At 7-1, twins work to measure up

FRESNO, Calif. — It happened every game. Brook and Robin Lopez loomed head and shoulders above the competition in claustrophobic high-school gyms across California's Central Valley.

Win or lose, opposing basketball players and even coaches cornered the towering 18-year-old twins for snapshots and autographs. Giggling girls who barely reach their waistlines compared hand sizes. Everyone wanted a piece of them.

There's a lot to go around.

At 7-foot-1, the Lopez twins are celebrities. In an era of highflying giants showboating on sports TV, even hypertall schoolboy athletes are hero-cool.

The brothers are still growing.

Wherever they go, the twins draw a crowd — and not just on the basketball court, where they block shots without jumping and hunch down to high-five ordinary-size teammates.

At a volleyball game in nearby Madera, one woman ogled the boys' size-20 shoes: "Look at the size of their feet!"

"Oh my God," another stammered. "There's two of them!"

At San Joaquin Memorial High School, they're the big kids on campus. Other students follow as the twins make their way through a miniature world. They stoop to avoid banging their heads while entering classrooms, contorting themselves into Lilliputian desks, legs outstretched like felled trees.

While one 7-footer can command awe, twin teen skyscrapers weighing 250 pounds each are attention squared.

Strangers approach them at fast-food restaurants with questions about their appetites, which can lead each to consume an extra-large pizza or four Big Macs at a sitting.

The twins take the attention in stride. "If things work out," Brook said in a soft baritone, "this could be even bigger."

Brook and Robin — who averaged 17 and 12 points a game, respectively — helped lead their hoops team to a 33-4 record before the Panthers lost in the state semifinals. The twins were among 24 high-school seniors named to the McDonald's All American Basketball Team. This fall, the brothers will play at Stanford University on full scholarships.

Twin phenoms such as the Lopez boys have few peers. The 7-foot Collins twins, Jarron and Jason, played for Stanford before joining the NBA in 2001. Jim and Mike Lanier, listed as the tallest twins in the world at 7 feet 6, also played college basketball in the 1990s.

Experts say the odds of being 7 foot tall in America are incredibly small. "If you walked into a pediatrician's office, they couldn't tell you what percentile a 7-footer would be in," said Richard Steckel, an Ohio State University professor who has studied height. "It would be 99.99999. The nines would go on forever. To have twin 7-footers, well, that's off the charts."

Deborah Ledford, 56, insists her sons are average kids. And the single parent, who also raised two other sons, works tirelessly to provide them with typical small-town childhoods.

Ledford, who teaches high-school math and German, hounds the twins about doing homework, taking out the garbage and reading books outside class. She monitors whom they talk to and where they go. Recently, she phoned another parent to make sure adults would be present at a school party that night.

The twins are honor students with near 4.0 averages. They like classical music and draw their own cartoon characters and still-lifes that crowd the walls of their home.

"What's important is that my boys are good people," she said. "That's bigger than their accomplishments. They're normal boys who happen to be tall."

The boys are comic-book fanatics, and their breakfast talk more often revolves around Batman, Flash or the Teen Titans than school or sports. Their cramped bedroom is full of childhood mementos: 3-D glasses, superhero dolls, Disney figurines, plastic light sabers and children's books.

On each twin bed sits a mangled stuffed animal the boys have had since infancy. Brook's is a tiger, Robin's a crocodile. "Losing any of this would be like losing a part of myself," Brook said. "I guess I'm still just a big kid."

Friends accept them as they are. "At first I was afraid of them; they're huge," said San Joaquin sophomore Zach Bennett. "They're regular kids. The more you know them, the smaller they get."

Height runs in the family. Ledford is a lanky 6-footer who wears men's size-13 sneakers.

She was a world-ranked child swimmer who later attended Stanford and tried out unsuccessfully for the 1968 Olympic team. Her father was 6-7, and her three brothers range from 6-8 to 6-11. Ledford was married to Heriberto Lopez, a onetime baseball star in Cuba who is 6-5. They divorced when the twins were 5.

Her oldest son, Alexander, 30, is a 6-11 former college hoopster. At 6-7, brother Chris, 24, an aspiring screenwriter, is the runt of the litter.

For years, the protective Ledford kept unwanted attention away from the twins, to allow the size of their personalities to catch up with their bodies. But reporters have arrived. The twins have been interviewed on ESPN, and Hollywood producers want to include them in a reality-TV project.

"Both twins have something that goes beyond height, an intangible quality," said brother Chris. "People can see there's no pretension, and they're drawn to that. Even the kids can see it."

This summer they'll be off to Stanford, where they'll be on their own for the first time. But they feel a debt to their mother and plan to pay her back, either as NBA players or professional animators.

"We want to build her a house overlooking Puget Sound," Brook said. "It's got to be on a cliff. She'd like that."