It was Christmas Eve 2014 when Larry Sanders, the budding star center for the Milwaukee Bucks, knew it was over. The night before, his team had lost by seven points at home to a middling Charlotte Hornets squad and the Bucks’ new coach, Jason Kidd, was angry. Milwaukee, who were hovering around .500, were slated to have the holiday off to spend with family but Kidd changed those plans and decided his roster should practice – as punishment. The players had to cancel flights and alert their family of the change – something, of course, they did not want to do. During the Christmas Eve practice, Sanders went full-on. He didn’t lollygag but, peeved, he also didn’t back away from engaging his coach in confrontation. Afterwards, while he was the last one left in the locker room, his body started to break down.
“I was cramping from my ears to my toes,” Sanders tells the Guardian. “Full body cramps.”
It was the second time that this stress reaction had happened to him during his young career and it forced Sanders to quickly seek medical treatment. Sanders was hospitalized that Christmas Eve and Christmas. He never returned to the Bucks practice facility again, despite having signed a four-year $44m contract extension the year before. “I physically and mentally could not get myself back there,” he says. “Nothing could get me in the car to go there. I had such a block.” The 6ft 11in center who’d averaged nearly a double-double and almost three blocks per game a few seasons before, was now the one stifled. “I didn’t touch a basketball for the next two years. Not a shot, not a dribble.”
Sanders was born on 21 November 1988, in Fort Pierce, Florida, and grew up “in the trenches”. There were gangs seemingly on every street in his neighborhood. His parents split when he was a kid and both suffered from untreated mental health issues. “They had all this trauma,” Sanders says, “all this pain. They were predisposed to a lot of violence [while] not understanding the power of therapy, the power of meditation.”
As a kid, Sanders loved to draw. It was his “getaway.” He wanted to illustrate comics and work for Disney. He had a deep interest in the ocean too, won a grant to study oceanography and got to ride in submarines. He was tall but didn’t have any particular interest in basketball. But it was a basketball that would save him.
“Because I lived in the projects,” Sanders says, “automatically where you live there are places you can’t go [due to gang conflicts].” He found that if he rode his bike from his home to his grandmother’s or cousin’s house while carrying a basketball, he was left alone. Gangs, even brutal ones, tend to respect the kids who can use the game to get out of the neighborhood.
“I had a ball everywhere I went,” he says. “It was my pass. Like, ‘Oh, he’s going to play basketball, he’s just going to the court. If I didn’t have that ball, I would’ve constantly been getting checked. I would probably have had to attach myself to a gang to protect myself. But I didn’t even play.”
It wasn’t until high school that he began to really take to the game. He was already 6ft 6in by the time he was in the 10th grade but he was raw: In his first game, he scored on his own basket. But he started watching the pros more. His idol was Tracy McGrady, who played for the nearby Orlando Magic. Sanders wore arm bands like him, modeled his game after McGrady’s. He soon managed double-digit blocks. Later, during his 11th and 12th grades, his team was dominant in the region. And as a senior, he started playing AAU, traveling as far as Las Vegas for games. It was the people he met then that he bonded, and later enrolled with, at VCU.
Sanders’ college team was a force. During his three years there, his squad won 75 games and only lost 27. After his junior year, he decided to turn pro and he was selected by Milwaukee with the 15th overall pick. Had he stayed in college he would have played for the VCU team that made the Final Four under coach Shaka Smart. Still, he was excited for the NBA. “You shoot a million jump shots and you want to get paid,” he says. But in the end, the NBA wasn’t what he’d hoped it would be. “It was a blessing but it was also a lot,” he says. “I come from nothing and then you become the one that has everything. People who are supposed to guide you become your dependents. And you’re too young for that.”
Sanders lacked a support system, in the league and his personal life. “You get fed to the sharks in a lot of ways,” he says. “You can find yourself in a very vulnerable position … It can feel like a setup, it can feel like a trap. I felt so alone. It was so hard to even express what I was going through. At the time, in 2012, no one said they had anxiety or depression – maybe Delonte West, but everyone was outcasting him.”
During his second year in the NBA, Sanders smoked a joint for the first time, passed to him by teammates. The drug helped, like medicine. But league drug testing led to suspensions, rehabs and ostracization. (Today, the NBA doesn’t test for weed.)
“Do I gravitate to some pills and other drugs or do I do alcohol?” he wondered then about substances that wouldn’t be detected. Not only that, but his need to be creative was no longer thriving. He felt stymied. “I was yearning for support, yearning to be heard. But there was nothing in the manuscript for what I was going through at that time.” Sanders became one of the first players to talk about mental health – though now, thanks to others such as DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love, it’s a much more accepted topic. However, when you’re the first to do something, you’re often judged harshly for it. “There was no way I was the first one [to have mental health issues],” he says. “But I was the first one to speak up.”
Today Sanders is glad he did. Not just vocally, but by publicly stepping away from the game. That choice led to conversations people are having now. “I have three sons that could be in the NBA one day,” he says. “To have their mental health be respected – sometimes you got to be the one to step out on a cliff. But it’s worth it.” It wasn’t that he didn’t love the game, it was that he didn’t have what he needed while participating in it. “My body and my mind are elite,” he says. “But my surroundings and my environment just wasn’t.”
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When he decided to walk, he had two kids and he knew that if he wasn’t in the right state of mind, he couldn’t ensure they would be either. Later, he went to another rehab facility. This time it wasn’t one selected by the NBA for marijuana – though, even in those, he made close relationships with patients who were there for additions to heroin and other narcotics. This one was designed around therapy and emotional wellbeing. That was the last facility he’s been to since.
After two years away from the NBA, Sanders sought a comeback. He worked out for a few teams and landed a contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016-17, alongside LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. But he still had a rehab stint he’d have to undertake for the league if he was to stay on and the team at the time had its own internal turmoil, he says. He lasted only a handful of games before he was waived. Leaving the NBA for good, despite still being in his prime in his 20s, brought a great deal of criticism. But Sanders doesn’t stress about those comments. His philosophy is that if someone isn’t going to be there at your funeral, why care about what they say? “One minute you’re larger than life,” he says. “And the next [in their eyes] you’re lower than dirt.”
Still, at his peak, Sanders, who is a member of and continues to work with the NBA Retired Players Association, was regarded my many as one of the best defensive players in the league. He was stopping his heroes in the paint, players he’d idolized. “I was their nightmare,” he says. “I was like, ‘I can really play this game. This game is really meant for me!’”
It took a lot to walk away from that. But today, though things aren’t always “perfect,” Sanders maintains gratitude. He also retains his love of creativity: he has a production company and a publishing company. He’s writing a memoir, kids’ books, a movie script, he runs camps, produces music, has a foundation and a cannabis line, and he even spends summers playing in the Big3. Sanders also keeps relationships with players who deal with their own mental health issues.
“Why I go so hard,” Sanders says, “is because this has to be a success story. I got to show kids that I made the right choice. That there is a way – more for us to do. That we can be successful without succumbing. All the power’s in the present.”