Is Larry Sanders’ second act going to be a cautionary tale, or this year’s
feel-good story?
He is earnest and honest, naïve and trusting, uncertain and confident. He is an
artist. He is a basketball player. He is 27.
He missed basketball.
“I miss being on a team, man,” Sanders said on the phone last week. “I miss
going to war with my teammates and fighting against another team and giving my
all out there and affecting the game. My children are getting older. I have a
boy and a girl, and my son talks about it all the time now, he misses me
playing. Giving them something to cheer for, and my family. Having my name on my
back, our name on my back. There’s a lot of value in that, there’s a lot of
strength in that, for my whole family. Me being that person for them brings joy
to me.”
Sanders has been working out for and meeting with teams — individual times with
the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers, a group workout in Miami earlier
this month witnessed by the Cavs and six other squads — to show them that he’s
serious about returning to the NBA, two years after flaming out in Milwaukee,
needing and ultimately receiving treatment for depression and anxiety disorder.
Now, he says he’s much better equipped, through the inclusion of new people in
his life and the removal of others, along with having been able to tap into the
creative world during the past 24 months, to return to the physical and mental
rigors of the NBA.
He knows the questions are all there, first and foremost being: how can any team
trust you’ll be able to deal with “the life” again?
“I would say I worked really hard to get to where I was,” Sanders said. “I
worked extremely hard. I started playing basketball when I was 17 years old.
Things kind of hit me fast. It was hard to manage. I would say I’m more mature.
I’m better. I’m at a higher level. I’m a better basketball player. I’ve taken
that time to establish those things and get my family in order — not to say
everything’s perfect. I took the time that I needed.
“To convince someone by words, I don’t know what more I can say. The action’s
going to be everything. If a team’s willing to take that risk on me, I’m also
taking that risk on them, that they’re going to be able to support me and be in
my corner. We’re going to be able to understand each other. I believe there’s a
team out there that’s like that, that would love a guy like me in their system.”
He has worked out for months, mostly in Miami, with trainer Stan Remy, best
known for his work with Phoenix Suns guard Brandon Knight. He has a new agent,
Washington-based Joel Bell. He’d like to hook on with a team immediately and
start to learn its terminologies and such, but understands that some may need
convincing, or may want to wait until the summer.
“I focus on my part of the street,” he said. “My half of the street is getting
in the best shape I can, getting stronger, still getting mentally stronger. And
that’s it. I see it as, I do my part, and that’s kind of what I’m focusing on.”
Sanders spent the past two years in the creative community of California. He did
the almost obligatory video or two (calling himself L8Show; you can YouTube it),
wrote a graphic novel, but he spent more time working as a manager, he says, for
several artists, allowing them to work out of his Sherman Oaks home.
There was Mo Korched, aka RuKo Photo, who met Sanders in Milwaukee and joined
him in Cali to get his photography business up and running. There was Ye Ali, an
R&B singer who worked out of the back part of Sanders’ house, which he converted
into a studio. The engineer/producer Bizness Boi came through and started laying
down his beats with Sanders’ help. A fashion designer working on his first line.
A screenwriter. “And they’re all working together; they’re all working together
as a team,” Sanders said.
Korched lived with Sanders for almost two years.
“It’s been a cool ride,” Korched said early Monday. “It’s cool to see the growth
and the changes he’s made in his life. I think (he has) just a more relaxed
demeanor. I think definitely when I first came in, I don’t know if it was me
just being new, living with him. But you can definitely tell that he’s a happier
person, mentally. You can definitely tell. He’s got his family around, he’s
always involved with family. He definitely had a chance to work in the music
production, the arts, photography, video, documentary making. So he’s got to
explore a lot of things that he wanted to do.”
Scratching that itch was crucial for Sanders to feel comfortable taking another
look at basketball.
“I was able to produce my major artist, and to show I could do that at a high
level,” he said. “My art, my paintings, I have a fashion designer and a
photographer that I manage, and they’re doing great. I see this position only
raising them up higher. I pool resources for them. I linked my company with Ron
Artest’s company — Metta (World Peace) — out here in L.A. And I house them —
well, now, they have their own housing. They’ve taken steps and strides to
establish things for themselves. I housed them and connecting some dots for them
in the city. It’s just trying to create this self-sustaining energy, where guys
can kind of become their own brands.”
Part of Sanders’ coping mechanism is having his two children, Jasiah, 6, and
Jynesis, 3, with him (“he takes them to school,” Korched said) as he reconnected
with the game.
“I worked myself into a good space,” he said. “I’ve put in a lot of work where
I’ve been away from basketball, ironing some things out of my life, spending
time with my family, feeling more comfortable with managing my life. I knew when
I got to a certain point in my life, when I got comfortable, I would want to
revisit the possibility of playing basketball at a high level. And I’ve working
toward that point. I feel like now is the prime time for me.”
Sanders and the Bucks worked out a buyout of his four-year, $44 million contract
in February, 2015. Milwaukee agreed to make annual $1.9 million payments to
Sanders through 2022 — seven years after he last played for them — and used
the stretch provision to officially waive him. It was a sad turn for a young
player who brought a single, devastating talent to a basketball court — he was
a defensive menace, a mobile, shot-blocking terror who wasn’t as tall as Rudy
Gobert, but just as effective.
In a league where stretch fours and corner fives were increasingly the norm,
Sanders was a Bizarro World NBA Player, a favorite of the then-nascent analytics
community with limited offensive skills. But he was a fast big man with amazing
timing who could destroy the bread and butter play of almost every NBA offense
— the high screen and roll. In the 2012-13 season, he ranked second in blocks
per game and sixth in defensive rating.
But Sanders was in the midst of unraveling. All kinds of pressures were building
in him and exploding out of him at the same time. He got in a fight in a
Milwaukee nightclub (he told Vice Magazine last year that he was jumped) in
which he tore thumb ligaments in December, 2013. He returned after missing
several weeks, only to break his orbital bone in February after getting hit by
an inadvertent James Harden elbow, and miss the rest of the season. He wasn’t
happy being away from his family; he missed the lack of creativity in his life
away from basketball. Ironically, the more he succeeded at the game, the more he
got paid, and the more he felt like a commodity — pressed to conform and fit
in, not to stand out.
“I’m definitely an artist when I play basketball,” he says. “The way I block
shots, my timing, my angles, how I see the game. Definitely. I think when you
play at a really high level, you kind of dumb it down a little bit. I think when
you do anything at a high level — you talk to a musician, how they love their
art, and then they sign to a label, and then their art gets tainted, and it dies
down. I think that comes with any kind of a high-level position, when there’s a
lot of money involved.”
And, he smoked a lot of weed.
Sanders says he didn’t start smoking until he got into the NBA, when he was 22.
He did it to cope with … well, everything.
“I was young in the league,” he says. “I was using it to handle where I was
going. I wasn’t really managing my life at a high level. That was helping me to
cope. But in hindsight, while I was coping on a day to day, on a larger scale,
it was hindering. Because there were other skills that I needed to learn. Now,
being away from marijuana, I’m able to look back on it and understand it and
indulge in these other coping mechanisms. I’m older now, too. I feel my brain’s
more developed. There’s different things that, chemically, are put in place now,
that make me, I feel like a stronger individual, where a crutch doesn’t seem as
appealing as it did before. There’s a lot of value in me learning things on my
own and dealing with issues head on.”
Sanders failed four drug tests during his five NBA seasons, all believed to be
for positive marijuana tests. His issues with the league and its marijuana
policy are as philosophical as anything. He says now that he hasn’t smoked in
two months, and he won’t when and if he gets with a team.
“I understand that, because I can see now, through hindsight that, it may make
me feel better at the moment, (but) it’s only adding,” he said. “Because it’s a
banned substance. As long as it’s banned in the league, it’s going to add to the
problem. It’s not going to help, ultimately. It’s kind of hard to see when
you’re kind of indulged in it … that comes with knowledge and understanding and
research. People are seeing, for whatever reason, you put an x on this my whole
life, now we’re understanding it more and seeing the benefits of it. And that
was a battle that I was in when I was playing.
“I understood the health components of it and I did my research. But it all
comes down to, that may all be all fine and dandy, but it’s not federally legal
yet. It’s a banned substance. That was always the final answer. It was a battle
that, you can fight the battle in different ways.”
After he reached the buyout with the Bucks, he announced his retirement on The
Players Tribune, saying “I’m a person, I’m a father, I’m an artist, a writer,
painter, I’m a musician … and sometimes I play basketball.” He spent a month at
Rogers Memorial Hospital in Oconomowoc https://rogershospital.org/, a quiet town
a little more than half an hour from Milwaukee, in treatment for his emotional
disorders.
“It’s a lot of youth there, a lot of kids that were younger than me,” Sanders
said. “While I came in with my own issues, I was also able to mentor a lot. And
I was able to kind of be of help, open my eyes just to a lot of things, where
you can really put your importance in life, the values system that we set up. It
made me extremely grateful for anything I did and didn’t have. It just opened my
eyes to my situation, how big the picture was. It helped me to make my decision.
It definitely did.”
Both while at Rogers and afterward, Sanders took stock of what had caused him so
much anxiety.
“A lot of guys in the league, we come from different situations,” he said. “The
way drama works, it just stores in your body. Certain things, they don’t really
go away. You just learn to cope. Things kind of come back when you’re a young
man in your early twenties, that you may not have thought about for 10 years.
It’s kind of how the mind works. So you have to learn. Understanding is huge. I
studied the mind a lot, I studied the nervous system a lot. Through my
understanding, it helped me to cope better, to kind of pinpoint what I think I
need.”
And here lies the rub, not only with Sanders, but with other players trying to
deal with anxieties and other disorders. Substance abuse is frequently a
derivative of a larger mental health issue or issues.
We’ve gone down this road before, with World Peace and Royce White and Delonte
West and other players who needed extra support and counseling to deal with
their unique maladies. The NBA maintains that while there remains no specific
mental health policy in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, players have access
to mental health professionals and treatment programs as part of their benefits
package. And the league continues to maintain that mental health professionals
not affiliated with its teams cannot have decision-making authority over the
best courses of treatment for players. There are, the league argues, mental
health resources available through the team and Players’ Association.
Sanders says he has a support system in place that will be best for him if he
returns.
“That’s something that, when I stepped away, I started to establish on my own,”
he said. “Those are things that I’m going to bring with me to the NBA. Until the
NBA figures that out, I’m going to have my own personal support system, that I’m
able to go to, that I didn’t have before. I had one, but it wasn’t very a strong
one. And I understood that. You get hit with these different obstacles and you
get put in these different positions, and these crises come up, and there’s
nothing to do but go play basketball. But you have to handle these different
things, and sometimes you can’t do it by yourself.”
His friends in his non-hoops community believe he’ll be able to balance
everything. They love him whether he goes back to the pros or not.
“I was always like, ‘I don’t really care, dude,’ ” Korched said. “We’ll play
basketball, we’ll play 2K, we’ll play video games and talk about basketball. But
I don’t really care if that’s something he wants to do, and being in the
community, all of his friends are like that, too. I think being in that space
where he actually got to be himself and not have the whole professional athlete
type situation, or having to worry about being the celebrity dude walking
around, gave him a really good feeling to know that, okay, I can do both, as
long as it’s the right people involved.”
Sanders wants to give the league what it needs from him without compromising who
he is. But he also believes who he is may be interpreted differently now than it
was just a few years ago.
“I think all over the world, they’re understanding, I really don’t have to stay
in this lane; I can kind of be who I want to be,” he said. “There’s this sense
of judgment that used to be around certain stigmas, because of a lack of
knowledge. Whatever the media said and whatever the dictation was, that’s what
people went with. Now people are kind of like, well, I have four friends like
that, and that’s not true. With that, I think it opens up doors for people like
Metta, where they don’t have to be thrown into different lanes because they
enjoy different types of art, different types of life. Whereas 10 years ago, to
say, I want to rap — now you’re a thug. You just called into different labels
that are changing.”
Sanders’ workouts with Remy were tailored toward today’s NBA offenses, and how
Sanders would attack them.
“When I watch the game, I look at it from a defensive standpoint,” Sanders said.
“Those are guys that I want to guard. I want to be able to guard that three,
that stretch four. I think I’m agile enough and I feel like I’m fast enough and
quick enough to guard those guys, and also the rim.
“Offensively, my speed is what opens the game up for other players. My hard
dives to the rim, my rim runs. I look at so many ways I can make the game
easier, for whatever team … I want to contribute without even touching the ball,
and make plays just being fast and being quick, using my speed and athleticism.”
Some of the teams that have seen Sanders work out said that while there’s
obviously some rust to work off, Sanders could conceivably come back with a few
weeks of serious work with a team.
“He has a better chance of helping some team and himself with a full summer of
training,” an official with one team said. “He’s underweight, but in good cardio
shape. His game is at one end (of the floor), so there’s not much drop off
offensively. He can still blow up pick and roll action and move well laterally.”
Said an official with a second team: “He was moving pretty good. Still mobile
and athletic. His conditioning was coming back, had a little ways to go there.
He’s lost some weight so he needed 10-15 pounds or so, but overall, he was okay
for being out so long.”
Cleveland will wait to see if Andrew Bogut, as expected, signs with the
Cavaliers after finishing out the details of his buyout with the Philadelphia
76ers. If Bogut were to go elsewhere, it’s possible the Cavs would consider
bringing in Sanders. But that sounds like a longshot at present. The Celtics
have made no moves to sign him. But other teams have interest, and Sanders has
told teams he’ll play in the NBA D-League if teams want him to go there first.
“He never really gave up basketball,” Korched said. “He was always training. He
never lost the love for basketball. He was still doing it. He made time for it.
He always made time for it. I don’t think that it’s a matter of if he will. Now
it’s just a matter of that’s what he wants to do. Larry’s the type of dude that,
if that’s what he wants, that’s what’s going to happen.”
But those in the game worry. No one thinks Sanders is a bad guy or malicious in
any way … it’s quite the opposite. The pressure of being a pro athlete is
unrelenting. Can Sanders get back on the grind, deal with the expectations that
would follow him wherever he goes to go back and be the player he was without
falling back into the old routines? (Obviously it won’t be in Milwaukee, but
could you imagine Sanders back in the middle alongside forwards Jabari Parker
and Giannis Antetokounmpo?)
Sanders says basketball will become his “high priority” if he can get a job, and
the other things will fall under that. But he still hopes to keep a hand in the
world that nurtured and sustained him the last two years. He thinks he can do it
all and stay clean.
“I understand my purpose,” he says. “I understand why I’m doing it. The money is
not a factor. Of course, they’re paying guys to play basketball not like they’re
paying artists to make music. I have to understand who I am in it. And stick to
that. I established some good things around me and some base, some unshakable
stuff that I know is going to help me if I do get to that level again, I won’t
have to wither. I won’t have to lower myself and my standards to be in that
position.”
Longtime NBA reporter, columnist and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer
David Aldridge is an analyst for TNT. You can e-mail him here, find his archive
here and follow him on Twitter.
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