NBA HOFer Tom ‘Satch’ Sanders wants to pass on lessons he got from Jackie Robinson

WASHINGTON -- In a massive room on the second floor of the Cannon House Office Building, adjacent the sleepy halls of Congress, a couple of hundred people sat quiet with anticipation as they awaited what was more than just another briefing.

In front of the stuffy congressmen, high school kids and the aides to President Barack Obama, Tom “Satch” Sanders planted himself in a cushy seat and peered around the large room through skinny frames, the dean of an eight-person panel.

“Satch” was on Capitol Hill for a congressional briefing on expanding opportunities for people of color through mentorship. It was hosted by Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) and members of the congressional My Brother’s Keeper Caucus.

The caucus is dedicated to fighting for the initiative, which is a partnership by the government to promote intervention in the lives of young people of color addressing systemic injustice, racial justice and mentorship.

But the nights Sanders had in Boston were sleepless. The ‘60s brought championships, but each day was a reminder of the country’s racist climate as his career spanned the Civil Rights Era.

The quiet and cool, 6’6 black man from New York City played for the Celtics at the onset of Boston’s busing crisis, a period when the city’s public schools were forced to desegregate through a system of busing students, which led to a series of racial protests and riots.

“Boston wasn’t any more (racist) than it is all over the country,” Sanders told SB Nation. “There were so many incidents and et cetera when you talk about black-white relationships and difficulties, where race became an issue. It was wherever we went in the country.”

There were also moments before games in Los Angeles where Sanders said police officers pulled guns on him and his teammates as they walked through the city’s streets.

“Don’t, don’t fool yourself,” Sanders scoffed. “It was the entire country and a lot of other places we had problems. I got that feeling in every city I went to. Bar none. ... You gotta recognize, in all of the cities, there are places that are uncomfortable for people of color, OK? It doesn’t matter where you are. That’s a whole situation that has to be solved in the entire country.”

Sanders had no choice but to confront racism during his tenure with Boston as a fact of life back then. But Sanders was better prepared for the tumultuous times of his adulthood because of the mentoring he’d received from a sports legend with some expertise on the subject: Jackie Robinson.

In 1951, Sanders was a 12-year-old in New York running with one of the city’s gangs. Its education was in making “zip guns” and threatening bystanders. Sanders was, by his own account, headed for trouble until an encounter with Robinson in junior high school.

Robinson, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and breaking baseball’s color barrier at the time, spent one afternoon at Sander’s school speaking to a group that included the budding troublemaker. Sanders was enthralled by the star.

“I went home and told my mother, ‘Jackie Robinson came to talk to me,’” he said.

Sanders took Robinson’s appearance to heart and vowed that he’d make something out of his life, too. It helped that Robinson was an accessible star. Robinson kept a business in Harlem where neighborhood kids like Sanders could find him.

“He had a shoe store on 125th street. We would all go up, 10 or 12 kids, we’d stand around outside hoping to see him,” Sanders explained. “He’d come out on occasion and say a few things to us, always positive. Roy Campanella would come by and Don Newcombe. These are old names. I don’t expect you to know them. But they were stars. They were the first blacks involved with baseball and sports period.”

Robinson, Campanella and Newcombe, the first black faces of the Brooklyn Dodgers changed Sanders’ outlook on life and motivated him to break ties with his neighborhood gang.

Years later when his playing days were over and Sanders began working in the NBA’s league office as the vice-president of player programs, he created the NBA’s Rookie Initiative Program, teaching financial literacy and daily competence to young players. It was his efforts to continue a legacy of mentorship, not as the defensive stalwart of championship teams, that earned him his place in the Hall of Fame as a contributor.

“We really try to help young men take the blinders off on this NBA journey and he’s the one that started that. It’s because he cared about young people,” Lanier told SB Nation.

As for their relationship? It wasn’t constant badgering or the pseudo parental shadowing like some veterans and retired players do to younger guys in the pros. Sanders’ touch was lighter.

“Sometimes it was just listening to me when I was complaining about something that was going on with me and my boss and how to handle the situation better,” Lanier said. “That, to me, was more meaningful than probably most of the stuff we talked about.”

Sanders got that touch from how another Hall of Fame Celtics legend treated him when he got to Boston. Bill Russell, but also K.C. Jones, kept Sanders in check.

Before cops brandished guns in Los Angeles during Sanders’ career or racial tensions raised in the ‘70s in Boston, Russell was the man that made sure Sanders’ bombastic and combustable attitude didn’t grate the wrong people.

“I made a mistake. I came up thinking my old style of trying to beat people to death physically on the court would be the answer,” Sanders said. “K.C. Jones, also with Bill Russell, pulled me aside and said, ‘If you gonna beat up on people, you not gonna make this team, they gonna send you home.’

“I had to step back, and become a better, bigger man in a lot of areas. The mentoring never stopped for me. Jackie Robinson was the beginning,” Sanders continued. “Being on that Celtics team was really big for me”

The panel conversation in the side room in Cannon shifted when presenters finished their prepared testimony. The written speeches were thrown out.

The discussion moved to the meat of the briefing: explaining the importance of getting more mentors for young black men, advocating for more black teachers in the classroom to mentor kids of color and encouraging consistency out of black and brown role models. The conversation around mentoring minority kids are necessary because of the systemic injustices people of color face daily, compared to their white counterparts in America.

Lanier, for his part, explained that many of the US-born kids coming into the NBA, the 19- and 21-year-olds, come from single-parent homes and don’t have a male role-model in their life. Essentially, he wondered how relationships like the one he and Lanier developed over years could remain consistent in today’s NBA. Or in a classroom.

“Kids have great BS detectors and realize adults are just showing up in that moment when something is wrong,” David Shapiro, CEO of MENTOR, the National Mentoring Partnership said as he was sitting on the panel with Sanders.

Noelle Hurd, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in adolescent development of marginalized youth, took it a step further. The more that there is a selection process in mentorship, she said, the more the person that needs the mentorship will take hold to the mentor.

“Maybe it’s someone that has been successful in the NBA. Or someone who they admire for the way they play or something that specifically speaks to the player,” she said. “It’s not an assigned mentor. It’s respecting the young person’s agency and decision-making in that process which can both help for a relationship that develops rather than one that’s assigned.”

That was it. Selecting the mentor. Sometimes within the ranks of the NBA or separate leagues, franchises attempt to pair their rookie wunderkinds with veteran players to force a mentorship process on their fresh-faced athletes.

That recipe doesn’t always yield success. Sanders looked up to Robinson, Campanella, Newcombe, Russell, Jones and many more. Lanier watched Sanders play basketball since he was a boy, donned the elder’s jersey number and cherished their time together in the league. The straightforwardness in that is unique.

Sanders, who once told President John F. Kennedy in a deep baritone, “Take it easy, baby,” before leaving the White House, who became a voice to young NBA players and people of color and who was the first black head coach of any sport in Ivy League athletics as men’s basketball coach at Harvard, still remembers his first mentor fondly.

If not for Robinson making history in Brooklyn, Sanders could still be playing bully ball on 116th Street in East Harlem.

“Did that mentorship from Jackie Robinson set me straight?” Sanders was asked. He thought for a minute, rubbed the greying stubble on his chin and beamed before strolling off with a clunky gait.

“Oh yeah,” he smiled. “No question.”