Let's face it, we all have our favorites.
Among my favorites co-workers from 26 years at the NBA are Tom "Satch" Sanders and Big Bob Lanier. Satch and Bob are two of the greatest players who have ever played the game. They are even better people.
The NBA is paying tribute to Bob today as part of the MLK Day holiday. Bob hails from Buffalo and Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan, a former Newsday NBA writer, wrote the following tribute to Lanier's work:
The Bennett High and St. Bonaventure graduate has made as big an impact on human lives as anyone who ever played
NBA honors Lanier for work in spirit of Dr. King
COMMENTARY
by Jerry Sullivan
Last summer, Bob Lanier was in town for a St. Bonaventure reunion when he took a tour of his old neighborhood on Buffalo’s East Side. Lanier visited his mother’s old house on Northland Avenue. Then he went over to the Boys & Girls Club on Masten Avenue, where he had spent so much of his free time as a kid.
Lanier walked into the club, unannounced. None of the kids recognized him. Then, a little boy noticed an old photograph of a basketball player on the wall. He gazed at the middle-aged man standing before him, and back to the photo. “Is that you?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Lanier said with a smile. “That was me at one time. I don’t know anymore.”
That’s how many people see Lanier after all these years — as a basketball legend, a towering, two-dimensional figure in an old, black-andwhite photograph. But the little boy had no idea that a true giant was in his midst, a man whose achievements extend far beyond the modest, rectangular world of a basketball court.
Oh, Lanier was one of the all-time greats. The Bennett High and St. Bonaventure grad is a Hall of Famer, an eight-time NBA All-Star. Last fall, the court at Bona was renamed in his honor. He is the best player this town has ever produced.
We don’t turn out many hoop greats. But our guy has made as big an impact on human lives as anyone who ever played. For the past 10 years, as special assistant to the commissioner, Lanier has been the NBA’s good-will ambassador, spreading a message of hope and education to people around the world.
On Monday, as part of the NBA’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. day, Lanier will be honored for his contributions to civil and human rights at the Grizzlies-Bulls game in Memphis, Tenn. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will also be honored.
Lanier said he was humbled to be honored for carrying on King’s legacy of justice and equality.
“I was blessed as a young boy in Buffalo, N.Y., that I had two parents,” Lanier said Thursday by phone. “My mother was from Kentucky and my daddy from Tennessee. My sister and I had a sense of our history instilled us at a young age.”
Lanier remembers traveling through the South when he was 9. He and his father had to go into a restaurant through the back door, a “Colored Only” entrance. He had heard the older folks talk about discrimination, but he had never experienced it until that day.
“I was too young to understand the impact of that moment until I was in college, and they wouldn’t serve a group of us at a bar my freshman year. They said they didn’t serve mixed couples. We were just a bunch of kids going to a function. I think it helped shape my life and my thinking, and gave me a strong sense of the fight for fairness and equality in life, and everybody having equal access and opportunity.”
Lanier, who retired in 1984, began working for the NBA in 1988. He spent a short time as a coach, then returned to the league office, where he has been doing a variety of community outreach programs for the past decade. He leads NBA Cares, the league’s global outreach program, and the Read to Achieve program.
“One of the great moments for me,” Lanier said, “is when I see our players sitting on a floor or a big old couch with kids in their laps or gathered around them, reading a book and trying to make the words come to life for the kids.”
Lanier was a founder of Basketball Without Borders, which runs hoop clinics around the world. Last summer, he led the NBA’s 12-city tour, organizing summer day camps to teach kids basketball and life skills. Two weeks ago, he was in Miami for a volunteer day, serving food at a rescue mission. The big lefty has run the league’s rookie transition program for years. He’s the national chairman of the NBA’s Stay In School initiative. He gives motivational speeches on education, family development and health.
Yeah, his legacy goes a little bit farther than his 19,248 points and his 9,698 rebounds. How do you calculate the number of hearts and minds Lanier has helped reach? Teachers say they touch the future. That’s what Lanier has done.
Lanier coached briefly in 1995, taking over as Golden State’s head man for half a season. Back then, he told me he wanted to give players “wisdom for life.” He went 12-25 and decided there were better ways to impart his wisdom.
“You don’t know what the Lord has in store,” Lanier said. “But there is something in my message that I think comes from another place, that it’s not me. It comes through me. The NBA has given me a forum to touch more lives than I could ever touch on my own. I’m an instrument. What has been special to me is that our commissioner [David Stern], he got it. He understood that touching young lives is germane to us building a better America.”
As a black man in America, Lanier exults in the progress that has been made, while acknowledging how far we have yet to go.
“The longer I live, the more I know we still need to focus on,” he said. “We have to continue to get people of color educational opportunities and let them know the importance of education. We have to strive for a level playing field. Until I see that happening, we have a lot more work to do.”
Lanier sees himself as a living example. He said he wouldn’t be where he is today without the Franciscan ideals that were instilled in him at St. Bonaventure. He gets a surge of pride when he hears people say he reflects everything that school stands for.
“That lifts me up,” he said. “My parents always told me I had to work twice as hard, because I wasn’t only representing myself. I represented my parents, family and community. I was blessed to grow up with the parents I had, and to come from Buffalo. Those two things kept me rooted in life.”
By Jerry Sullivan - jsullivan@buffnews.com
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