Barry Sanders Essay Research Paper My article — страница 2

comfortable outside of my own little environment and people can see more of me, more inside of the person. Before, I was a person who felt out of their element and was just kind of being, sitting back and watching everything. "At home, they knew I wasn?t just this quiet and reserved person, the way people thought I was here. It?s just a matter of comfort, that?s all it is. Even in the locker room, people that I?m not real close with I can laugh and joke. And now, I?m more prone to try to defend myself from attacks from Brett Perriman and Herman Moore." Sanders starts cracking up. Get it? He has just made a joke. "I can sit and talk with my oldest son for hours and hours. Barry and I could never do that. But the last time he called, he asked to talk tome. We talked

for quite a while. Barry, he used to make me mad because he was just like his mother. Looks like her. Quiet like her. I wanted him to have something of me. But I wouldn?t let him be outgoing. ?Barry,? I said, ?you?ve got to be different.? Ask him. He?ll remember."?William Sanders, Barry?s father Peter Schaffer, one of Sanders? agents, lives in Denver. He belongs to a health club where Sanders and former Michigan receiver Mercury Hayes joined a pick up basketball game last year. Sanders! , who?s 5-feet-8 and 203 pounds, wore a plain T-shirt and shorts. Hayes? shirt said"Michigan" on the front. The next day, a couple of Schaffer?s friends who played in the game sought him out. "Hey, it was sure fun playing basketball with Mercury Hayes!" they said. Schaffer

didn?t have the heart to tell them who the other guy was. Stories like that one are still as popular as they were in 1988 — the year Sanders won the Heisman Trophy as a junior at Oklahoma State and turned down an invitation to the White House because he said he had to study. Or how about the time two years ago in Miami when Sanders spent the evening in the lounge at the Marriott? Think you?re onto some juicy gossip, right? Well, Sanders wasn?t attached to any bar stool. He and Steve Atwater of the Denver Broncos were in a corner, playing Pop-A-Shot basketball all night. Former Lions offensive tackle Lomas Brown has a good one, too. He can list the times Sanders has been over to his house for dinner, but you! wouldn?t have known he was there. "You know how it?s kids in one

room, adults in another?" says Brown, who spent 11 years with the Lions before he signed with the Arizona Cardinals last February. "Well, most of the time Barry would be with my kids, sitting on the floor playing a video game or eating off their plates watching a movie." Sanders, who has one year left on a four-year, $17.2-million contract he signed in December 1993, still lives in the $175,000 house in Rochester Hills he bought in 1989 after the Lions made him their first-round draft pick. But back in Wichita, he moved his parents into a new 7,000-square-foot house three years ago. The white brick home, which sits on 11 acres with a private pond stocked with bass, crappie and catfish, replaces the three-bedroom, 850-square-foot home Barry and his 10 brothers and

sisters grew up in. "You do what?s right," Sanders says with a shrug. Well, that includes everything from paying the college tuitions for his brothers! and sisters to making sure his Nike contract still has a clause that says the company must supply his former high school football coach with 60 pairs of shoes a year. One person who knows Sanders best outside his family is Mark McCormick, a newspaper reporter at the Wichita Eagle. They grew up on the same street, Volutsia, on the city?s north side, and have been friends since McCormick got over the day Sanders beat him up in kindergarten. When Sanders was attending Oklahoma State, McCormick was studying journalism at the University of Kansas. He was on a tight budget and got sick, losing 30 pounds one semester.

"Dang, what?s going on with you?" Sanders asked. "I?m in college," McCormick replied. "I?m starving." Sanders wanted to help and offered his Pell Grant money, which McCormick refused. A few years later, after Sanders joined the Lions, he heard that McCormick was evicted from an apartment after getting his first job. He mailed him $500. "I?m at the point now in our rel! ationship that I can never repay him unless I give him a lung or a kidney," McCormick says. "And he still calls me all the time." After rushing for 1,470 yards and breaking Billy Sims? single-season club record his rookie year, Sanders gave each of the Lions? offensive linemen a Rolex watch, valued at more than $10,000. On the back was the inscription: "Thanks