The color of plaid

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 1996 by Steve Harrison

Ten minutes gone, with 30 left to play, Wimb Sanderson looks as if he has been trapped for a week in a room full of bawling babies. His Arkansas-Little Rock Trojans may be playing well, good enough to lead Louisiana Tech by 10, but nonetheless they're still playing -- and he's still coaching -- in a game. Which Sanderson readily admits he hates. All that stress. All those opportunities for failure. Practice, now that's better. Let the man recruit -- and turn on his narcotic charm -- seven days a week. Offseason is tough to beat, too. But basketball games? Forget it.

"MARCUS!" Sanderson screams during a timeout. "WHY DID YOU PUT UP THAT BAD SHOT? DIDNT I TELL YOU NOT TO SHOOT THE GODDAMN BALL?"

Marcus Wesley, a reserve guard, leans forward, eyeball-to-eyeball with coach, and barks, "Yeah!"

"DON'T YOU YEAH ME!"

After this soap opera, Wimp gets around to diagramming a play. Marcus stays on the bench. UALR gets around to winning its sixth straight, 66-60. And, Vesuvius, never silent and almost) always unhappy, mutters again and again what must be his favorite word of all: "crap."

The scowl, the plaid, the stomping and the waving of his arms as if he were parting the Red Sea, are all, of course, part of Wimp Sanderson, salesman. Which is what UALR banked on when it hired him two years ago to revive a program with one highlight -- an NCAA Tournament first-round upset of Notre Dame in 1986. (Sanderson wears the plaid sport coat, forever his signature at Alabama and an item a recruit once asked if he could touch, only because UALR asks him to.) Home for the Sanderson Show is an 8,303-seat, drafty, hoary barn called Barton Coliseum on the Arkansas State Fairgrounds, appropriate, since UALR, despite owning a 13-4 overall record (6-3 in the Sun Belt Conference) entering the week, is still something of a sideshow. However, an 18,000- to 20,000-seat arena is planned to open later this decade as part of a downtown revitalization project.

Conventional wisdom says Sanderson is coaching even harder now, because it has been four years -- Was it really that long ago? -- since his last game at Alabama. Surely he's looking for greener pastures, or at least a school with a bigger recruiting budget. And surely Wimp Sanderson is trying to forget the sad events of four years ago.

Sanderson resigned from Alabama on May 18, 1992, days after Nancy Watts, his longtime secretary, filed a sex-discrimination suit -- a precursor to a lawsuit -- against him and the university with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission. Both Sanderson and Watts admitted they had had an affair from about 1970 to '85, but both later would offer conflicting stories about what happened on March 17, 1992.

Watts said that on that day, two days before Alabama was to play Stanford in the NCAA Tournament, Sanderson punched her in the face, giving her a black eye, during an argument. Sanderson said Watts had become hysterical and that, in an effort to defend himself, he stuck out his hand. She collided with it, giving her a black eye. More than a year later. Watts' lawsuit against Sanderson, the university and then-athletic director Cecil (Hootie) Ingram, was settled out of court, days before it was scheduled to go to trial. Alabama and Sanderson's homeowner's insurance policy paid Watts $275,000. Sanderson's 32-year relationship with Alabama, in which he had been a graduate assistant, assistant coach or head coach for more than half of the basketball games the school had ever played, was over.

"It was a situation where if you're accused of anything, you're guilty, and that's not right. I know what happened," Sanderson says, almost whispering. "I gave the university 32 years, all I could give them. Tried to do everything the right way. It was a sad day in my life. I loved the school, but it's behind me. It's over."

After a two-year exile, Sanderson was invited back in the club. Two years penance for two godawful seconds. Now, at every UALR game, like clockwork, the man who one friend said is "miserable when he's coaching, and miserable when he's not coaching" leaps and bounds beyond the coach's box, like a hamster in a cage. No wonder Bear Bryant told Wimp he was going to worry himself to death.

Sanderson knows this, is frustrated by it and for the better part of three decades has tried to change. But what is he to do? This, after all, is a man who is so competitive he and his family (his wife of 28 years, Annette, and three sons) used to take separate cars to church and race to see who made it there first. "The games make me nervous, that's why I say I hate them," Sanderson says. 'I'm always glad for them to be over with. I guess I'm afraid we'll get beat. I need to learn how to enjoy it more, but doggone it, I just don't know how.

"Why am I like this?" he wonders. "I've always feared I'd fail." Winfrey Sanderson was named for his mother's brother, Hayes Winfrey, who died from kidney problems in his 20s after he blocked a punt in his stomach during a high school football game. Sanderson never much liked that name, so he called himself Wimp, back when to be Wimp was cool, or at least not the harmless dig it is today. This was a long time ago, in Florence, an Alabama town on the Tennessee River tucked in the northwest corner of the state. The big game for kids was hot-tail, a cross between "21" and H-O-R-S-E. You picked your spots on your court -- shots were worth one or two points -- and the first to 21 was the winner. The loser was hot-tail. "I had to shoot the ball (like a) grandma just to get it up there," Sanderson says. "If you lost, you had to grab your ankles, and they threw the ball at you. They always wanted me to be hot-tail."