This is a story about a man who happens to be very tall. 

Like any man, he feels joy and pain. Unlike most men, he feels the joy and pain of being very tall.

How tall? Through the 1960s he played basketball at 7-foot-2. Knee replacements have brought him down an inch or two; the more recent one also brought him prolonged pain. 

“I don’t think it’s ever gonna heal,” said Ron Smith, 77. 

But there are indeed joys to being very tall. There are joyous, amazed strangers who approach him in the grocery store, as a colleague of mine did one day. The colleague excitedly reported back to me, and I agreed we should do a story about the tallest man in Colorado Springs.

At least this was our suspicion, that Smith was the tallest man in town. Smith shares the suspicion. “I have never met anybody anywhere taller than me,” he said.

He has not met all of the current Denver Nuggets, but if he did he would stand above all of them at least slightly (Nikola Jokić is listed at 6-11). A quick glance at Colorado’s collegiate rosters suggests Smith might not be the tallest man in the state ー CU Boulder lists an Italian freshman at 7-1 ー but it seems safe to say he is one of the tallest.

A man of Smith’s stature is rare, though it’s hard to say how rare. People before me who have wondered how many 7-footers are out there have popularly cited a 2011 Sports Illustrated article, which extrapolated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data and figured “no more than 70 American men are between the ages of 20 and 40 and at least 7 feet tall.” 

Anyway, was this really a story? Would Smith really want to talk to me about being very tall? He was, I recognized, just a man who happened to be very tall.

I met him at his wood-heated house where he lives alone, where the walls hang basketball honors and the ceiling hangs too low for him to fully raise his arms. 

He seemed happy to talk about being very tall. “I’ve been talking about being tall since I was 12!” 

He grew up in Pueblo and grew up fast. Before high school, he was already taller than his 6-4 dad. His mom was 5-11, the next in a line of tall Germans who learned valuable skills. 

“Thank God my mom was a good seamstress,” Smith said. She’d stitch two pairs of jeans together to fit her son’s legs and made other clothes.

“Plus he had a special bed made for him,” said a childhood friend, Richard Purcell. 

The family station wagon, however, was not exactly made for the 6-6 boy. Nor was the school. Smith struggled to fit his knees under his desk and under the cafeteria table. He learned to duck through doors ー often the hard way, as scars and bruises left their marks. 

“All I could see was the top of bobbling heads,” Smith said, recalling those classmates who would run freely ahead of him.

Running was not so easy for Smith, not while he kept growing and growing. 

“He was in a lot of pain,” Purcell said. “He held it in pretty good, but you could tell when you watched him run and stuff, it wasn’t any fun.” 

Purcell was the constant friend in a world that felt unfriendly. “I was in a world by myself,” Smith said. “They thought I was a freak.”

But soon he would be an asset like no other. 

He wasn’t always sporty; more than courts and fields he was happier around Lake Isabel and the surrounding forest west of Pueblo. But of course he caught the eye of the basketball coach at Centennial High. Now Smith stood 7-2. And that coach had the foresight to train the kid how to jump high and swat shots from midair, avoiding physical contact and fouls.

And jump high and block shots the kid did ー not so unlike Lew Alcindor, who was captivating the nation at UCLA.

“Seven-Foot Psycho,” read the headline of a Gazette Telegraph column in 1967, remarking on southern Colorado’s own anomaly.

Smith, indeed, was a sight to see. He was a dunking, shot-blocking sensation drawing triple defenders as well as reporters, photographers and fans from beyond Pueblo. 

Said Purcell’s wife, Suzi, who attended rival Central High: “The gym was always packed. It was unbelievable. They all wanted to see Smitty.” 

As did recruiters. Smith’s mailbox filled with scholarship offers. 

Though, not from the coach he admired most, John Wooden of UCLA; maybe there wasn’t room next to Alcindor, to be known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Smith would choose CU Boulder, where he hoped to face Alcindor and block that seemingly unblockable hook shot of his. That, too, was not meant to be. 

But Smith did meet another 7-footer with a similar hook shot. “I blocked his first three shots,” Smith said. 

Many more memories come back. They come back with every page he flips in a loaded, tattered scrapbook of articles and photos showing those packed gyms and that once-gangly boy who grew to be mighty, the pride of Pueblo and then the pride of Boulder. He’d be inducted into the Centennial High Hall of Fame in 2013, followed by the university honoring him as a “living legend” in 2019. 

Those plaques bring back memories, but not like the scrapbook Smith regularly consults. 

“At night, I dream about basketball,” he said. “So I go to this book to see what it was like and remember everything.” 

Some parts he tries to forget, like the injuries. They mounted and prevented him from a spot on the Denver Rockets, the pro team of the early ’70s. 

Smith had left Boulder without a degree. “I was terrible at math,” he said. “Haunts me to this day.”

He’d find work where he could, including at the mine in Leadville. He’d find love and get married. “That didn’t last very long,” he said. (A family of his own wasn’t meant to be. “I didn’t want any more 7-footers running around,” he said with a wry grin.)

Leadville would be another place of fond memories. There amid some of Colorado’s highest mountains, he got back to his first love: the outdoors. He’d hike to high-alpine lakes to fish and drive up rough, rugged roads to other views, refreshingly wide-open, unlike the cramped truck.

As for skiing: “I tried that in Leadville. Fell down and took forever to get back up.”

Like the ski slopes, the tight quarters of a mine weren’t ideal for a very tall man. Other work took him to warehouses, one for a medical supply company; he tossed needles at the ceiling out of boredom. He later oversaw a warehouse for Champion Windows. 

Said his former boss there and friend, Dave Smalley: “I threw away all the step ladders. Didn’t need them anymore.” 

It could be useful being very tall in the warehouse. It could be useful in the grocery store. “There’s always a little old lady looking up at something and can’t reach it,” Smith said. “The only problem is when I need something on the floor.” 

There are other problems on airplanes (he hasn’t flown in 30 years). There are problems at hotels (shower heads too low on the wall, toilets too low to the ground, beds too small). There are problems at restaurants (his knees tend to come up to the table). 

But Smalley has seen his friend light up at restaurants. “He’d say, ‘I bet they’ve never seen this,’ and we’d walk in and everybody looked up to him.” 

Some might ask to take a photo, as they often do at the grocery store. Not long ago a mother asked if he would take a photo with her kids. The other day a nurse asked for a photo. Smith is always happy to oblige. 

“He has a lot of fun with it,” Smalley said. 

But it seemed he was always happiest outside, away from people. That’s how it always seemed to his lifelong friends, Richard and Suzi Purcell. They’ve heard him talk about his favorite place: Colorado’s most remote wilderness, the Weminuche, seen in pictures hanging around his house. 

“It made him feel alive, you know?” Suzi said. “And it made him feel like he was needed, because he always had to be doing something.” 

He’s not getting outside anymore, not since the knee replacement. Being very tall comes with other consequences. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spoke publicly about this.

“I’ve got AFib, a heart valve problem. That’s where I learned about AFib, from him,” Smith said. “I’m on special drugs now to keep my heart pumping blood.” 

That’s part of being very tall ー part of a story not so unlike all of our stories, mixed with joy and pain on the winding way to purpose and belonging. 

I thanked Smith for sharing. I shook his hand that wrapped around mine and started walking away. 

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” he said. 

Didn’t I want a photo?