A lot of you were intrigued by the video I embedded here about Igor Vovkovinskiy, the tallest man in this country. I received the following message from my pal Terry Beatty, who's currently handling the Rex Morgan, M.D. newspaper strip among his many endeavors…
Some years ago, as the Twin Cities Comic Convention was winding down and a bunch of cartoonist guests were making plans to go out to dinner afterward, we ended up also bringing along a group of gamers (somebody was a friend of somebody or whatever). The gamers picked up and brought along a few friends who had spent the day gaming at The Source comic shop — one of whom was Igor Vovkovinskiy. Nice guy, quiet and unassuming — and startlingly tall. We dined at The Big Bowl and when Igor sat down, his knees were higher than the table top.
A couple years later, I told this story to the young woman I was dating (now my wife) and she seemed surprisingly unimpressed that I'd met the tallest man in America. Why was that, you ask? 'Cause she'd gone to school with him in her hometown of Rochester, MN.
And Terry suggests that I note that the video I embedded is not current. In it, they say Igor is 29. Wikipedia says he just turned 36. Wikipedia also gives his height as 7 feet, 8.33 inches — the same as it was in the video. Does this mean that medical treatment has succeeded in stopping his growth? Or is that info on Wikipedia just way out o' date?