Albert Sanders Jr., the boy with the big dreams and the bigger drive, was scared. He was angry. Worried.
He wanted to become a lawyer, to wow courtrooms just like Ben Matlock and Perry Mason did on his family’s clunky console TV. But in 1994, when he was 14, that dream suddenly seemed beyond reach, hence the anger and worry. He had excelled at a private school but circumstances had brought him to Jefferson High School, one of the worst in Los Angeles.
Before his first day as a freshman, he and his mother, Paula Sanders, sat in front of the campus in her 11-year-old Volvo as she fought to hide tears.
“How am I going to realize this dream of being a lawyer and maybe working in politics one day when I’m at a school where half the kids don’t graduate?” Albert wondered to himself.
But that was on the inside.
“He said, ‘Mom, I know what to do,’” Paula Sanders remembered. “And I believed him.”
It was trust well-placed. Sanders would work on Capitol Hill, at the White House and at Google. These days he is head of referee operations in the NBA, and is one of the most important people in professional basketball.
The role may seem improbable. He’s never blown a whistle, never called a foul. But to those who know him and recall the boy who grew up in South L.A., his journey is not so surprising.
“Mom, I know what to do.”
The child of an aviation manufacturing worker and a nurse, Sanders made it abundantly clear early on that he wanted to be a lawyer. Sitting on the burgundy living room carpet, he devoured any TV show with a courtroom. He became a skilled arguer with his parents. And if he got sent to his room? The door would slam shut with the words “Sanders & Associates” taped on the outside.
In elementary school, Sanders carried a briefcase to campus and practiced his signature so it would perfectly adorn legal filings. Academically, he was thriving at a private Christian academy in Compton.
But there also were sports, especially basketball. Like many L.A. kids born in 1980, Sanders made sure the “Showtime” Lakers were on the television whenever “Matlock” was off it. He’d go to parks with his father, Albert Sr., who taught him how to put the proper spin, “some English,” on a finger roll layup and mimic Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook.
They attended some Lakers games where Sanders would stand on his seat and occasionally yell “Bad call!” when he thought the home team was wronged.
Read more: Lakers rally late, then hold off Kings for another win
But along with “amazing memories” of his dad and basketball — including always watching the Lakers’ Christmas Day games on television — there was “a time in my life where he was not there and he couldn’t be there.”
Albert Sr. lost his job and struggled with addiction. Paula, who was working in private nursing to make extra money for the family, slipped on a porch and injured her back.
With no money, they had to move.
“She can’t work. My dad’s unemployed. And now we’re moving from Carson and that private school and all that sort of stuff to South Central, where I did not expect to be in 1993, ’94, ’95 — all the things that were happening in South Central.”
There was a time when Jefferson represented the best of Black excellence in Los Angeles. Legendary singer Etta James, Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche and ground-breaking choreographer Alvin Ailey all attended Jefferson. But that was the past. In the 1990s, South L.A. was reeling from gangs and the aftermath of the 1992 riots.
Even so, teachers steered him into the “Humanitas Academy,” a tract of classes for high-potential students. Teachers who were lifers at the school — who had taught Albert Sr. and his brothers when they attended Jefferson — kept close tabs on Albert Jr. and helped him overcome disadvantages he now faced, like a schoolbook shortage that meant texts needed to be kept on campus.
“There was a rich community of people there that spent their own money on supplies, that would drive us to mock trial competitions, that would stay after school, that would go above and beyond what teachers were paid to do or supposed to do to help us excel,” he said. “So between that, between my family and between my church, my world was full, right?”
Sanders also played on the basketball team, but it was Humanitas that prepared him for the future, recalled Sanders’ teacher and friend Cris Gutierrez.
“We would work together on whatever we were studying as if they were colleagues,” Gutierrez recalled, adding, “Albert thrived in that kind of situation — to know that he could be assuming responsibilities in new ways and he could push us as we pushed him.”
Sanders excelled and even accompanied Gutierrez to Washington, D.C., to give a speech to a group of educators, politicians and reformers. He had found his thing, and it had nothing to do with a basketball.
“My basketball coach gave me the best basketball advice I’d ever received,” Sanders remembered. The advice came just after a loss. “I’d done my best,” he said, “and I’m looking at him for, like, inspiration and some feedback. He’s like, ‘Go to law school.’
“There was no chance that I was going to get to the NBA.”
He went on to Morehouse College and to the University of Pennsylvania law school, specializing in labor and employment law before going to Washington to work with the Senate Judiciary Committee and as associate counsel to President Obama. After Obama’s second term, he joined Google, overseeing the intertwined roads of technology and public policy.
Years later, there…
LA Times
