I've been closing out a piece for the magazine the past couple weeks, and consequently gotten backed up on my own magazine reading. But on Monday and today I spent a good bit of time on the train and managed to get caught up.

The giant of Fort Lupton was born, like a cowbird's chick, to parents of ordinary size. His father, Jay Shaw, a lineman for a local power company, was six feet tall; his mother, Bonnie, was an inch or so shorter. At the age of three months, Brian weighed seventeen pounds. At two years, he could grab his Sit 'n Spin and toss it nearly across the room. In photographs of his grade-school classes, he always looked out of place, his grinning, elephant-eared face floating like a parade balloon above the other kids in line. They used to pile on his back during recess, his mother told me--not because they didn't like him but because they wanted to see how many of them he could carry. "I just think Brian has been blessed," she said. "He has been blessed with size." 

Fort Lupton is a city of eight thousand on the dry plains north of Denver. In a bigger place, Shaw might have been corralled into peewee football at eight or nine, and found his way among other oversized boys. But the local teams were lousy and, aside from a few Punt, Pass & Kick contests--which he won with discouraging ease--Shaw stuck to basketball. By seventh grade, he was six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. When he went in for a dunk on his hoop at home, he snapped off the pole, leaving a jagged stump in the driveway. By his late teens, his bulk had become a menace. One player knocked himself out running into Shaw's chest; another met with his elbow coming down with a rebound, and was carried off with a broken nose and shattered facial bones. "It was bad," Shaw told me. "One guy, we dove for a ball together, and I literally broke his back. It wasn't that I was a dirty player. I wasn't even trying to do it hard."