Tales of tall people and Jurgen Klinsmann to start the day

David McNabb is a buddy who worked with me at The Dallas Morning News back in the day. Yesterday, he saw something I wrote about Jurgen Klinsmann and told me a quick story via Facebook. It’s so quintessentially Klinsi. Remember, this was around the time Klinsmann was discovering the United States on summer drives. Then, as now, he was a keen observer of life.

Here’s what Eric Wynalda told San Diego Union-Tribune writer Mark Zeigler about Klinsmann: “The word that best describes Jurgen is he is a Renaissance man, and one of the things he’s always preached is always, always look for new experiences. He’s a very astute man. He studies. He’s in a constant state of learning.”

Sure enough … David was covering the ‘94 World Cup matches in Dallas; Germany was in town to face South Korea. After a practice at the Cotton Bowl, Klinsmann and German team buddy asked if David could drive them to the Sixth Floor Museum nearby. It’s in the building where Lee Harvey Oswald, perched on the 6^th floor, shot and killed President Kennedy in 1963.

David was happy to oblige. But here’s the real hoot:

The museum sits in a downtown restaurant area, and they happened to be staging a Hoop-It-Up tournament there at the time. Hoop-It-Up was (maybe still is, I’m not sure) a series of outdoor 3-on-3 basketball tournaments. And these were big events.

David is a tall fellow himself; he played basketball in high school.  So there’s David and, as they got into downtown, literally thousands of basketball players, all milling about. As David said, a lot of “size 15 shoes.”

Klinsmann made a quick assessment of his surroundings: "You guys in Texas really are big!" he told David.