Turn Bone tissue cells into cartilage cells

The best way to figure it out would be to see how to do the process known as transdifferentiation, where one type of fully differentiated cell turns into  another type of fully differentiated cell without going through the middle path which is to de-differentiate and revert into a progenitor form of  stem cells, and then redifferentiate into the type of tissue cell we are looking for.

The fact is that researchers can already turn the cells in urine into stem cells for teeth. (source) So the technology for focusing one type of stem cell into differentiate into a fully differentiated cell like neurons, adipocytes, etc. is available already. The step on how to de-differentiate backwards into the progenitor cells has also been very well studied and there are some options.

It is just that scientists have not been able to figure out how to do transdifferentiation of fully differentiated human cells yet. If we understood at the genetic or nano level on how some animals like the Immortal Jellyfish does this process, which mRNA or microRNA is activated to turn on the expression of which gene, then we would be able to figure out how to turn the bone cells in a certain area of the body into cartilage cells. If we can keep the chondrogenic phenotype long enough through some type of minimal approach like Ultrasound, Extracorporeal Shockwaves, etc., then it would start releasing the right type of extracellular proteins and compounds like Collagen Type 2, proteoglycans, Glycoaminoglycans, Type IX, and Alkaline phosphatase, which would slowly turn the region of bone from a hard, brittle matrix into a elastic one which would eventually become hyaline cartilage.

The title of this post is “Increase Height And Grow Taller Through Cartilage Regeneration Through Stainless Steel Strength Osteogenic Tissue”

What the title of the post really means is that instead of trying to stretch out bone, which has the resistive and material strength at the same magnitude as stainless steel (source), we should try to regenerate (or actually generate) the cartilage tissue which can get in between the osteogenic tissue/bone and slowly replace the bone into something that is much less strong which we can work with.

So we can try to either get small fragments of cartilage tissue embedded in between the large much harder and stronger bone, and then figure out how to dissolve/ filter out the bone tissue over time, or we try to turn a segment of the bone into cartilage tissue, using maybe de-mineralization techniques, increasing of PTHrP levels, acid-base titration reactions, or activating some type of microRNA signals which will start the transdifferentiation process.

The Indian Basketball Player Superstar

satnam_singh_bhamara_imgBack in May of this year (2013) Sports Illustrated printed the piece about the NBA trying to expand into the Indian market which has untapped. The piece “Wanted: 1.2 Billion Basketball Fans” had stated that the current best option is a young 7 feet tall Punjabi kid named “SATNAM SINGH BHAMARA”. His actual numbers are supposed to be…

  • Height: 7′ 1½”
  • Wight: 300-pound
  • Shoe Size: 20 

The idea of trying to combine basketball with the culture and nation of India has been extremely seductive since the project with the NBA and basketball getting penetration into the Chinese market with Yao Ming was so successful. 10 years after Yao Ming opened the door between the market of China to basketball, people are now looking to get into the India market looking for another giant.

Many basketball and NBA executives would love to get more coverage in India but from what I see, I don’t think Satnam will be the first Indian basketball player who will play in the NBA or become even reasonable famous.

In general, the way that basketball works is that for any country to represent itself and get exposure to NBA, the first or first few players that gets drafted is a giant. The examples are many

When it comes to getting into basketball, and definitely playing professionally, the easiest attribute to have is to be tall to get recognized first.

Of all the sports in the world, only basketball and volleyball put such a huge emphasize towards height and length as absolute requirements on its professional athletes. Some other sports like football, the fighting arts, and rowing might prefer to have their athletes bigger, but not always. Of all the sports in the world today, besides the game of futbol or soccer, the biggest growing sport to take over the psyche of the developing world with its 5+ billion people would probably be basketball.

In a world that is now over 7 billion people in population, with the countries of China and India being the only two countries with a population over the 1 billion mark, the influence of the sport of basketball would be greatly expanded if the American created sport of basketball managed to reach these two major countries.

I propose that in even 20 years, the game of basketball will eclipse the game of soccer in popularity. I cite 4 primary reasons.

1. The game of soccer is resource intensive in terms of space and has many people so the team is emphasized. The game of basketball is not as resource intensive at least in terms of land required. When comparing the court size of the basketball court to say baseball, football, soccer, or hockey, the basketball court is small. Some sports like Volleyball do however have a smaller court.

2. Basketball also has the interesting feature of having only 5 players of a team at one time on the field. It means that the physical actions of any one player can be much more focused on and glorified if they perform at a much higher level. As the nations of the world in general grow richer and more well off, there will be overall less emphasize placed on the whole and teams and the individual’s accomplished will be focused on more. The individual’s achievements will be glorified more and this will make the sport of basketball, which has less people on the court, more attractive as more people in the developing world start to place more importance on the individual.

3. The game of basketball is faster (at least in terms of scoring) – In soccer, due to how big the field is, it is rare that a goal and point is scored. When a soccer player gets reasonably close to the goal, often people start to get excited but that excitement goes away because the actual point is not made due to the goalie blocking a shot or the player running towards the goal missing the shot.

In comparison, the game of basketball allows of people to score almost every second. The court is small enough that a person with enough strength and accuracy can throw a basketball from one side of the court to the other end and make a 3 point basketball. There have been instances were a 10 point lead can be reduced in less than 2 minutes of game play and teams can come out of big point deficits creating a type of drama which could be called “movie like”.

When we compare the score at the end of a game of a soccer game, it is usually something like 2-1, and sometimes when neither side scores a point in the regulation time, they have to go into kicking. With basketball, the scores of an average game between two players are around 80-100, which means that the direction of the game can change in a minute when a team that is 10 point behind can bounce back. This makes the game of basketball more exciting to watch.

4. The game of basketball focuses on humans that are much bigger in size – There is no doubt that size is something that people admire at a very visceral instinctual level. The truth is that humans have always looked for heros in their culture. When we read storied from any culture’s past, the main protagonist is almost always described as being bigger than average. Hercules, Gilgamesh, Miyamoto Musashi, Michael Jordan, etc. We secretly, unconscious want our heros to be bigger than the average person.

We as a species love the idea of heroes. It is true that at one level we might wish that the people we admire, our heroes, were just average people like us and the same size as us so that we might be able to relate to them better, but we also project from our minds the idea that our ‘heroes’ should be ‘larger than life’, and basically larger in height and stature so that we can literally ‘look up to them’.

Millions of people in the world admire and look up to Messi, who is considered the greatest soccer player today. However, I would guess that a 15 year old boy who is 5′ 8″ and manages to actually meet Messi, who is his hero face to face might be psychologically jolted and a little shocked to realize that his hero is actually shorter than him (being 5′ 7″). This might actually cause the image of the greatness of the guy to decrease in some of his fans who actually see him in real life.

This is why I think basketball will one day become larger than soccer. It is due to 4 main things…

  1. The size and space of the courts the game is played on is smaller.
  2. The individual’s accomplishments will be glorified more instead of the team, which will coincide with the overall way global society is shifting towards as people get richer.
  3. The game of basketball is much faster and things can change so fast in terms of who is winning. This creates drama.
  4. The game of basketball mainly puts larger than average humans in the game, allowing it easier for the commoner and non-athlete to turn the players into heroes.

Of course soccer is still going to create raving fans that are willing to riot, fight, and kill each other for. However, I think the overall global zeal for soccer will decrease as the decades go by. Basketball will go up in influence and popularity.

When we look at what happened to China, we see that basketball managed to completely take over the country due to the Chinese superstar basketball player Yao Ming influence. He was the one of the main reasons the NBA has been so popular in the country of over a billion people.

It might be also becasue basketball has been a part of Chinese athletics for much of its history in the last century, since Chairman Mao was very fond of the game, and even during the 1960-1970s when the Chinese Cultural Revolution was going on, when almost all other types of Western influences and ideas were suppressed and rejected by Mao and his ideology on self sufficiency, Mao still was fond of basketball and allowed this sport to continue on in the country. So another big reason why basketball managed to take over the Chinese psyche might be also because it has had a very long, undisrupted history in a country with over 1 billion people.

When we look at Yao Ming, he represents all of the reasons why I think people and nations will one day make basketball into the most popular sport in the world. His mythical size, his graceful movements, the speed of the game, and the small space that the game is played in all contributed to the game of basketball becoming so popular in China. Now, after a little more than a decade, 10 years after Yao was drafted into the NBA as the 1st round pick of the 2002 NBA Draft, he would go back to Shanghai, where he played before, and buy the team he used to play for. Yao Ming’s net worth is over 100 million USD as calculated by some sources. (source) Because of this, Yao Ming may have become the first true Chinese superstar in this century, beyond anything that other entertainers like actors, singers, and musicians can reach in terms of global popularity.

The interesting case of how basketball fever swept the country of China I am proposing will one day reach India as well, however it would not be as strong.

Now, what about India. There is a national India basketball team but why has basketball not caught on? – Would basketball one day manage to take over the indian psyche and create as loyal fans just like the other 1 billion + nation?

One of the things why it probably won’t happen, at least for a long time, is the game of Cricket. Cricket has taken over the south asian people’s psyche. For many south asians, cricket represents the absolute pinnacle of sports. People go crazy over cricket in Pakistan and India.

Just last month the New York Times wrote a piece showing just how big and passionate people are about cricket and the rivalry between Pakistan and India in the cricket world. The article was entitled “In India vs. Pakistan Cricket Match, Passions Unleashed”

I personally know absolutely nothing about cricket, so it would be a great disservice to say anything about the sport by a person who knows nothing about it. I will just talk about basketball.

So will India also one day catch the basketball bug and become basketball fanatics as much as they are crazy about cricket? I think they will, but first they have to find their own national hero to look up to. They need their own giant to cheer behind and root for. This person will be someone that they can related to but also root for.

Is there anyone in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh which has the size, speed, and skill in basketball right now to make the entire country of India turn their heads? Not yet.

Basketball is a game that requires first a lot of size. Like most countries based in the continent of Asia, the average people are not that big compared to say people who are ethnicity from Northern Europe. Only a few small regions in the country have ethnic groups of tribes where the people are big in stature. One area which seems to have produced quite a few extremely large Indians is the Punjabi region, which is the region of land that has been shared and disputed by Pakistan and India for decades.

  • Dalip Singh Rana (aka The Great Khali from WWE) – Height: 7′ 2″
  • Sim Bhullar (Canada based) – Height: 7′ 4″ – 7′ 5″
  • Tanveer Bhullar (Canada based) – Height: 7′ 2″ – 7′ 3″
  • Naseer Soomro (aka Naseer Ahmaad Soomro) from Pakistan – Height: 7′ 8.9″
  • Ijaz Ahmed (aka Ajaz Ahmed) from Pakistan – Height: 7′ 10″
  • Satnam Singh Bhamara – Height: 7′ 0″ – 7′ 1″
  • Karan Singh (Mother is Shweatlana Singh who claims she is 7′ 2″ but is actually around 6′ 8″ – 6′ 10″) – Height: was already 4′ 5″ at the age of 2
  • Jitendra Singh – Height: Claims to be 8′ 2″ or 7′ 8″ but is probably closer to 7′ 7″
  • Aurangzeb Khan – Height: Claims he is 8′ 0″ but is probably closer to 7′ 6″
  • Azad Khan Masood – Height: 7′ 5″
  • Dharmendra Pratap Singh – Height: 7′ 5″

I am sure that out of a country of billion + there a a few giants, 7 feet plus. After looking at the height and growth of both East Asians and South Asians I would say that it seems that South asians are in general slightly taller than East Asians.

However, currently the numbers don’t agree with my assessment and prediction. From the Wikipedia article on average human height based on countries,

  • Average Height Of Males In India: 1.663 m (5 ft 5 1⁄2 in)
  • Average Height Of Females In India: 1.526 m (5 ft 0 in)
  • Average Height Of Males In China: 1.721 m (5 ft 8 in)
  • Average Height Of Females In China: 1.601 m (5 ft 3 in)

Also…

  • Average Height Of Males in Pakistan:  Pakistan 169,3 (159196336), 167,0 (159196336)
  • Average Height Of Females in Pakistan:
  • Average Height Of Males in Japan: 1.707 m (5 ft 7 in)
  • Average Height Of Females in Japan: 1.580 m (5 ft 2 in)

From comparing the actual numbers from Wikipedia, it actually shows that the average height of both males and females are shorter in India compared to its neighbor country China. However, I am proposing that the reason there is a 2.5 inch of height discrepancy is due to the living conditions of India. From the plight of malnutrition and vitamin deficiency that is so common in India, children develop stunted growth and end up shorter than other places.

It is not that South Asians are inheritantly shorter than their Northern neighbors, just that they are lacking the right conditions for it. According to the Wikipedia article on average GDP for different countries in the world,

  • Average GDP per Capita of China: 6000+ USD per year
  • Average GDP per Capita of India: 1500+ USD per year

If we then look at say Japan compared to Bangladesh or Pakistan, we see a huge difference in wealth and quality of lifestyle between these continental neighbors.

  • Average GDP per capita of Bangladesh: 700- 850+ USD per year
  • Average GDP per capita of Pakistan: 1200-1300+ USD per year
  • Average GDP per capita of Japan: 46500+ USD year

The huge wealth difference between say Bangladesh and Japan is insane, where the GDP for Japan is around 50X.

The living cost of these south asian countries are just so low, and the people are just so much poorer. I suspect that if the people of India and Pakistan was given the type of amount of food and nutrition to reach their real height potential, it would be slightly higher than the Chinese. and If one country can produce a 7′ 6″ idiopathically giant like Yao Ming, India should be able to produce its own healthy giant which has the body suitable to play basketball.

However the question then becomes, even if a person has the natural gifts like height, arm wingspan length, jumping ability, and coordination needed to play professional basketball, would they wish to try to play professional basketball at the global level to represent their country like Yao? I am not sure since India has never been a traditionally homogenous nation unlike say China.

For most of its history, the country of India was not a complete nation. The nation is so diverse with at least a dozen official languages and each region of India has its own culture, way of living, and customs. If a person was to try to represent India as the first Indian Basketball Superstar, it would be hard. There will be people who will be very proud that he represents them as a group, but they might start to associate more over the city or section of India he comes from.

I am reminded of the curious case of Jeremy Lin, who is a 2nd generation Taiwanese American and how after he became extremely famous last year over the phenomenon known as Lin-Sanity, all types of subsect Asian communities stated that he was representing them. It did not matter how he wanted to defined himself, as asian, taiwanese, chinese, american, but that other people who admired him started to find ways to associate themselves with him, whether it was true or not.

I would rather believe that the next Asian basketball superstar is more likely to be from the Philippines than India. It seems that Yao Ming agrees with me. For a long time, the two basketball powerhouses from the Asian continent has been just the Philippines and China. From the history of the FIBA Asia Championship, it seems that the two countries of China and Philippines have won the most championships compared to their asian counterparts.

At this point, I would love to see an Indian basketball player in the NBA but I don’t think that the people of the country have the passion for basketball at this time. It is just not as attractive as cricket for this current generation. I will wait for the indian basketball player superstar.