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2014 and a wide variety of national schools offered him scholarships before he decided in November to not sign with Wake Forest and inked with Purdue instead. Haas stands out on the hardwood just by, well, standing. But that's true of every phase of life for a young person who's learned to fold up like origami to squeeze into coach seating on airplanes, in the rare event a fellow passenger doesn't volunteer up their bulkhead seat out of common decency. "Usually he just wants to sit with me, though," Haas' mother, Rachel, joked. "One time, a lady offered to give him her seat, but he said he wanted to sit with mom because he could just crowd her." There are practical considerations of life that large that seep into every hour of every day. While Haas played AAU, it was Nike that provided those battleships he wears on his feet, while he played for the Swoosh-sponsored Alabama Challenge on the summer circuit. At Purdue, a Nike-sponsored program, the same will be true. But for more formal footwear, Rachel Haas said, a twohour drive to Atlanta is their only option. (Friedman's Shoes in Downtown Atlanta also counts among its customers Shaquille O'Neal, Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson and the guy who played Michael Oher in "The Blind Side.") Ordering online: Not an option. "He has a very wide foot," Rachel Haas said, "so we need to try everything on." Very few people would know what it's like to stand in those shoes, in any sense, to be that big, to be gawked at even in buildings full of over-sized people. It was at a prominent summer tournament in South Carolina this summer when Haas made maybe the hundred-yard walk from one of the gyms to an outdoor area to conduct a brief interview. During that walk through a rec center teeming with teams of 16- and 17-year-old centers and power forwards and their fathers, uncles and coaches, not to mention the numerous current or ex-NBA players who frequent such events, Haas couldn't seem to walk 20 feet without a teenage girl stopping him to ask about his height. f Haas Interview There are days it gets old, days when Rachel Haas might just keep walking to give her son an easy out — "My mom's waiting for me" — or days where you can just only stand to have the same conversation so many times with so many people. But Haas is big, always has been, hitting his peak (to this point at least) of 86 inches just a few at a time over time — no one or two dramatic spurts — since being almost 2 feet tall at birth. And for whatever annoyances might have come with it, and for whatever hassles it's created in his sport, it's who Haas is, his "gift" as he terms it. So he's generally happy to talk, sometimes remembering, too, the time he met someone even taller and was naturally compelled to ask how tall he was. "There's some people out there that may never, ever see a 7-2 guy in their lives," Haas said. "I just like to make people happy in the end and maybe meeting me makes people happy." There's some small irony then in Haas hoping to bring others such happiness with something he himself had to grow, literally, to embrace. "I never really expected to be this tall," he said. "Standing out in a crowd the way I always have kind of made me worried at first, because I didn't know if I was going to be able to use this gift I have to my advantage. "But I understand now how great it is and how blessed I am and I just try to use it. I've grown to love it." j IllustrateD volume 24, issue 3 4