NBA Players' Fathers' Heights

Yao Ming (7'6) parents:

His dad is 6'7.
His mom is 6'3.

 

Lebron doesn't know who his dad was, but some random dude came out a couple years back claiming to be his father. The guy was 6'8, and was an athlete in college. He somewhat resembled Lebron, but everyone denied it.

 

Spudd Webb's parents are 4'8 and 4'2. I don't know where he got his height.

 

Yeah it runs in the family.

For example all 5 of Rick Barry's sons from different women are tall. Rick is 6'7" and Brent is 6'7" and Jon is 6'5" Pat Ewing jr is 6'8, Pat himself was about 6'10" Bill Walton and his sons. There's a lot of cases:

There's a strong correlation to your parents but also some important factors:

1) Height is most closely correlated to nutrition and general health. Even if you have tall genes if you dont eat enough during your growth periods or are otherwise unhealthy you wont be tall. As a generalization the healthiest populations are the tallest.. for example in the 20th century rural Americans were taller than Europeans who lived in polluted cities and had inferior diets. According to records from the late 1800s whites were taller than blacks (who largely lived subsistence lives) and American Plains Indians were the tallest people in the world. Today Americans (who have poorer health care and diet) are shorter than Northern Europeans by like 4 inches and Asians in developed countries like Koreans average the same height as white Americans. Obviously this isn't a concern for NBA players since their kids will have enough to eat and health care but might explain some NBA player's father is shorter if he grew up poor on government cheese or elsewise didn't have proper care in his own youth.

2) You get half your DNA from your mom. You get a quarter from your grandparents etc. Not all your genetic lineage is visible to the eye. You might have taller genes even if your parents are shorter

3) There's built in randomness to genetics. Even if your brothers and dad are tall you could be shorter. Evolutionarily randomness is built into how genes manifest. Even identical twins have small differences even though they started out with identical DNA. If you had a do over, even given your identical DNA depending on developmental stuff you could be an inch or two taller or shorter than you are today.

4) Given all that, if you're on the very end of the bell curve like Yao Ming a lot of things had to go right for you to be such a genetic freak. You'll probably have tall kids but it's unlikely even given the genes your kids will hit all the random jackpots and be as tall. Ralph Sampson's son is about 6'10" which obviously is not as tall as Sampson.

 

That's interesting to know.

I had a buddy when I was around 3rd grade and he came from a really poor family, this was in a developing country. I guess poor there is worlds apart than poor in the states. He was really malnourished. At one point I didn't see him for months and when I finally saw him, he was at least a foot shorter. Mind you this was just a few months (a lot less than a year) so I couldn't have grown that much, if at all. I was really confused for years because I didn't know anyone could shrink. He was shorter, skinnier, and darker.

Was I imagining things? Did I grow that much or did he really shrink? I'm 5'7 now so I couldn't have grown that much in 3rd grade. He was taller than I was before, and then he got short.

 

It's partially my own hypothesis, partially the paleontogical studies that were quoted in my readings on the Paleo Diet, but I bet that there's a direct correlation between the amount of meat that group of people eat, and the height of that group. American Plains Indians often starved, but when they did eat, they ate mostly meat. They're still big people, so it's partially genetic, but I'm guessing that eating bison was a lot better for them than their corn-eating cousins.

 

Weren't Abdul-Jabbar's parents both under 6'-- maybe even well under.

 

I don't know if this counts, but Jeremy Lin is 6'3'' and both of his parents are only 5'6''.