Big Enough In The Land Of Giants As The Smallest Man In History Of Nba, Bogues Gives Meaning To `Competitive’

In the den of their splendid suburban home, the one distinguished by, among other items, an outdoor basketball court done in teal and purple, the colors of the Charlotte Hornets, two short guys were conducting a television interview - a mock television interview, that is. The two short guys were father and son.

The subject of the interview was Tyrone Bogues Sr., known universally as Muggsy, who is 30 years old and stands 5 feet 3 inches tall. He is the speedy, stocky, starting point guard for the Hornets, the team’s most valuable player last year and the shortest player in the history of the National Basketball Association.

The interviewer was his son, Tyrone Jr., age 3, who comes about up to his father’s hip and is the shortest person in the Bogues household.

In the audience were his sister, 8-year-old Brittney, and their mother, Kim Bogues.

“Daddy,” said Ty Jr., holding up a microphone, “Alonzo Mourning is this big” - Ty Jr. held his hand over his head - “and you are this big.” He dropped his hand to his knee. “Alonzo Mourning can dunk the basketball and you can’t. Why’s that?”

“Why’s that?” asked the startled father. “What kind of interview is this? What show am I on, anyway? I’m leaving!”

All this drew a laugh from everyone but the interviewer, who still waited, microphone in hand, for the answer.

And Muggsy gave it. “Two is two,” he said.

“What?” Ty Jr. asked

“It doesn’t matter how you do something,” Muggsy said. “The only thing that matters is what you do. And a basket counts for two points any way it goes in.”

And there in the few moments of this interview, the life of Muggsy Bogues passed before him. Every day of his life, he has said, he has to prove himself over again. Every day of his life, he has to demonstrate that someone his size can accomplish the improbable. And every day of his life, he confronts and ultimately confounds his critics, whether they are in the press, on the basketball court, or, even, in his den.

What perhaps went unnoticed at the moment, however, was the luxurious setting, the spacious contemporary house tucked away in the green and hilly and quiet suburb.

That Muggsy Bogues has arrived where he has, a significant member of one of basketball’s best teams, at his height and at his salary - in his seventh NBA season he recently signed an extension for five years at a total of $7.5 million - is spectacular.

“We feed off his energy,” Larry Johnson has said.

“They’ve got the two horses,” said Gary St. Jean, the coach of the Sacramento Kings, referring to Mourning and Johnson, “but Muggsy drives the wagon. He feeds ‘em the oats.”

“It’s hard for people to appreciate just how much a little guy contributes - until you’re actually on the court playing with him or against him,” said Spud Webb, who, at 5-7 and the point guard of the Kings, knows something about the topic. “And Muggsy is a spark on offense and a real pest on defense. There is no higher compliment.”

But where Bogues is today from where he came is at least as remarkable as his basketball accomplishments.

He grew up in the tough Lafayette housing projects of Baltimore, where he once saw a man beaten to death with a baseball bat, another stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick, where gun shots regularly rang out, where he himself was shot in the arm and back when he was 5, where he wouldn’t take the elevator in his building because he never knew who might have him trapped there, walking up the 10 flights of stairs instead to the family’s modest apartment.

He avoided drugs and crime and gangs, the way to big money and even some stature in the neighborhood. “All it would take was about two seconds to get in trouble, or get killed,” Bogues said.

He avoided it for several reasons, one of them being that his father Richard had been sentenced to prison for 20 years for armed robbery, had also been a drug dealer and addict, and was a model for Bogues in what not to do.

Muggsy had great ambivalence about his father - as he does about his old neighborhood - and eventually became friends with him, visiting him in prison and corresponding with him when he was in college (“Take your shots,” the father urged him. “I see you on television and you’re passing more than you have to.”). When his father died in 1993, he said at his funeral, “He wasn’t the perfect father, and even though he was a person of the streets, he never let his family go without.”

Muggsy avoided drugs and crime and gangs because his mother Elaine held the family - Muggsy, two older brothers and a sister - together. She went on welfare when her husband went to prison, but decided that she could not continue in that fashion, earned a high-school equivalency diploma at night, and worked as a secretary in non-profit organizations. “I was able to put food on the table and clothes on my kids’ backs,” she said. “I always bought for them first. I always thought that if I was clean, I didn’t have to have a lot of dresses.”

“My mom always brought home a present once a week for all of us,” Bogues recalled. “We never felt like we ever needed anything. We never felt poor. So I never felt I had to go out and do something wrong to get money.”

And it was his mother who consoled him when he came home crying that he wanted to be taller. “You’ll do fine, Ty,” she said gently. “God doesn’t make mistakes.”

He avoided drugs and crime and gangs, too, because of basketball. “I loved the game,” he said. “I loved it from the start. I was always with a basketball. I’d even dribble a basketball when I’d throw out the trash - and I got so that I could do it without spilling the trash.”

It was his basketball play that gave him stature.

“The first time I ever saw him was when we were about 11 years old,” said David Wingate, a Hornets’ teammate and a high school teammate at Dunbar as well. “It was a recreational league, and I looked at this guy who was so little and thought, `What’s he doing here?’ But then the game started and he was so fast you needed radar to detect him.” His nickname is derived from the way neighborhood players described his intense defense as “mugging” his man.

And it was the closeness of his family and his basketball and neighborhood friends, especially the 6-7 Reggie Williams - “We called each other `The Big Fella’ and “The Little Fella’ ” recalls Bogues - that was so important to him.

“What drives him,” said his wife Kim “is when people say he can’t do something because he’s too short. He thinks to himself, `Oh yeah?’ He’s been that way all his life.”

“If there is one word to describe Muggsy for me,” said Hornets teammate Joe Wolf, who also played against him in college, “that word is competitive.”

Bogues went from the most valuable player in the rec leagues to the most valuable player on his undefeated high school team in 1983 - which was chosen No.1 in the nation, considered among the best high school teams ever and included future pro stars Wingate, Williams and Reggie Lewis.

From there he became the most valuable player at Wake Forest. He was the Washington Bullets’ firstround draft pick (and 12th pick overall) in 1987, but was given little playing time and, as he recalled, suffered a loss of confidence for one of the first times in his basketball life.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance - you’ll make it,” Moses Malone, a teammate, told him often. How was it that a 7-foot player could be so encouraging? “Because he was knowledgeable about basketball,” Bogues says.

But he didn’t get his chance with the Bullets. They allowed him to go in the expansion draft, where he was picked up by Charlotte. In his first year there, the coach, Dick Harter, felt that Bogues was too small to be a regular, but that he could provide impetus for a short spurt off the bench.

“I never understood this,” Bogues said, “because every time I was in the game, the team picked up. If I could do it for short spurts, why not give me a chance to do it for longer spurts?”

Harter was dismissed after that season and Gene Littles took over. He, and his current successor, Allan Bristow, put Bogues in the starting lineup, where he has stayed. Twice he has been the team’s MVP; he is shooting about 50 percent from the floor and about 90 percent - third in the league - in free throws.

Most important for a point guard, he is one of the league’s consistent leaders in assists and steals. His ratio of assists to turnovers is the best of anyone’s - six assists for every turnover.

He sees himself as a possible inspiration to others - some may call it a role model - and is content to fit that mold.

“I’m a living example of not giving up,” he said. In fact, a recently released book he has written with David Levine is called “In the Land of Giants” (Little, Brown & Co.).

Every summer he returns to his old Baltimore neighborhood to conduct clinics related to his program, “Reading and Roundball.”

Muggsy tells the kids: “Give yourself a chance. Now, everyone can’t play basketball. But find something you’re interested in. I guarantee you - if you want it, you can get it. Don’t close the door on yourself.”

In the locker room, Bogues puts on his uniform and, in customary baggy shorts, leaves for the court, for the land of giants, as great a giant, in his fashion, as any of them.