I remember 12-year old BoiseBlue watching Jazz games back in the late 80's and thinking "Wait - I COULD BE THAT GUY!!!!!!" Not only did he look like a Deacon, but he didn't dunk, rarely did anything in a game that made you say "wow, that was athletic", and even his passes were generally very "fundamental" rather than flashy. As a kid, I totally believed that if I could just grow up to be 6'1", I could absolutely make the NBA like John Stockton.

I remember a couple of years later reading an article in Sports Illustrated article about how in order to make the NBA you basically needed to be "freakish" in some aspect - like freakishly tall, or freakishly athletic. In the article they singled out Stockton and the fact that he had these abnormally large hands - like, basically his hands were the size of a 7-foot guy, and I was like "Oh, well there goes that plan".

Ha ha. Kids are dumb.