Game 50: Chuck Nevitt - Grandpa's Pound Cake
If you sat across a dining room table from Chuck Nevitt, you’d never expect the polite, unassuming IT analyst to be a retired NBA player. But once he left the table, you’d know right away. At 7’5”, Nevitt was one of the tallest people to ever play in the NBA. And by beating Kareem Abdul-Jabbar by three inches, Nevitt is easily the tallest player to ever suit up for the purple and gold. But he wasn’t the only giant to wow crowds at The Forum and Staples Center. Tied for 2nd place with Kareem was the towering Icelandic center Pétur Guðmundsson. And tied at 3rd place with Shaq, Andrew Byum, Wilt Chamberlain, Vlade Divac, and Elmore Smith was Sam Bowie, the notorious draft bust who was taken over Michael Jordan.
Chuck Nevitt. Pétur Guðmundsson. Sam Bowie. Who were these men cursed with a height that forced them into playing basketball for a living? Let’s find out.
Chuck Nevitt
Over a discontinuous 11 year career, Chuck Nevitt played for the Rockets, Pistons, Bulls, Spurs, and Lakers. Known as the Human Victory Cigar, Nevitt never started a game and put up tiny numbers (1.6 points / 1.5 rebounds) off the bench, usually when his team had the lead. For much of his career, Nevitt’s main job was to defend Abdul-Jabbar and Hakeem Olajuwan in practice. "My job was preparing the other guys. And I was fine with that,” he told Sports Illustrated for their annual Where Are They Now? issue. I guess it was more convenient than the alternative of having an assistant coach sway a ladder back and forth.
Nevitt found himself on the championship 1984-1985 Lakers when Jamaal Wilkes suffered a season ending knee injury in February. To be fair to Nevitt, the big man earned his ring that year with 6 blocks and 4 steals in the 7 playoff games he played for the Lakers team responsible for the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers Are Cookin’ Family Cookbook. Nevitt stayed with the Lakers, sort of, the following season when his agent negotiated an unusual deal: Nevitt would practice with Kareem, as well as sell tickets at the local mall, and if somebody went down with an injury, they’d sign the big man. Nevitt only played 4 games with the Lakers that year but did book an audition for Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School during his time in Hollywood.
The gentle giant had a great sense of humor about his life as a disposable post-up practice dummy. The “folk hero” who drove a car with the license plate 7 FT 5 and who once got a smooch from Morganna the Kissing Bandit was known for being one of the nicest, funniest guys on every team he played on. Even when he was fired, he ended up taking on the emotional labor of his ex-teammates who came to brighten up his lonely hotel room. According to teammate Mitch Kupchuk: "I remember the day he was cut in Portland. Kurt Rambis and Ronnie Lester and some other guys and I went up to his room to make sure he was O.K. We went up there to cheer him up, and pretty soon he was the one cheering us up.”
After retiring for good, the former NC State Wolfpack and his family moved back to North Carolina where he works as an IT analyst for a telecom company. Whether on a basketball court or in a windowless room surrounded by computers, Nevitt remains the nicest guy in the building. For proof, check out this YouTube comment on a video of Nevitt shooting one of the ugliest skyhooks you’ll ever seen.
Pétur Guðmundsson
The first and still only Icelander to play in the NBA, Pétur Guðmundsson grew to 6’0” by the age of 12 and didn’t stop growing. Four years later, a chance meeting with longtime University of Washington head coach Marv Harshman led to the talented young Icelander moving to Seattle, WA to jumpstart his professional basketball career. After three years at UW where he averaged only 6.7 points / 1.1 blocks / 4.3 rebounds, Guðmundsson returned to Europe to improve his game before entering the 1981 NBA draft.
Guðmundsson stayed in the Pacific Northwest after the Portland Trail Blazers drafted him in the 3rd round, but only lasted a season before getting cut. That led to another stint internationally before he returned to America to play in the Continental Basketball League. He impressed the Lakers enough -- or rather, they badly needed a huge body and Chuck Nevitt was unavailable -- to sign with the Lakers for the second half of the 1986-1987 season. The Lakers brought him back on a two-year extension, but a slipped disc during training camp led to him never playing a game with the team. After a stint with the Spurs, Nevitt went back to Europe again and then made another NBA comeback attempt with the Lakers, until an Achilles injury ended his playing career for good.
After retiring, Guðmundsson returned to his native Iceland for a brief coaching career. But in 2005, he returned to Seattle to finish his degree and now works as a hearing aid specialist for a company called Miracle Ear. Not only is he on Facebook with the handle of /SevenFoot2, the big man is also a regular LinkedIn poster and commentator. Weird!
Sam Bowie
The last decade was much kinder to Sam Bowie. Growing up, Bowie was synonymous with the pejorative BUST, a regular on every “Worst Draft Picks” or “Worst Sports Decision” docu-series aired on ESPN and Fox Sports or written about in nascent blogs of the early 2000s. But by the 2010s, retrospectives about the 1984 NBA Draft -- the Houston Rockets took Hakeem Olajuwon at #1, the Portland Trail Blazers took Bowie at #2, and the Chicago Bulls took Michael Jordan with #3 -- finally softened on Bowie give the circumstances, his string of bad luck, and the era he played in. The Blazers didn’t blow their pick by skipping on Jordan, they already had Clyde Drexler and needed a center. And it wasn’t Bowie’s fault he broke both legs in consecutive years, but it definitely was the fault of the training staff for allowing him to return too early. These days, with examples like Bowie and his Portland draft bust successor Greg Oden, teams are much likier to protect their young players (and the millions invested in them) by letting them sit out full seasons.
By the time he joined the Lakers in 1992, Bowie had resurrected his career with the New Jersey Nets. After being traded to NJ in 1989, Bowie put up respectable numbers and four mostly injury-free seasons as the team’s starter. But when he was traded to the Lakers, his old injuries returned, preventing him from backing up Vlade Divac with any regularity. When his contract was up after two years in Los Angeles, Bowie called it a career. He moved back to his old college town Lexington, KY and now devotes his life to his second love: owning and training harness racing horses. Also very weird!
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Grandpa’s Pound Cake
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup shortening
2 tablespoons white corn syrup
1 tablespoon vanilla
Granulated sugar
3 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons lemon extract
5 eggs
Confectioners’ sugar
In large bowl, mix together flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Add shortening and mix thoroughly until mixture resembles cornmeal. In a separate bowl mix milk and corn syrup, until corn syrup is blended completely into milk. Add milk mixture to flour mixture. Add vanilla and lemon extract. One at a time, add eggs, mixing thoroughly before adding the next egg. Pour all into greased and floured bundt pan. Bake in preheated oven at 350 degrees for about 1 hour. Remove from oven, let cool 5 minutes, turn out onto wax paper that has been sprinkled with granulated sugar so that bottom of cakes rests on the sugar. Cool completely, then sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar.
This had all the makings of a Goldstein and Gasol disaster.
I borrowed a bundt cake pan from my mom, which is weird because I don’t recall her ever baking any cakes, let alone a bundt cake. Bundt cake is goyish. My sister went through a lengthy baking period in her teens, but this pan was almost as old as she and I combined. It had to be from the 1960s. It was also last cleaned in the 1960s. After a normal sponging, I noticed there was grime EVERYWHERE. Not just normal grime, set in from DECADES of sitting on top of a fridge type grime. Dust and oil mixed together in an unholy bond. I tried every internet remedy and nothing worked. The only thing that could remove the grime was my fingernail and I didn’t feel like spending the next 72 hours scraping it one nail at a time.
So I turned to the deep disposable aluminum trays I bought for Jerry Buss’ 7 layer slam dunk dip. But how do cakes bake in those thin aluminium pans compared to a real hard metal cake pan? Inconclusive, according to the internet. Some sites said it didn’t matter, but I don’t believe that. It just doesn’t make any sense. So after placing the deep tray with cake batter on top of a baking sheet, I set my timer to 45 minutes instead of an hour just to be safe. I am bad at science, but aluminium trays are not the same as hard metal trays in conducting heat. Is conducting the right word? I am bad at science.
After 45 minutes, the cake was not done. After 60 minutes, I was still getting some cake batter on the ol’ trust cake tester, a toothpick. But nearly 75 minutes later, I had a perfect pound cake. Slightly hard on the outside crust, moist in the middle, and decorated, if I can just brag for one second, perfectly with a sprinkling of powdered sugar.
If any idiot out there decides to do their own Goldstein and Gasol in the future, make sure to sparse out your cake bakes. Even one week in between cakes is not enough time without feeling guilty about throwing the leftovers away.
