“YOU’VE GOT A MAN DOWN IN HERE”

Brandon Sanders was in the shower, deep in the metal catacombs beneath the Orange Bowl, when he heard the sobs. He and his University of Arizona teammates could be forgiven for shedding some tears. The 1992 edition of the Wildcats had just come achingly close — a foot away, if you want the measure of it — €”to beating the top-ranked, defending national champion Miami Hurricanes on their home field.

This Miami roster was filled with future NFL stars and a soon-to-be Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Gino Torretta. Arizona had to this point in the ‘92 season been a collection of underage, undersized underachievers, who only a week before played woebegone Oregon State (final season record 1-9-1) to a 14-14 draw. Against Miami, a team that had won 47 straight home games, the Wildcats were 28-point underdogs. Yet Arizona fought the celebrated ‘Canes to a brutal, bruising, humbling standoff, losing 8-7 in a contest so dominated by defense that the difference was a safety - and a missed field goal.

Every man in that locker room was hurting. But what Sanders heard was different. This was deeper. “I look over, and it’s Steve, and he’s in a corner crying.”

A half-hour earlier, Arizona kicker Steve McLaughlin pushed his 51-yard try at the final whistle just to the right, by the length of a ruler. “He was just devastated,” recalls Dick Tomey, Arizona’s head coach that day.

Devastated and alone. “It was heartbreaking, because we fought so hard,” McLaughlin recalls. “I needed a moment, so I just kind of found a place over by the showers.” Some teammates were walking past him, like he didn’t exist, and that pissed off Sanders, a redshirt freshman safety.

Sanders weighed, maybe, 175 pounds, but his intelligence and charisma made him respected among his peers, a young group including future pros Tony Bouie, Tedy Bruschi, Sean Harris and Rob Waldrop, who were determined to turn the program around. Sanders also had a disturbing ability to deliver a blow on a football field, leaving a trail of cracked ribs and crumpled collarbones ever since he was a kid playing Pop Warner in San Diego. This made him not just respected, but a little bit feared.

Eugene Garcia/Getty Images

“Something just came over me,” he says now. He threw a towel on, walked into the locker room, jumped onto a bench to enhance his 5′9 stature, and started yelling — at seniors, at 300-pounders, everybody. Didn’t matter. “Hey, we have a man fucking down in here!” he shouted. “Get in there and pick him up — everybody! Tap him on his shoulders, tell him he’s going to be all right. Whatever you got to do, everybody needs to get in there. Everybody!”

Angry young men are volatile. Brandon Sanders knows this. He grew up in Southeast San Diego amid the turmoil of the 1980s Bloods and Crips gang conflicts. And angry young football players are built for physical violence. It’s in the game. He braced for a fight.

Didn’t happen. “Nobody challenged me,” Sanders says. “Everybody — everybody on that team went.” They lifted McLaughlin up, tapped his shoulder, treated him like a brother and not a loser. “They all got together, did like a ‘1-2-3 CAT!’ thing,” McLaughlin says. “It’s not like anybody felt any better in that moment, but it showed the underlying character of that team. And Brandon spearheaded that. That’s just the kind of guy he was.”

The next week, McLaughlin nailed a 51-yarder from almost the same spot on the field against No. 11 UCLA, one of three kicks he’d make in a 23-3 rout. Four weeks after that, he hit three more FGs as the Wildcats knocked off No. 1 Washington, led by Mark Brunell, 16-3. Two years later, he won the Lou Groza Award, given annually to college football’s best placekicker, and moved on to the NFL.

Sometimes, when people are given another chance, they go on to do great things. Brandon Sanders knows this, too.

A MAN AT WORK

The chair squeaks. It’s an ancient brown metal thing, sturdy as a barge and covered in an orange substance that may or may not be Naugahyde. The ceiling is short some perforated tiles. The couch, which has seen better days, doubles as a storage unit for sports equipment. The dowdy office at Pueblo Magnet High School in Tucson, where Brandon Sanders now sits, features a few reminders of where he’s been. The autographed 1994 Sports Illustrated cover that proclaims, “Rock Solid: Arizona is No. 1,” with Sanders and his defensive mates mean-mugging next to a giant saguaro. A framed certificate noting that he was Arizona’s captain in 1995. Tchotchkes from his three years with the New York Giants as a special teamer and backup DB. Otherwise, the space is fairly typical for a head football coach and athletic director of a slightly rough-around-the-edges high-school program. On a PC monitor that sits atop an Eisenhower-era wooden desk, Sanders scans the Hudl video of the Pueblo Warriors’ next opponent. “Oh, they want to go,” he says to nobody in particular. “They want to play fast.”

Alex McIntyre

He has the same fierce eyebrows as in the SI cover, but the head is now shaved, the face is less angular, and though he’s chugging from a giant yellow can of Monster energy drink, his overall demeanor is calm. Don’t be fooled. In his second year, he attacks the job with the same intensity he hunted receivers coming across the middle as a college and pro safety. He’s in on a Sunday scouting and cleaning up the gym. That’s after spending all day Saturday here, first watching video with about 20 members of his squad, then helping stage a charity hoops game, then keeping an eye on youth football contests on Pueblo’s field. That followed a full school day and a long Friday night that culminated in his team’s 56-7 victory over Palo Verde.

Now, between loads of football and basketball laundry, he’s studying Pusch Ridge, a Christian academy that’s better endowed than Pueblo. Many places are. Pueblo’s South Tucson neighborhood has a median household income of less than $21,000. More than a few kids at the school, and on his team, experience the problems endemic to such poverty. Last year, police ticketed one of his players for underage driving. This wasn’t rebellious, joyride stuff; his family needed him to drive his grandmother to doctors. “No judge in America is going to say, ‘That’s OK due to the circumstances,’” Sanders says. “So this is the kind of thing we’re dealing with.”

But there’s pride here on this low-slung, sprawling 1950s-vintage campus. The hallways are tidy, the school produced a Gates Millennium Scholar last year, and the Lever Gym, donated years ago by Pueblo alum and NBA star Fat Lever, just got a refurbished floor with a gorgeous powder-blue paint job. Members of Lever’s 1977-78 state championship hoops teams played in the previous day’s charity game against the current boys and girls varsity teams, and several hundred alumni showed up to laugh and reminisce. “We’re trying to have events, not just games,” says Frank Rosthenhausler, Pueblo’s assistant principal, who along with the principal, Augustine Romero, wants to bring the entire community together around a stable institution. Back in the day, they called it school spirit.

And Sanders, as the athletic director and head football coach, is part of the push. In his first season in 2014, the Warriors posted a 7-3 record, Pueblo’s first winning season in 12 years. This year, the word has gotten out to the Pueblo community. On a pleasant early-October night, nearly a hundred fans made the trip across town to Palo Verde. They saw Pueblo’s senior stars, running back Jorge Romero and quarterback Justin Pledger, overwhelm the hosts. Romero rushed for more than 200 yards and four TDs, including a clever 21-yard gallop in which he swept right, was cut off, reversed his field and raced through the left side of Palo Verde’s defense and into the end zone. Pledger showed his versatility all night, on one play using his nimble feet to avoid a rush, moving to his right and heaving a perfect pass 60 yards in the air to Frankie Gomez for an 82-yard score.

At the end, the players gathered in front of the visiting bleachers and sang the Pueblo fight song as the band played along.

Alex McIntyre

Sanders’ job isn’t glamorous. Many of his players never set foot on a football field until high school, so some schemes he learned in college under Tomey and as a pro under current Bears head coach John Fox will have to wait. It’s not like he’s on an NFL or major-college staff, where under different circumstances he might be working now, and where many ex-teammates are today.

But Pueblo is Sanders’ show. “It’s all on me,” he says. “That is the absolute greatest, to be in control of your own program. Yes, it’s a lot of work. Yes, it’s a lot of time; I’m here in this office right now on a Sunday afternoon.”

Friday nights like the one at Palo Verde make it all worthwhile. The coaches’ box can’t contain him as he chatters at his players, praising every good tackle and telling them to shake off the mistakes. Next play! Next play!

He keeps any scolding brief and often repeats how proud he is of them — and how they can do better. “Don’t worry about scoreboard stuff,” he says after a Monday practice, anticipating the next game. “Worry about, ‘Next play, do my job. Do my job 100 percent right, next play. I make a mistake, all right, my bad, next play. What’s the next play?’

“We do that fellas, they’re not gonna beat you. We do that fellas, we’ll open some eyes, not just in our city but up north as well. Got it?”

YES SIRRR! they reply in unison.

When he talks about his players in more private moments, he often refers to them as “my guys out there,” and there’s no mistaking the pride in his voice. Like any job, there are headaches, and Friday nights don’t always go well. But after what he’s gone through to get here, he’s OK with that.

STRAIGHT OUTTA SOUTHEAST

In the 1980s and ’90s, a kid couldn’t grow up in Southeast San Diego without meeting either a soon-to-be-famous football player, or a gang member. This was Brandon Sanders’ world. The area has produced three Heisman Trophy winners, Marcus Allen, Rashaan Salaam and Reggie Bush; three-time All-NFL lineman Lincoln Kennedy; and a Super Bowl MVP in Terrell Davis — plus dozens of lesser-known college and pro players.

Sanders is the youngest of Betty Sanders-Nevis’ three children, and she and Brandon’s father divorced before Brandon was born. Betty worried about her son being bullied, so she signed him up for Pop Warner football. Always undersized, that never stopped Brandon from being “like a bull in a china closet on the field,” Betty says.

He vividly remembers one moment from those Pop Warner days. Playing linebacker, Sanders saw a gap open up right in front of him. He stepped in to fill it and hit “a brick wall” — Davis, the future 2,000-yard rusher for the Broncos, running through the hole. “He got up,” Sanders says, “and I didn’t.”

That didn’t happen often. Sanders overcame his lack of size with smarts and deceptive athleticism. He started on the basketball team at Helix High, the suburban San Diego sports factory that churned out Bill Walton and more recently Reggie Bush and Alex Smith, and he triple-jumped 50 feet in track.

And, damn, could he hit. Once, he broke an opposing receiver’s collarbone during a high-school all-star game; in a bar a few years later he saw the guy, who approached him to tell how bad he jacked him up. Sanders told him he was sorry, “but he tried to come across the middle. Can’t do that.”

One time late in a blowout Arizona win, Sanders hit a receiver just as the ball did on a corner route, hit him so hard the crowd collectively gasped. After doling out those cracked ribs, Sanders, who knew only one speed, felt bad about the mismatch and asked to be taken out of the game.

Betty remarried and moved the family into a safer neighborhood near Lemon Grove, which is what put her son in the Helix High district. The school buffered him against the worst influences in his old neighborhood, but didn’t shield him completely. The aggressiveness that enabled him to hurl himself at a charging Terrell Davis or to jump up and yell at teammates in Miami had a downside. Sanders fell in with some friends and relatives who dabbled in crime. More than once he stole cars from the San Diego State campus. “I didn’t do it because I needed the money,” he says. “It was just the excitement, the rush. It was the ‘Straight Outta Compton’ era. You got the ’80s drug epidemic. You got guys stealing and selling drugs and just gang-banging and everything else.”

It wasn’t organized, mafia-style crime, he says, but more like cliques that occasionally wandered off the path. One day it would be, “Let’s get together and we’ll go to Lincoln High School and we’ll play football.”

The next? “I’m broke today. I’m about to go up to San Diego State and steal a car.”

“All right, I’m with you. I’m broke, too.”

“Let’s go.”

That ended when John Singer, his basketball coach at Helix, caught wind of Sanders’ motor-vehicle heists, and upbraided the kid during his sophomore year. “He’s a big guy, loud, with a handlebar mustache,” Sanders says. “And he just told me, ‘You have a future in football.’”

This was true. Cal, UCLA and Colorado all recruited him hard, but he decided on Arizona — far enough away from neighborhood influences but close enough for his family to see him play. He soon found a home next to Bouie in the Wildcat secondary, and the hard-hitting, ball-hawking duo formed the backstop for the defense that became famous as “Desert Swarm.”

Stephen Dunn/Getty Images

“He was undersized but he was fearless in filling the gaps and knocking people out as they came across the middle,” says Bouie, “and he had a very strong personality between the lines, that was for sure.”

The Desert Swarm legend really began with that 8-7 loss to Miami. “We knew we could play with anyone after that,” Sanders says. The following season the Wildcats won 10 games and a share of the 1993 Pac-10 title, and they destroyed Miami 29-0 in the Fiesta Bowl. Most important, they beat Arizona State three times in a row. Their No. 1 ranking fell apart midway through the 1994 season, after an upset loss to Colorado State, and they finished 8-4 and 6-5 in Sanders’ final two seasons. But those teams remain fixed in fans’ memories — partly because of the warm bond they formed with Tomey, partly because of Bruschi’s long NFL career with the Patriots, and partly because Keanu Reeves immortalized them in “Speed.”

Sanders was an outstanding college player; Bill Walsh, who coached against Sanders at Stanford, once called him “pound for pound, the best player in the Pac-10.” But he went undrafted in 1996 after graduating with a degree in media arts emphasizing film, and then was cut by Kansas City in training camp. He worked at a Blockbuster store in Tucson, renting videos and writing screenplays on the side. The next year, he made the Giants as a free agent, where his ferocity made him a coaches’ favorite. The head coach at the time, Jim Fassel, called him “a live bullet.”

In the NFL, though, your measurables eventually catch up with you, and Sanders never weighed as much as 190 pounds. He was released by the Giants, then the Browns, and then the Giants again ahead of the 1999 season. But seven weeks after New York cut him the second time, Sanders had his finest moment in the league. The Giants’ top two free safeties had suffered injuries, so they called Sanders, who knew the defense. Just days removed from his couch in Arizona, he made his first NFL start, racking up eight tackles and a forced fumble in a 23-17 overtime victory over the Eagles. He remembers Jessie Armstead asking him after the game, “Do you know how hard it is to do what you just did?”

His greatest victory looked to be off the field. At a time when many children in Southeast fell into drugs and crime, he seemed to escape. Ahead of the 1998 Super Bowl in San Diego, Sanders agreed to be interviewed for a New York Daily News article on the intersection of the football and gang cultures in his old neighborhood. From a hilltop high above San Diego, he pointed out which streets were Bloods and which were Crips. Kids here couldn’t avoid gangs, he explained, and were almost always “affiliated” in some way. But that didn’t mean you were a crook. It just meant you didn’t forget where you came from. “You can grow up and be affiliated,” he said that day, but “you don’t have to be a criminal. You have a chance to do other things.”

Sanders had that chance. And then he slipped.

VEGAS

Before Sanders’s fall, though, there were good times, in Las Vegas, a place where it seems OK to take gambles and risks you might not take anywhere else.

Sanders was no stranger to the place. That SI cover on his office shelf has a Sin City connection. On the eve of the ‘94 photo shoot, Sanders was in Vegas with some of his friends, and had no money for a plane ticket. He didn’t know the photo was for the cover, and considered blowing it off. But he’s always enjoyed gambling. Throughout his football career, Sanders won big money playing Madden video games for high stakes. He went downstairs with his last $20, and by the next morning, he’d won $800 from slots, blackjack and craps, caught a cab to the airport, bought a plane ticket to Tucson and made it to the cover shoot. Vegas treated him well. Little wonder then, that when Sanders had an offer to play for the Las Vegas Outlaws in WWE mogul Vince McMahon’s newly hatched XFL in 2000, he leapt at it. “I loved it,” Sanders says of the XFL. “Loved it probably even more than I loved New York.”

Todd Warshaw/Allsport

His voice rises when you ask if the demon baby of a wrestling promoter and a then-desperate network, NBC, was legitimate. “Absolutely it was real football,” Sanders says.

But yes, it was goofy. McMahon controlled every aspect of the league, and he tried to make a TV star out of Sanders, who enthusiastically obliged. McMahon liked how Sanders talked trash in a promo and demanded more. By the final preseason scrimmage in Vegas, Sanders had honed his shtick. They were playing the Los Angeles Xtreme, quarterbacked by Tommy Maddox, a former UCLA wunderkind who left after his sophomore year to become John Elway’s heir apparent in Denver. It didn’t quite work out, so now Maddox was a castaway in a new league. Sanders decided to have some fun. “I went hard at Tommy Maddox,” he says, ranting about how he had just been selling insurance and ripping his UCLA ties — and L.A. in general. “I was over the top,” he says.

The jests shocked anyone used to the No Fun League, and sounded worse in an empty stadium, playing on a continuous loop on the scoreboard. His old-school coach, Jim Criner, told him, “I’ve never been so embarrassed by a player in all my life,” Sanders recalls. “He was pissed.”

But who was Sanders supposed to listen to? The coach? Or McMahon, the owner of the league? Sanders led the ill-fated squad in interceptions — and had a grand time doing it. He remembers attending one team function at a tony Vegas nightspot, and being guided through a series of passages to an exclusive VIP section, “like in Goodfellas.” Unfortunately, Sanders’ life soon resembled the iconic film about gangsters obliviously, almost comically, spinning out of control. “That may have been why I got in so much trouble later,” he says of his Outlaw days. “God was punishing me for how much fun I had.”

A FAVOR FOR A FRIEND

The XFL was gone, and the NFL wasn’t calling in early June of 2001. But NFL Europe’s Amsterdam Admirals asked him to join them as their spring season wound down — a couple of weeks, a thousand bucks a game.

He flies to Frankfurt’s league headquarters for a physical, where the airline loses his luggage. His hotel has no hot water. His European cell phone doesn’t work. Meets the team for a game in Berlin, where he doesn’t play a down in a 41-10 defeat. Gets off the plane in Amsterdam, steps outside, and rain starts to pour. The bus from the airport blows a transmission. When he finally gets to the hotel, there’s no power on his floor. Orders some stroganoff. It’s inedible.

“This is a bad, bad, bad omen,” he says.

Soon a friend, whom he won’t name, calls from the States to ask a favor. Another friend, Lloyd Lake, who played basketball at Helix and grew up in Southeast, calls him, too. (What follows is based on court records and interviews with Sanders; Lake did not respond to an interview request made through his attorney, Brian Watkins.) Lake tells Sanders their buddy is having a bad time with drugs, he’s got this marijuana at home, and he doesn’t want to get caught with it. Can he leave it at your house? Lake asks. He’ll get himself straight, then he’ll come take it.

Lake and Sanders were tight. Sanders dated one of Lloyd’s sisters, Leslie, and Lake’s mother and father were almost like a second set of parents to him. Lloyd was the fun-loving pal from the old days who had a nose for trouble; he had convictions for domestic violence and drug possession in the 1990s. “I would tell Brandon that with certain people, you should say, ‘Hi,’ and ‘’Bye,’ and move on,” says Betty. But Sanders never turned his back on a friend.

So Sanders says OK, as long as the weed’s gone by the time he returns to Tucson from Europe. “That was a fateful mistake,” he says now. Sanders thought they were storing 20, maybe 30 pounds. When he arrives at his suburban Tucson home, he sees it’s way more than that. He calls his friends. “Get this out of my house ASAP,” Sanders says.

Nothing happens. Sanders is ready to dispose of it in the desert, but Lake says to wait; their buddy will pick it up. Only problem is it won’t all fit in the trunk of a car. Lake flies in from San Diego to help Sanders cut the bale down into manageable pieces. It’s hard. Sanders, a liberal arts major, and Lake, who barely finished high school, devise a plan that requires engineering and a machine with which they are not familiar.

Guillermo Legaria/AFP/GettyImages

“Get this out of my house ASAP”

They buy a gas-powered log splitter.

They figure they’ll use it to break up the bale and compact pieces of it into a metal mold and then put them into plastic bags that can fit in the car trunk. But the log splitter isn’t designed to do this. It takes hours, and the whole time the gas generator is fumigating the closed garage with carbon monoxide. “It’s smoky in there, I’m getting lightheaded, and I say to Lake, ‘We’re going to kill ourselves.’”

It gets worse. The next day, they decide to take the mold to a metal shop and ask the shopkeepers to make a bigger one. The number one thing, Lake and Sanders agree, is not to leave the pot-tainted mold with the shop. The shopkeeper says he needs to keep it as a model.

They leave it behind.

They agree that when they go back, they’ll take off their license plates, grab the molds and leave, so that if the shop calls the cops, the car can’t be traced. They go home, start playing Madden, fall asleep. When they wake up, it’s past closing time. They call, and the guy on the phone says he’ll stay open until they come. Lake and Sanders decide to go.

They forget to take off the license plate.

On the drive back, Sanders notices they’re being followed. He and Lake pull into a supermarket, and a white car pulls in behind them. Lake goes right up to the car and asks for directions to the airport. The driver has a badge, but denies he’s a cop.

Sanders and Lake, really nervous now, jump back on the freeway. A different car follows. They jump off the freeway, make some quick turns and lose the chase car. They head home, but vow to park away from Sanders’ driveway.

Then they go back to the house and park in the driveway.

Not long after, Sanders steps outside to get the mail. Plain-clothes police meet him and ask questions. Sanders shows them the molds in his truck, and the officers say they smell marijuana from a vent in his house. Sanders believes that was impossible, but the officers get a search warrant. He’s run headlong into a different sort of brick wall.

It was a state case, and the Arizona prosecutors cut a deal with Lake and Sanders: three years probation for possession. Sanders believes he could have fought the legality of the search warrant, but he had already piled up huge legal fees and took the deal. It looked like the right move. By the time of the guilty plea, in spring of 2002, Sanders had an offer from Canada’s Montreal Alouettes, and Arizona authorities agreed to let him work there while serving out his probation. But just before the first scrimmage, Montreal released him. “They didn’t give me a whole bunch of details,” he says.

Early in the morning on Friday, June 14, 2002, a few days after he flew home from Montreal, Sanders heard a knock on his door. He opened it to find 16 armed federal officers. They told him they had him on tape “saying things.”

The next thing he knew, Brandon Sanders was on Con Air, the federal “airline” that ferries prisoners, as part of his journey to San Diego via Oklahoma City for a bail hearing. The real Con Air is nothing like the Nicholas Cage film. “It’s just like a regular plane,” Sanders says. Except there’s no logo on the outside, and all the passengers wear ankle and wrist restraints. Also, if you get up for any reason, there’s no guarantee your seat will be available when you return. “When I find out I’m sitting next to Big Honcho,” he says, “I know there’s no way I’m going to the bathroom on this flight.”

Wayne Alfred Day, aka “Big Honcho,” helped found the Grape Street Watts Crips. He’d supposedly helped set up a long-lasting truce between Bloods and Crips in LA in 1992, following the rioting that broke out after police were acquitted in the beating of the black motorist Rodney King. This was Sanders’ seatmate. As Sanders tells it, the nearly mythical figure gave him tips on surviving in jail, and spun stories about the early days of the Southern California gang culture, “basically giving me a seminar on his life.”

At his bail hearing, the judge told Sanders he was “on the edge of a cliff,” implicated in a drug-trafficking case involving San Diego gang members or associates, some of whom he knew, and one he knew well — Lloyd Lake. The FBI had wiretaps on Lake and Sanders for months, all part of a three-year investigation. In its stories about the roundup of 15 suspects, including an accused cop killer, the Associated Press led with Sanders, the pro athlete. But in the indictment, Sanders’ name was at the bottom, indicating to Sanders that they didn’t think he wasn’t much of a player.

Initially, though, the government took a hard line. Prosecutors insisted he could face 30 years in prison — longer than he had been alive. That terrified him. They claimed to have video evidence of him throwing gang signs during NFL games. This exasperated him. Any of Sanders’ teenage gang affiliations had long cooled by the time he reached the NFL, but more practically, he was a special-teamer and backup DB, not exactly a darling of the TV cameras.

Because of so many defendants and so many moving parts, the prosecution took its time. The feds eventually split off Lake and Sanders from the other cases, and nothing happened for months, then years.  “It was like watching paint dry,” says Sanders’ mother.

Meanwhile, the government pressed Sanders to give up information on Lake or someone else. “But I didn’t know anything,” he says.

The feds obtained some major convictions, including a 17-year sentence for another defendant in the case who chose to go to trial. But while Lake spent three years in jail awaiting trial, he ultimately only received probation after a plea deal. Lake wasn’t through finding trouble, though. Rap fans may be familiar with Lake as a man who in recent years called out Suge Knight as a snitch on the Internet. USC football fans know Lake as the wannabe agent who gave extra benefits to Reggie Bush while trying to court him as a client, transactions that cost Bush his Heisman and USC four years of probation. Sanders knows Lake as a former friend.

It would be convenient to blame Lake, but Sanders takes responsibility for what he did. “I never should have had that pot in my house, and I should have just gotten rid of it once it was there,” he says. “I’m a grown man. I could have said no.” In his final plea agreement, he admitted guilt to a felony charge, accessory after the fact, primarily for knowingly evading a law-enforcement officer in his car. His sentence? One year of probation, no prison time.

Still, he lost his football career, all his money — everything. And as a convicted felon, he was borderline unemployable.

DOWN IN THE HOLE

By the time he was 28 years old, Brandon Sanders had a firm belief in hard work. It had earned him a scholarship, an education and six-figure salaries in professional football. “I was a grinder,” he says. “I was under the impression that nothing was unattainable if you were willing to dedicate yourself and work hard for it.”

After his court case, he questioned all of that. “No matter how much I played in the NFL; no matter how much I played at Arizona; no matter how much people knew me — I have a college degree and everything else — a criminal charge trumps all that. It just trumps it.”

Research on unemployment among ex-cons bears this out; employers are twice as likely to hire welfare recipients or long-term jobless applicants as felons. The odds are even longer if a felon is African-American.

Sanders felt like he could still play pro football, but now that was out. He knew he’d like to coach, but that was a non-starter, too. With two and later four children to support, he needed money, and he was willing to do any job, cobbling together two or three gigs at a time. Prep work for oil changes on cars in 110-degree desert heat. Part-time work officiating and setting up games at a Jewish community center and a local parks department. A lot attendant at a car dealership. Off-hours stocking shelves during the holiday rush at Toys R Us. “A great Christmas for the kids,” he says, “but that almost killed me.” The worst was cleaning up bedding at a hospital; he’s a germophobe and couldn’t take it.

The lot attendant job turned into a sales position for a while, but he quit in the fall of 2003 after a disagreement with a boss. Tucson’s economy was strong, and he thought he would be able to get something else. He sent applications everywhere, as many as 50 in one week. He did not receive a single callback for months. Around the same time, he learned he would lose his four-bedroom house.

“I was like in tears,” he says. He even considered asking the court to revoke his bail. “I’ll go back and I’ll sit in the jail cell maybe down near San Diego, and all I got to do is whatever they’re saying. … I mean, I didn’t want to deal with life anymore. I always used to say, ‘I can’t understand how somebody could ever say that.’ But I was there. I was like, I just don’t want to live.”

In early 2004, he finally caught a break when a friend helped him get a job at a call center, selling women’s clothing over the phone. Did the bone-crunching ex-NFL player care that he was now catering to people in their 60s who wanted something more fashionable than elastic waist bands and easy-fit blouses? Not a bit. “I got to talk to women all day,” he says. He was good at it, got promoted, and even after being laid off during the 2008 recession, found a similar job with another company.

Life had calmed down and Sanders settled in. He had finally found some stability, enough to start thinking about football again.

I’M A COACH

On a Friday afternoon Brandon Sanders stands in a cage. It’s the equipment room under the Pueblo Magnet High School grandstand, filled with the beat of rap music and the din of teenagers who in a few hours will play a football game. He’s in a good mood, handing out game jerseys and pants, and the occasional thigh pad. “Hey coach!” A squatty kid hollers at him and sticks out his tongue from the other side of the room. “Beltran!” Sanders yells back. Michael Beltran, a 5’11, 330-pound junior lineman, is one of the smartest kids on the team. In a science course where the teacher regularly fails 80 percent of the class, Sanders says, Beltran is acing tests. He’s also a team clown. Once, during a film session, Beltran commented that the other team’s quarterback was “a fat ass.”

“Beltran, are you kidding me?” Sanders said. “Ain’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”

“He’s a quarterback, coach, not a lineman,” the player explained.

Alex McIntyre

As his players gear up, Sanders is describing how his slow road to coaching suddenly sped up. He had asked about coaching before, but the blot on his record held him back. Then Tomey told him that if he wanted to coach, he had to be a coach — anywhere. So he assisted on a semipro team, helped out a youth football league, did personal training, then joined the staff at nearby Pima Community College coaching defensive backs. All the while, he kept a day job.

In January of 2011, he heard Tomey was involved with the Casino Del Sol College All-Star Game in Tucson, a showcase for lower-level college players with NFL dreams who didn’t get a Senior Bowl invite. Sanders asked if he could observe, but another coach backed out at the last minute, and suddenly he was in charge of the DBs. It was a fluke, and a blast. And his team won.

Not long after that, he had a revelation, “a lightning bolt,” he says. He called his mom. “I know what I want to do,” he told her. “I’m a coach.”

Less than a year later, he was in his car listening to a sports talk station when he heard Tomey tell the host that Brandon Sanders was going to be on the staff for the January 2012 Casino Del Sol game. “He hadn’t told me yet,” Sanders laughs.

He spent 2012 on the Pima staff, then jumped to a high school assistant job — but not just any job. Jeff Scurran, one of the most decorated coaches in Arizona high school history, was taking over the program at Catalina Foothills. Twice before, at different schools, Scurran had taken winless teams all the way to the state finals within two years. Scurran had made some enemies in the coaching ranks in Southern Arizona, but that didn’t matter to Sanders. “I know I don’t know everything,” Sanders says, “and this was someone I could learn from.”

Sure enough, Cat Foothills, quarterbacked by current Arizona coach Rich Rodriquez’s son, Rhett, went from an 0-10 team to an 8-3 playoff squad in the 2013 season.

All of a sudden, Sanders had a resume. He had another important credential, too. Before he could coach high school, he needed a state fingerprint clearance card, and Scurran helped shepherd him through the process. The little laminated slab, about the size of a driver’s license, might be Sanders’ most cherished possession. It doesn’t expunge a criminal record, but it’s proof that the state of Arizona sets that record aside. For anyone thinking of hiring a convicted felon, it marks a debt paid.

Five high school head coaching jobs came open that winter, and Sanders sent resumes to three schools. Rosthenhausler, Pueblo’s assistant principal, called back first and set up an interview in December of 2013. Sanders thought it went OK, but this was all new. “I remember leaving there thinking, I’m happy I went through it, and I’ll be better for the next two.”

Pueblo offered him the head coach position the next week.

The next summer, Pueblo named him athletic director.

That fall, the Arizona Daily Star named him coach of the year.

Alex McIntyre

THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON

When first contacted about a profile last spring, Sanders was gracious but hesitant. This fall would be crucial for his program, he said. For decades, Pueblo had lived with a culture of losing, and despite the winning record in Sanders’ first year, the Warriors failed to make the postseason in 2014, continuing a 25-year playoff drought. A bad 2015 season could reverse Pueblo’s progress. He agreed to cooperate only if the story ran after the season.

The coach didn’t want any distractions, and going public with his legal history could create one. “I don’t like bringing up the negative stuff with papers,” he says, “because I know somebody’s gonna shoot darts at me.”

Alex McIntyre

Yet he’s never feared his players finding out about his past. Instead, he’s open about it, telling them how a lifetime of achievement can disappear “just from the company you keep.” His greatest regret is a teachable moment.

Once the season started he’d recap how his squad did, and how he did, what worked and what didn’t. What usually worked was a spread offense that allowed Pueblo’s playmakers — his do-everything QB Pledger, his punishing running back Romero, and his quicksilver wideout Gomez — do their thing.  “I spent my whole life trying to win games 6-3, or 3-0,” he says. He wanted wide-open football now. He lost sight of that once, in the Warriors’ 32-6 loss to Flowing Wells in the third week of the season. Thinking he had an advantage up front, Sanders overruled his offensive coaches and called too many power running plays. “If I’d stayed out of the way,” he says, “we’d have been in it.”

The season turned the next week against Thatcher, a school in a tiny farm and mining town near the New Mexico border, two hours from Tucson. The Warriors had every reason to lose. Thatcher runs the veer, and Sanders was at an athletic directors convention on Monday and Tuesday, so his players had only two days to prepare for an option offense they’d never seen. The team bus arrived to pick them up 50 minutes late, and the Warriors made it to the field just 35 minutes before kickoff. When Sanders asked the refs if they could delay the game 10 minutes so his kids could get a proper warmup, “They were like, ‘Yeeeeaaah, uh … no.’”

Thatcher ran a tricky reverse to set up two scores, and Pueblo turned the ball over three times in the red zone. The Warriors were down 12-6 in the third when things got biblical. Swarms of gnats and grasshoppers hit the field. Such a series of unfortunate events might have sunk past Pueblo teams. Just a week before at Flowing Wells, the kids gave up a long running play with the score still 14-6, and acted like the game was over.

Alex McIntyre

But at the AD’s convention earlier that week, Sanders sat in on a talk by former Virginia Tech women’s soccer coach Kelly Cagle. She described how whenever anyone on her team would make a mistake, whether coaches or players, they had a signal to acknowledge it. Mess up, give the signal, take responsibility, and move on. Nobody harps on it. Sanders implemented the system the week of the Thatcher game — mess up, signal, own it, move on — and it worked. “We kept our focus,” he says. “Everybody just kept pushing, pushing, pushing.”

Pueblo scored 20 unanswered points en route to its most important victory of the season, a 26-18 triumph that started a four-game winning streak. The Warriors finished the regular season 7-3, with a 6-0 record to win their division. Their final regular-season home game, a 73-41 victory over Santa Rita, clinched Pueblo’s first playoff berth in a quarter century.

Betty Sanders-Nevis made the five-hour trip from San Diego to be there. She saw the Warriors’ open affection for their coach, the hugs, the respect. “They love him,” she says. And she witnessed her son’s first sideline shower, when his players dumped the contents of two water coolers on his head in celebration.

THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

Pueblo lost its playoff game, 42-13, at Estrella Foothills, a suburban Phoenix school. Sanders says he learned something: You can’t treat the playoffs like just another game. He says he’ll adjust next time. He won’t divulge how. He still has some secrets.

On-field results are only one measure of success, and in high school, nowhere near the most important. Pueblo always struggled with keeping players academically eligible, so Sanders mandated twice-a-week study halls. Miss them, and the whole team runs gassers. Last year, a ref told Sanders he’d never seen so many Pueblo players suited up for the final game. This year, 97 percent of his players maintained their grades and stayed eligible all season.

“Before, there was no discipline, and kids just came and went,” Romero says. “It was on the kids’ time. No one paid attention. But when coach came in, he just flipped it around. He laid down what his rules were, and we obeyed him.”

More than discipline improved, though. “He’s helped us become a family,” says Pledger. “He showed us how to play together as one.”

Alex McIntyre

Nobody experienced that more than Brianna Bertsch, a 5’5, 265-pound senior who plays as a backup on the offensive and defensive line. Bertsch is a girl, which was an issue before Sanders arrived. “My freshman year and sophomore year, no one would really talk to me,” she says. “After he came, it’s like they’re my big brothers.”

Her best football memory? She was on the ballot for Homecoming royalty along with running mate Skyblue Estrella, a boy on the cheer squad. When results were announced at halftime, they lost, but the whole team and all the cheerleaders ran out on the field cheering for Bertsch and Estrella. “It was so cute,” she says. “I loved it.”

Beltran, the lineman with the quick wit and the 3.7 GPA, says Sanders sets big goals for his players, the biggest being to overcome whatever circumstances life hands them — including Pueblo’s reputation. Asked to define that reputation, Beltran starts laughing. “Oh, this is gonna be fun. Well, I’m sure you know we had a couple of rough seasons before he got here. The students, you know, like there’s drugs and stuff. And the community that a lot of us grew up around, there’s gangs up and down 36^th and Ajo, right down the street. But he pretty much just tells us, don’t let that be a reason to quit. Rise above the occasion, and what I mean by that is, push ourselves in the classroom, push ourselves out here on the field. He’s always on us about our grades, and he’s really just giving us a chance to make it out of what most of us have been through. It’s been real cool that he’s done that.”

He’s taught them a game, and something else. “Integrity,” Beltran says. “Definitely integrity. We had every reason to give up, every reason to quit. Odds are against us, being Pueblo, you know what I mean? And he really taught us to just rise above it.”

Alex McIntyre

Like any good coach, Sanders is never satisfied. He’d like more players. He craves a state championship. He wants to finance a new artificial-turf field, a blue one, Pueblo colors, that the whole community can use year-round.

And yes, he wouldn’t mind a higher-paying job someday, maybe at a higher level. So many of his peers are coaching in college or the pros — ex-Giants such as Tyrone Wheatley, Sam Garnes, Jessie Armstead and Ike Hilliard — and he wonders how he’d do.

But this is where he’s supposed to be now, a place where the future isn’t a void and the past isn’t a shackle. He sometimes worries that people will use his record against him, that they’ll try to take away his second chance, that they’ll paint him as a bad guy. “I’m not a bad guy,” he says. “Do I think I was around bad people? Absolutely. Do I think I wasn’t smart? Absolutely. Did I make some bad decisions? One-hundred percent. But I owned up to it, and I lost a lot for it.”

He ended up gaining a lot, too, winding up here, in this office, on that squeaky old chair, on everyone else’s day off. “Sitting here, watching film, learning, seeing what someone else’s team does, and then seeing those kids’ faces at the end of their game and being around them, it is a special thing,” he says. “I’m fortunate. I truly, truly am. And now, it’s like I have to do what I’m doing. I have to train kids. I have to help kids find a better way.”

In the worst of times, when the case looked like it wouldn’t end, and it felt like he might never find work, and the game he loved was a receding memory, he would ask God for any glimmer of hope, and add: Thank you for the little candlelight you give me in the darkness.

“It was funny,” he says. “Everytime I was like, this might be the day I just don’t want to do it anymore, and think, ‘Can I give up? Can I really just give up?’ there would be a phone call.”

Maybe from one of his uncles, or a cousin, or an ex-teammate, or a guy from Southeast. How you doing man? Just checking up on you. Let me know that you’re doing all right. Hey, here’s what it is, you know we’re behind you. Keep working hard. We’re proud of what you’re trying to do. Wherever your mind is, keep the fight going.

“Every single time,” Sanders says, marveling. “Every time it got to the worst point, it would be crazy, like that same day…”

After awhile, he came to accept it all. If a bill can’t be paid, let it go and figure out how to buy the groceries. If the lights go out, find a way to turn them back on. Mess up? Take responsibility. Acknowledge it and move on. Keep working. Keep going.

Next play.

Alex McIntyre