The Preface: Thoughts Behind a Conversation with Wimp Sanderson

Tucked back off of Highway 280, outside of Birmingham on the way to Columbiana, hidden from view and entrenched in fairways, there is a neighborhood. Getting into this neighborhood is not easy. First off, it’s tricky to find. I wasn’t involved with writing the storyline for Zero Dark Thirty, but my understanding is that they had a pretty tough time finding that fellow they were looking for. This isn’t that hard, but still, it’s tough. Once that’s been done, there is a security guard who must be charmed to gain entrance into the neighborhood. She will be perched in her brick enclosure, blocking the entrance better than the Border Patrol controls the Texas line. Once she feels her legitimacy as a law enforcement officer has properly sunk in, and she has assessed that you are not, in fact, a criminal, she will begrudgingly allow passage. Thank her and drive on your merry way. Soon after, there is a realization that she was not, in fact, a security guard. She was Peter, and the mechanical gate she just opened was really a gate made of Pearls, and surely you must be dead because that’s the only explanation for how incredible these houses are. This is rarefied air, and you impulsively slow down to take it all in.Eventually though, even 15 MPH leads somewhere, and you turn into the driveway of a beautiful yet somewhat comparatively modest home, where there is a man in sweatpants waving at you to park by the garage. You get out, and the first thing he says is, “Told you it was a tough place to find.”This is how I met Wimp Sanderson on a Tuesday in November. Late, cold, and with him standing on his front porch in a sweat suit.When I was asked to track down and meet with Coach Wimp Sanderson, I reacted very much like my grandmothers would react if they were told to meet Kim Kardashian. First, “Who?” Second, “Is that their real name?” Third, “Sure, let’s do it” (my grandmothers are real dope, they’re up for anything. You keep doing you, Gran and Granny). So there I found myself, walking into the house of a man who was the National Men’s Collegiate Basketball Coach of the Year four years before I was born, wondering how we were going to breach what I assumed would be an intense generational gap.That lasted all of ten seconds, when Coach Wimp Sanderson made his second statement, “You a Kentucky fan? I saw your plates. It’s gonna be interesting to see how that platoon system works out for them this year.”I knew then that we’d be just fine.Coach Sanderson and I talked for a while that November morning. We talked about basketball mostly, but a host of other issues as well. When I sat down to start writing about that conversation, all of a sudden I had too much to say. So my boss/editor/general overseer thought it would be a good idea to break the experience into two pieces. This is sort of a preface piece, where I can get my thoughts in order and sort of roll out the red carpet for the second, which will deal with the experience more directly. That sounded like a good idea, so that’s what’s happening here, if you hadn’t quite caught on yet. I just wanted to take a minute to talk about my first impressions and thoughts from that day.Coach Sanderson has been nothing short of wonderful to me. He has been easy to get in touch with, has been polite on the phone, and hospitable in person. He’s a funny, ornery man in the way older men from this part of the country can be. A lifetime of speaking his mind and having others speak their minds to him has left him, not necessarily displaced in today’s world, but maybe a little misunderstood. He certainly can come across as short or curt. In an age where most of us will veil how we really feel on any issue so as not to seem confrontational or rude, Coach Sanderson can be seen, in that context, like a bull in an antique shop. If you ask him a stupid question, he’ll tell you “That’s a stupid question” then do his best to answer it anyway. However, that’s not to say he isn’t a politically savvy man as well. You don’t earn and keep the head coaching job of a major college sports program without a great deal of intelligence and an ability to respond coyly to questions when the occasion calls.Sanderson is complex. His hospitality has been tremendous and much appreciated. He did not need to return my phone calls and emails, nor did he need to agree to sit down with me and have a conversation. But it has not had the suffocating, overtly fake tinge that sometimes manifests itself in the South. Kill ‘em with kindness, as they say, is not Sanderson’s move. We don’t know each other, so there’s no need for him to treat me like a long-lost brother. I respect that. He is an intelligent man who respects intelligence in others and does not have the time, or maybe the patience, to have menial conversations. He’s opinionated at times, yet remarkably coy at others, tantalizing me with a number of comments I can see he might want to make, but then refrains.I say all that to say this: I do not believe, for a second, that I know this man any better than you. I have been a tourist in his life, pausing momentarily to take in the sights and sounds he has to offer, then moving on with my own life. I want you to understand this before reading the story to come. I want my writing to reflect the experience of that conversation, but I also want you to walk away with the same thoughts as I did. “Man, I’d really like to know more about that guy.” Anyway, please keep these things in mind when reading the Sanderson article that will come out in the January print publication of 78.The man in the sweatpants and I would really appreciate it. 78