Manute Bol Back in U.S. -- as a Refugee

Manute Bol lopes across the lawn toward his house, covering the distance in a few giant strides.

At 42, Bol’s joints ache from rheumatism, but he still carries his 7-foot-7 frame erect and proud. His face is a little fuller than it was during his years in the NBA, when his celebrity and singular ability to block shots earned him millions.

The money is gone. The house he lives in is sparsely furnished; the furniture, slightly ragged. The rent is paid by Catholic Charities, a group that helps political refugees. That’s what Bol is now.

He moved here with his wife, son and half-sister a few months ago, having finally made the painful decision to leave the Sudanese homeland that he loved but could not find a place in anymore. He ended up making a daring escape, complicated by the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Bol never forgot Sudan during the years of wealth and fame. He couldn’t, he says.

That cost him nearly everything.

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Manute Bol was born in Turalie, a remote village in the southern part of Sudan, a nation where, during the last 19 years, civil war has left 2 million people dead. Most casualties have been in the south, where Christian and animist rebels battle a northern Islamic government, based in Khartoum.

Southern Sudan is the home of the Dinkas, the tallest people in the world and Bol’s tribe. Bol was the tallest man ever to play in the NBA, until Gheorghe Muresan, a Romanian with a pituitary gland condition, beat him out by a few centimeters.

Bol’s grandfather, Bol Chol, reputed to be 7-feet-10, was a powerful chieftain and had 40 wives. Bol’s father, Madut Bol, was only 6-feet-8 but had seven wives and a large cattle herd -- a sign of great wealth. His second wife, Okwok, was 6-feet-10. After having stillborn twins twice, she gave birth to Manute, whose name means “blessing from God.”

Unlike his city-dwelling cousins, Bol never went to school. Instead, he herded goats and cattle.

When he was 15, at the suggestion of relatives, he gave basketball a try. Bol walked three days from his village to join his first team.

An American college basketball coach, in Sudan for a summer, learned of the tall athlete and soon arranged for Bol and a translator friend to fly to the United States in 1982. Bol wound up at the University of Bridgeport.

Games at the small Connecticut school’s 1,800-seat gymnasium suddenly became packed, frenzied events.

Early on, Bol blocked 15 shots a game and averaged 22.5 points. He made Division II All-American.

After just a year at Bridgeport, Bol joined the Rhode Island Gulls, a pro team in the United States Basketball League. A few months later, he was picked up by the Washington Bullets in the NBA draft.

Many speculated that Bol’s 205-pound frame couldn’t take the wear-and-tear of the NBA. But Bol ran away with the league title in blocked shots with 397 in 1985, the second highest total in league history.

During the next 10 years, Bol cycled through four different teams, the Bullets, the Golden State Warriors, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Miami Heat.

Bol was essentially a one-dimensional player, averaging just 2.6 points and 4.2 rebounds a game, but he lived the NBA high life, making $1.6 million a year at one point.

His loopy sense of humor and accented trash talking, full of hilarious malapropisms, made him popular among his teammates. But he remained a stranger in his adopted land.

A knee injury in 1994 relegated Bol briefly to the Continental Basketball Assn. and then to a league in Italy. It seemed he would just retire and enjoy his earnings.

But his heart was still in Sudan.

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Bol visited his native country regularly -- nearly every summer during his NBA career.

On one of his early trips, he met and married his first wife, Atong, then 18, a southern Sudanese refugee.

Starting in 1991, Bol began making visits to southern Sudanese refugee camps. Many of Bol’s relatives were leaders in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the rebel movement.

He became an important backer of the rebels, contributing an estimated $3.5 million. Bol and his cousin Ed Bona, a former college basketball player at Fordham, met with dozens of members of Congress, warning of Muslim extremists and begging for American intervention.

Hope came in 1996, when a group of southern Sudanese split from the SPLA to sign a cease-fire with the government. A leader of the splinter group invited Bol to join a government delegation in talks with the SPLA in Kenya.

Despite accusations of betrayal, Bol flew to Nairobi.

Two weeks later, the talks collapsed.

Bol returned to Khartoum, where the government, promising more talks later, offered him a post as minister of sport. Their offer was conditional, however. He would need to become a Muslim first. A Christian since childhood, Bol refused.

As time passed with no progress toward peace, Bol began to feel used. On visits to refugee camps, he told his people that there was still hope, even though he didn’t think so.

“I have to say it for my safety,” he says.

A lone bright spot was his second marriage, to Ajok, a tall 21-year-old. (Bol’s first marriage had soured. Atong later remarried and moved to New Jersey with their four children.) Bol met Ajok through her father, an SPLA leader. In the Dinka tradition, Bol paid 150 cows for her. Soon, they had a son, Bol Manute.

In August 1998, Bol was sitting on his roof in Khartoum to escape the heat when an explosion half a mile away lighted up the night sky, followed by 15 to 20 more.

President Clinton had ordered the cruise missile strike on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant suspected of aiding the manufacture of chemical weapons. It was retaliation for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, linked by U.S. officials to Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.

Worried for his family’s safety, the attack was a turning point for Bol. The government accused him of being a spy, he says.

He tried to leave in 1999 but the government stopped him. His money dwindled as he supported himself and as many as 20 relatives.

On his second attempt in 2001, Bol marched to the immigration office and demanded an exit visa. An officer told him to come back with a bribe.

Bol peddled his furniture. Meanwhile, in Connecticut, friends swung into action, buying plane tickets in London and secretly shipping them to Bol via a travel agent in Khartoum.

In July 2001, Bol, his wife, son and half-sister, Achuil, then 9, flew to Cairo, with the idea of going on to the United States.

In Egypt, U.S. consulate officials explained he needed to apply for refugee status if he wanted to bring his entire family. Bol settled in to wait.

Then came Sept. 11. Bol thought of the warnings he’d given to members of Congress on Islamic extremism. It wasn’t until March 7, nearly six months after his arrival, that Bol’s family finally departed, catching flights that brought them to Hartford.

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Today, friends are shopping around a screenplay on Bol’s life in two very different worlds.

He has made a few public appearances, for small fees, and plans to petition the NBA to give him an advance on his NBA pension, roughly $24,000 a year.

His height remains an access pass -- and his strange celebrity was underscored in one especially strange event.

Fox TV’s Celebrity Boxing show invited him to fight another oversized athlete from an earlier era, William “The Refrigerator” Perry.

Bol agreed to the bout, so long as Fox agreed to air a toll-free number for the Ring True Foundation, a West Hartford-based charity he set up to benefit southern Sudanese children. He donated his $35,000 fight fee to the group.

Bol’s trainer told him to keep his distance from Perry, a former NFL lineman. But Bol went after him -- and won the fight.

Manute Bol doesn’t mind being a spectacle, he says, as long as it means helping his people.

Though relieved to be out of Sudan now, he still dreams of returning home. His ideal retirement would be split between the countries he’s called home.

“I want my country to be like this someday,” he says. “This is my dream.”

That way, he could settle down on a farm and go back to herding cows.