NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Kenny Anderson walked north along the main pathway through the campus of Fisk University, amid buildings that represent some of this city’s most important moments, toward the dormitories, where a recruit and his parents were supposed to meet him.
But wait. Were the dorms supposed to be later? Anderson stopped, sighed and pulled out his phone. Short-term memory loss is a lasting effect, a likely permanent one, of the massive stroke he suffered in February 2019 and the smaller stroke he had about 14 months later.
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“I have to write everything down now … everything,” Anderson said. “I never had to do that. I remembered everything, everyone’s name, everything. I hate it.”
The list of complaints beyond that is short. Anderson, 52, is where he wants to be. He hasn’t done much winning since Fisk hired him to be its men’s basketball coach in the fall of 2018, and he hasn’t made much money — relative, at least, to the more than $63 million he earned in a 14-year NBA career and to the salaries of college basketball coaches at higher levels.
NAIA coaches typically sweep their gym floors, wash their uniforms and need multiple years to reach six figures. Anderson’s name did not award him a higher salary than the norm when Fisk hired him, and his practices start at 6 a.m. because class schedules at Fisk don’t adjust for athletics.
But this job is what he saw in it, fulfillment in a journey through missteps that have played out in public and trauma he no longer needs to keep private. Certainly, they are linked, as therapy, a near-death experience and his wife of 16 years, Natasha, have helped him see.
Anderson, hailed as one of the best point guard prospects to come out of New York and the No. 2 pick in the 1991 NBA Draft from Georgia Tech, wants his players to see the game the way he sees it and can get frustrated when it doesn’t translate. When he tells them about the drinking that kept him from his ceiling as a pro, the DUI that cost him a high school coaching job, the two men who sexually assaulted him as a child and the abuse and addiction he saw his late mother endure, that’s what he needs to stick.
“He talks about everything with us, and it can’t help but get your attention, knowing what he’s gone through,” said Devyn Payne, Fisk’s senior point guard.
“To me, this is real coaching,” Anderson said. “I don’t want to be on the back of a bench with a pad. I could probably get a job somewhere (else), but I don’t want that. It’s about these young guys, giving them the right path, the work ethic, the desire. Just live a good life. Take care of your family. That’s what I want for them.”
Anderson has seven children with five women, going back to a relationship he had in college and including two previous wives. This is an oft-cited statistic in a personal history that has fed many a tabloid cover. Anderson, however, considers himself a father of eight. He has raised Tiana, Natasha’s daughter from a previous relationship, and his own son Kenny Jr., since both were toddlers.
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Tiana now is a senior at Fisk, on course to graduate with a degree in psychology. She is especially interested in mental health for adolescents. Attending Fisk was “very intentional,” Natasha said, and not just so Tiana could be close to Anderson. When he applied for the job in 2018, Anderson knew it was an HBCU (historically Black college or university) but not much else. He didn’t know a lot of Black history at all. Fisk has changed that.
“I had no idea,” Anderson said. “I mean, John Lewis. W.E.B. Du Bois. The things these people did, it’s amazing. People need to know about this.”
Nashville is full of colleges and universities, including four — Vanderbilt, Tennessee State, Belmont and Lipscomb — that play NCAA Division I basketball. Fisk is the oldest institute of higher learning in the city. It opened months after the Civil War ended, in January 1866, and was founded by the American Missionary Association for the education of freed slaves. It was named after General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, and he provided facilities at the former site of Union Army barracks.
The NAACP, the civil rights movement and the science of sociology all trace back to the first African American institution to gain accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the first to be approved by the Association of American Universities.
“Kenny and Tiana have really been learning about their culture together these past few years,” Natasha, who grew up in Panama City, Fla., and whose family is from Puerto Rico, told The Athletic. “Kenny knew what he knew culturally, but this has given him a foundation of actually learning his history, things you need to talk about as a Black individual in this country.
“Tiana wanted to learn about that side of who she is. She has mostly been familiar with the Puerto Rican side of her heritage. The way she has grown, the things Fisk has instilled for her growth, it’s just impressive.”
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Du Bois, an 1888 Fisk graduate, was co-founder of the NAACP. Ida B. Wells, a journalist who exposed lynchings and other injustices all over the South, also attended Fisk and was part of that founding. Lewis, a civil rights activist, protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and later a congressman, graduated in 1967. He and Fisk alum Diane Nash integrated lunch counters in Nashville with nonviolent sit-ins. Booker T. Washington served on Fisk’s Board of Trustees and sent his children to Fisk. That’s a slice of the history of a place that has produced countless leaders in science, government, the arts and industry, a place that is fighting to continue prospering.
When Nathan Jossel visited Fisk as a high school senior from Oklahoma City, that’s part of why he quickly knew this would be home.
Jossel was sitting in a class as a freshman in 2018 when he got another bit of news, courtesy of his parents. They figured their son, a devoted NBA historian, might be interested to hear the name of his school’s new men’s basketball coach.
“I was like, ‘Kenny Anderson? What? Dude is cold!’ ” Jossel said.
Soon enough, he was Anderson’s volunteer student manager. He did not get a full four seasons with Anderson, as COVID-19 wiped out the 2020-21 season altogether. The Bulldogs went 3-26 in their return to basketball in 2021-22, Jossel’s senior year. They won eight games in each of Anderson’s first two seasons and matched it this season with an 8-16 record after losing 79-72 to Philander Smith in the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference tournament semifinals Saturday in Jackson, Miss. This season did see progress, with seven league wins after going winless in conference play two seasons ago.
It has been a struggle to match up consistently at a school with higher academic standards than some competitors — many of which have older players than Anderson’s teams because of heavy reliance on junior college transfers. Anderson also is still honing his skills as a coach, including the ability to identify talent and build rosters.
Chuck Daly, Nate McMillan, P.J. Carlesimo, Bill Fitch and Bobby Cremins are among the coaches who have informed Anderson’s path to the profession. Vanderbilt coach Jerry Stackhouse is a friend who invites Anderson to his practices. He’s still trying to find the right formula at this level, a quest made more difficult by his strokes.
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“He’s consumed by (coaching), but he absolutely loves it,” Natasha said.
“He’s been through a lot, but you can see he’s making progress,” said Cremins, who started recruiting Anderson to Georgia Tech as a high school freshman and who has been to Fisk to consult and help him raise funds. “I think his faith brought him to Fisk more than anything. He wants to win, and that’s hard. He’s got to find some sleepers, and he’s got to teach them to play. But I’ve seen what he means to those kids.”
Those players include freshman forward Jeremiah Armstead, who spent much of his high school years homeless in the Los Angeles area with his mother and two siblings, in cars and domestic violence shelters. Anderson could relate, having been forced into the New York streets multiple times when his late mother, Joan Anderson, was evicted from apartments in Queens.
The conversations can be heavy around the Fisk program. Jossel, a business administration graduate who is now working as a data analyst intern for the Los Angeles Lakers, said Anderson “really invests in every guy, takes the time to truly know them, the ones who allow themselves to get to that point with him.”
He gets after his players at times; sometimes, they get after him. Here’s a scene as described by Jossel from a long bus ride last season:
Player: “Hey, Coach Kenny, you played against Michael Jordan?”
Anderson (in a deep New York accent): “Oh yeah, all the time, all the time.”
Player: “Did he ever dunk on you?”
Anderson: “Naw, naw, that never happened.”
Player (holding up video on phone of Jordan dunking on Anderson): “So what’s this?”
Anderson (as the entire bus cracks up): “Aw man, you got me.”
“I love him so much, I don’t even get mad at him anymore when he says to get on the line (to run sprints in practice),” said Payne, who is graduating in business administration. “I just get on the line.”
Anderson’s post-NBA mistakes hounded him. His inability to pay child support for a few of his children in 2006, a year after declaring bankruptcy and losing his mother. The 2013 DUI cost him his high school coaching job. The ill-conceived trip to North Korea with other basketball players, organized by Dennis Rodman, to play in front of Kim Jong-un in 2014.
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The Andersons said they didn’t fully understand the specifics of the North Korea trip, which started in China and paid him a few thousand dollars, until it was too late. Natasha said she finally got him on the phone at his hotel, crying and frantic, and started telling him why he couldn’t play in the game and all the things she had learned about North Korea’s leader. Anderson told her the call was being recorded and that his passport had been taken. The call ended. He played in the game and prayed he’d get home.
The aftermath of that North Korea trip is part of the 2017 documentary by Jill Campbell about Anderson, “Mr. Chibbs,” which is what his mother called him when he was younger. The couple decided they’d only do the doc if they could agree to hold nothing back, and in a moment in their car, Natasha forgot the cameras were rolling and confronted Anderson about suspected infidelity. She followed that up with a tearful testimonial for the cameras about considering leaving him.
“Most of my life, I’ve been a clinical social worker,” said Natasha, now a healthcare executive. “Not to make excuses, but the trauma in Kenny’s life was holding him back. It kind of kept him stuck where he couldn’t move forward, couldn’t grow as a person. He acted out with women, he drank, he showed his ass. He treated people ugly sometimes, but he’s not an ugly person. He’s one of the kindest, warmhearted, most giving people I’ve met. He has one of the sweetest souls.
“People ask me why I stayed. Because I knew it was there.”
The trauma included a neighbor molesting Anderson, and a coach attempting to rape him, revelations Anderson first made in another regrettable public moment, a 2013 version of “Penis Monologues” on Broadway with former NBA players. The trauma included having to share a room with his mother and her boyfriend, both drug-addicted at the time, and enduring the boyfriend raping his mother. The therapy is ongoing.
“There are no excuses,” Anderson said, “but I’ve been able to understand why I’ve done some of the things I’ve done.”
Anderson has been able to get all of his children together a few times, including a Disney World trip several years ago. He has strong relationships with some; he speaks very little to others.
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“You just can’t stop trying,” Natasha said. “And he doesn’t.”
Anderson said his drinking has been reduced to an occasional glass of wine with dinner. That was a priority before the stroke; the stroke made everything more urgent. Anderson was back in Florida for a day after his first season concluded when he suffered it, on Feb. 23, 2019, losing vision temporarily in his right eye and feeling his face sag and speech slur. Tiana was home with him and called 911. For two days, Anderson fought to live.
For months, he rehabilitated, working to regain memory and motor function. Most of what he needed came back. Some didn’t. He was able to coach his second season. A few weeks after rehabilitation, he had another episode.
Natasha sent him to Vanderbilt Hospital, where doctors discovered he had suffered a smaller stroke. They also found he had a patent foramen ovale (PFO), a tiny hole in his heart that didn’t close correctly after birth. A PFO can allow tiny blood clots to travel to the brain and cause strokes. Doctors closed Anderson’s surgically — and wondered how this never affected him during his basketball career.
Last week on the Fisk campus, trying to find that recruit and his parents, Anderson texted Jossel, who was back visiting during the NBA All-Star break and was up to giving a recruit and his parents a tour. They were at the administration building. The dorms were later.
“Damn, that’s right,” Anderson said.
He turned and walked south through the Fisk campus. He talked about the upcoming fourth anniversary of the stroke. Tears started to stream down his cheeks.
“I had to get myself together,” he said. “I was almost gone, out of here. I had to change my life, period. Like, I’ve got to do something for somebody else in this life. That’s why I’m on this path.”
(Top photo of Kenny and Natasha Anderson: Theo Wargo / Getty Images)
