Our Giant

After an NBA career and starring movie role, 7-foot-7-inch Gheorghe Muresan is on top of the world at home with his family in Potomac

By Chris Vogel

At 7-foot-7, Potomac’s Gheorghe Muresan will always look up to the 5-foot-7 Billy Crystal for advice.

Nine years ago, Muresan starred alongside Crystal in the feature film “My Giant,” about a Hollywood agent who tries to make a movie star out of a Romanian giant. It was a plot the Romanian-born basketball player knew well; he had already come to fame by playing for the Washington Bullets, starring in a series of commercials and by being the tallest person to ever play in the NBA. His life had been a combination of good luck and hard work, but injuries were about to end his NBA career, forcing him to begin a new chapter in his life.

“I learned a lot from working with Billy,” Muresan, 36, says in a thick Romanian accent and a deep, slow baritone voice. “He told me two things that I will never forget. The first was, ‘When you work, work.’ The second was, ‘When you have your kids, enjoy them when they’re small, because they won’t be small forever, and when they leave the home, that’s it.’”

It is these two lessons that define Muresan today.

Learning to play the game

Gheorghe Dumitru Muresan was born on Valentine’s Day, 1971, in the rural farming village of Triteni in communist Romania. Known to his friends as “Ghitza,” which means “Little Gheorghe,” Muresan was the youngest of three children and the son of a brick-factory worker. Life was not easy and the Muresans were poor. To complicate matters, Muresan had a tumor on his pituitary gland, causing him to secrete an excess of growth hormone and making him unusually tall. It is a rare condition known as gigantism that, if left untreated, can lead to an early death. Both his parents, now deceased, were less than 6 feet tall. 

By the time Muresan was 15 years old, he was 6 feet 9 inches tall, and the local basketball coach couldn’t help but take notice. The problem was that Muresan didn’t know how to play the game.

“On my first team,” says Muresan, “I was not the worst; I was the worst of the worst.”

During his initial tryout, players had to pass a running test. Muresan says he fell flat on his face.

“I was in very bad shape,” he says, “but I like playing very much and those first couple of months, I tell you, I worked like a horse all day. I wanted to be proud of myself.”

Muresan would spend every spare moment working on his shot and learning how to move on the court. During school, students had a 25-minute break in the middle of the day, and his coach would walk to the playground and work on his game with Muresan.

“It was tough, but I don’t give up,” says Muresan. “And I don’t give up because I don’t want to show that I can’t do it. I don’t want to be embarrassed, and I don’t want my parents to be embarrassed. I didn’t do it to become a professional, but if I work hard, I can help the team win.”

Muresan did help his team win, and basketball soon took him to the University of Cluj (Babes-Bolyai University) in Romania. Although he did not graduate, he played for the Romanian National Team and then professionally in France before the Washington Bullets drafted him in 1993.

Muresan played with the Bullets for four years. He played two more years for the New Jersey Nets before a series of back injuries and subsequent surgeries forced him into early retirement after the 2000 season. Today, he still works for the Washington Wizards organization as a suite ambassador—he schmoozes with VIPs at all the home games.

“He’s a major fan favorite,” says Matt Williams, senior vice president of communications for the Wizards. “People can tell what a nice guy he is and he does a great job for us. A lot of players are standoffish and wait for people to come to them, but Gheorghe is great at going up to people and talking to them. Sure, he’s been telling the same jokes for more than 10 years, jokes like ‘You know who’s looking for you? Nobody.’ But as corny as that is, he just laughs and laughs and laughs, and you can’t help but laugh too. He really does love life every day.”

Though an eternal optimist, Muresan found retirement difficult at first. He would wake up every morning ready for practice, and then, realizing he did not have anywhere to go, slink back into bed depressed.

“I wish I could’ve played a little bit longer,” says Muresan, “but it was not happening. It hurt my back and my legs, and I didn’t look good on the court. But I did try.”

When Muresan walks, he lurches from side to side almost as if one leg is shorter than the other. It is painful to watch. From the torso up, he looks almost normal, but his legs are extremely thin and disproportionate for a man his size. He is, to say the least, top-heavy. He says that it does not hurt him to walk or run today, though he is so ginger and awkward, it’s hard to believe him.

“He definitely had a hard time adjusting after his playing days were over,” says Bill Brener of Great Falls, Va., one of Muresan’s closest friends. “But, he got over it, and he’s sublimating now by being part of the Wizards organization so he can stay part of the game.”

Says Muresan, “I just love being on the basketball court. When I’m playing, I can forget about everything and it’s so nice. I just focus, and everything else goes away.”

A wife and kids

Luckily, as his career was ending and a lifetime of dedicated, hard work was wrapping up, a new focus came into his life: children. “Just as Gheorghe was ending his time in the NBA,” says Muresan’s wife, Liliana, “the kids came and we suddenly were so busy. So it was the perfect timing.” Liliana grew up in a small farming village, much like Muresan’s, about 200 miles away from where Muresan was raised. Her mother, Tereza, 63, a former waitress, and father, Liviu, 65, a former truck driver, both still live there. The Muresans visit them every summer.

The Muresans have been married for 14 years, but have known each other for longer. They met during Gheorghe’s first year at university. They lived in the same dormitory. “We first became friends,” she says, “and then we became closer and closer.”

Says Muresan, “The first time I saw her in the hallway, I say hello, but she did not say hello back. So, we really met the second time I saw her.”

Liliana laughs, saying she does not remember that.

“My first impression was that he was really tall,” says the 6-foot-1 Liliana, “but so was I. But really soon, I just got used to it and he did not seem so tall to me anymore. He was so nice and caring. I remember that he was always gone with his team, and then I started to miss him. And that’s how it all began.”

The couple live in Potomac with their two sons, George, 9, and Victor, 6. Their home used to be the clubhouse for the Potomac Hunt Club, but today the three acres in the back yard are no longer used for a quick nip of sherry before the fox hunt; Muresan has transformed it into a child’s Valhalla.

There is a treehouse, a trampoline and a soccer pitch, and Muresan is building a basketball court. A stone walkway descends from the back porch into the middle of the well-manicured yard, where a built-in grill sits next to a wooden canopy above a pair of benches. 

There for his kids

Muresan is a hands-on father. He drives his two boys to their Montessori school every morning and when they get home, he plays soccer or dodge ball with them in the back yard. After helping them with their homework, he then reads to his children before putting them to bed.

Although they can afford almost any of life’s comforts, the Muresans have two strict rules for their boys: No TV and no computers. “When we moved from New Jersey back to Maryland in 2004, we did not have cable and it was wonderful how well George began to read,” Muresan says. “So we said, this is it, this is good. And reading helps you so much more than watching the TV anyways.”

A conversation with Muresan while his boys are around is nearly impossible. A big kid at heart, he just wants to play with them. He constantly gives them his attention, slapping them high-fives and taking their pictures with a camera phone.

Muresan even started a business so he could spend more time with his boys. In 2004, he launched the Giant Basketball Academy, a year-round program punctuated by a series of camps during the summer, dedicated to teaching basketball to children.

“My kids go to my camp,” he says, “but I pretend that they are not my kids during the camp, but I get to spend the time with them.”

Muresan’s view that spending time with his children is the “best investment I can do” evolved from his own childhood experiences.

Muresan grew up hardly ever seeing his father. As a factory worker, Muresan’s father frequently worked different shifts, sometimes leaving at 4:30 in the morning, sometimes at 8:30 at night, always taking a long bus ride to work from their small village.

“He never had time to spend with me,” says Muresan, “so I say to myself, ‘I have to spend more time with my kids.’ I want my kids to look back and say, ‘He taught me this and he taught me that.’ I want them to say that I was there for them.”

Acutely aware of leaving a legacy, Muresan believes part of his job as a father is to teach his boys the values that led to his success. Muresan prizes hard work—during his basketball career he was always the last to leave the practice court, and he overcame a lack of innate athleticism by putting in the extra hours.

“For them to be successful,” he says, “they have to go to school and work hard. Even if you are not talented but work hard, you will be successful. And whatever you do, you must be proud of it. If you are not proud, then there is more work for you to do so that you are proud.”

A public person who is happiest at home

For most people, it takes less than a minute to walk from the parking lot of Timpano Italian Chophouse on Rockville Pike through the front door of the restaurant. But for Muresan, it is a lengthy exercise in public relations.

“Hey Gheorghe!” shouts a man from behind the wheel of a red sports car, just as Muresan is exiting his SUV.

“Hi there,” replies a smiling Muresan.

“What’s going on big guy?” says another man walking through the parking lot.

“Hi, how are you?” Muresan says, shaking his hand.

“How tall are you, man?” asks a third fellow, who is smoking a cigarette outside the restaurant.

In all, seven people, including the wait staff, say hello to Montgomery County’s resident giant before he, rather uncomfortably, takes a seat in a corner booth and orders hot tea in “the largest mug you have, please.” 

When asked what it is like to be bombarded all the time by strangers, he says, “I’ve lived this way for such a long time, I don’t know what it is for it to be any different. When people ask me, ‘What is it like to be 7-foot-7?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, what is it like to be 6-foot?’ This is all I know.”

Muresan comes across as a natural people person, seducing those around him into his glass-is-half-full and deep, booming laugh-out-loud world. He is always reaching out to people, patting them on the shoulder or shaking their hand with his oversized fleshy paw. It is as if he is a P.R. savant. This makes sense because, after all, he makes much of his living these days by simply being himself, chatting with fans, during Wizards games. Though it’s been about 10 years since he graced the airwaves with national television commercials for Snickers candy bars and ESPN, he still does some TV work, most recently a public service announcement against drunken driving.

While Muresan clearly revels in his public role, he deliberately spends most of his time out of the public eye—at home with his family. He doesn’t like going out to eat, for example. He says he dines at restaurants no more than 10 times a year.

“On my birthday, I never have a party where I invite over lots of people,” he says. “I don’t have a lot of friends. I just like a cake and my family.”

His close friend, Brener, says the Muresan that the public sees is just one part of the complex man. “He is extroverted in the sense that he’s forthcoming, loves people and is bubbly,” Brener says, “but at the same time he’s quite shy. I know it sounds like a contradiction, but with him it’s not.”

Muresan is anything but flashy. He is not into cars—he drives a Toyota SUV. According to Brener, the only time Muresan ever bought something expensive was when he was on the road with the Bullets as a player and returned with a $1,000 pair of shoes, “and man, did his wife let him have it.”

As a child growing up in Romania, “I did not feel like we did not have much money,” Muresan says. “I never felt poor or that my parents could not give me the things I needed. And it doesn’t feel any different now.”

Muresan went from Romania to France to the U.S. He says the biggest difference was that in America, everything is larger, “from the cars to the homes to the meals, everything.” When he and Liliana first came to the U.S., they rented a one-bedroom town home in Crofton and thought it was huge. Now of course, they live in a large Potomac home. “It’s amazing how you get used to things,” says Liliana.

Friends and colleagues say Muresan is also very bright, although his slow speech and somewhat broken English sometimes give people another impression. “It was amazing how quickly Gheorghe adapted to the NBA and other parts of being here in the U.S.,” says Williams of the Wizards. “We initially had an interpreter for him behind the bench, but he very quickly learned English. He is anything but slow.”

Muresan constantly demands fresh stimuli and cannot abide repetition. When driving, he listens to the news and avoids music stations because they play the same songs over and over. He says he cannot watch the same movie twice in one year.

“If you don’t move on, you stay stagnant,” he says. “And if you’re stagnant, you’re not learning.”

However, Brener says Muresan does have a naive streak. “For example, he’s got these great floor seats for the Wizards games and people come up to him all the time and talk to him. One time, this guy, he looked like some kinda hippie, an old guy, he comes up and wants Gheorghe’s e-mail. I said, ‘You can’t give your e-mail out to all these weirdos,’ and he says, ‘Oh, it’s all right.’

“Anybody with a story, like ‘I need an operation,’ can snag a few bucks from him,” says Brener. “I think Gheorghe is very trusting, and I try to talk to him about that. But, he’s much better than he used to be.”

The topic nobody talks about          

While Muresan is as trusting and open as anyone, the one topic his friends find difficult to talk with him about is his gigantism. “I don’t want to talk to him about it,” says Brener. “It would be unpleasant both for me and for him to talk about that.”

Williams of the Wizards also says he has never spoken to Muresan about it.

Gigantism is a rare pituitary gland condition possessed by less than one child in a million throughout the world. Unfortunately, most people who have gigantism do not live past middle age, if they don’t have access to medication.

Muresan was born with a benign tumor on his pituitary gland, causing excessive secretion of growth hormone into his body. Muresan says he became aware of the tumor when he was 15 years old and that doctors could have treated him in Romania by removing the tumor, but the medical expertise to do so did not exist there at the time. It was not until Muresan was in his early 20s, playing basketball professionally in France, that doctors removed all but a tiny piece of the tumor.

Other famous people who have had the condition include actors Matthew McGrory, most famous for his role in the movie “Big Fish,” Carel Struycken, who played “Lurch” in the Addams Family movies and professional wrestler Andre the Giant.

Today, Muresan takes medication and gives himself an injection every day to control the release of growth hormone. He will have to do so for the rest of his life.

“I don’t feel like I’m sick,” Muresan says, “and my health is good. The doctors say that if I take care of myself, don’t get overweight and take the medication, I can live to be old age. [Dying] is not something I worry about.”

Muresan does not seem uncomfortable talking about his condition, but after a few minutes, excuses himself to make a cup of tea.

“Although I haven’t talked to him, I have talked to Gheorghe’s wife about it,” says Brener. “I’ve said, ‘You’ve got to ring the cash register now because I don’t know how much time Gheorghe has and you’ve got to take care of these kids.’”

When asked whether or not she worries about her husband dying, Liliana says, “You just don’t know. You don’t even want to.”

Dr. Mary Lee Vance, an endocrinologist and a professor at University of Virginia, says there was no good treatment for gigantism until about 15 years ago. “…[T]oday, if you are getting adequate treatment, you should have a normal life expectancy and avoid the various complications,” which can include enlargement of the heart or bones, high blood pressure and diabetes, says Vance.

Without treatment, there is on average a 10-year decrease in life expectancy, Vance says. However, there is not much literature on gigantism because it is so rare. Gigantism is when you have the growth before puberty; acromegaly, which is slightly more common, is when the growth happens as an adult. Vance has 200 patients with acromegaly, only two of whom have gigantism.

 Muresan says he is getting good treatment, and Muresan and his family live as they always have, in Gheorghe’s warm embrace and cocoon of optimism. They love their home in Potomac and plan on staying. Life is simple. Far away from the NBA’s spotlight or the glitzy world of Hollywood, Muresan wakes up every morning, takes his medication and then drives his boys to school. During the day in the summer and after school during the rest of the time, he works hard at his basketball academy teaching young players the fundamentals of the game.

Marina Reichhart-Erickson of Sandy Spring has sent her son, Hartley, 14, to Muresan’s camp. “I have three children and I’ve seen a lot of coaching and some are very undesirable,” she says. “But Gheorghe is at the top of my list of good coaches because of the way he treats children and how positive and encouraging he is. My son said he is inspirational. Gheorghe really is the gentle giant.”

It’s been six years since Muresan spoke with Crystal—and nine years since the two of them palled around in Hollywood during the filming of “My Giant.” But

Billy Crystal’s words still rumble around in his head.

“Billy is out there, and I am here,” says Muresan, “but I remember what he said. I’ve been very lucky, but I’ve also worked very hard and earned my success. I have the best job in the world with the Wizards and I get to be with my kids. That’s my number one, right now. I want to be the best father I can be before they grow up and go away.”

Chris Vogel is a freelance writer who lives in Houston, Texas.