Bob Lutz: Dick Sanders prepares for his final Hall of Fame

Dick Sanders is 84, in the twilight of his life and, he thought, at the end of the line when it came to Hall of Fame inductions.

But there’s one more – on Sunday he will be inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, the final bouquet thrown his way for an athletic career in which he excelled in football, basketball and baseball and became a standout official.

The man once referred to over and over again as “Saunders” by his University of Wichita basketball coach, Ralph Miller, will speak slowly and gracefully during his induction speech, feeling as if he doesn’t belong but honored to be invited.

“The way he looks at it, he was just playing games a long time ago,” said Sanders’ son, Kyle, the baseball coach at North. “And he’s keeps having to go into these dad-gum halls of fame.”

Sanders is already in the Wichita Sports Hall of Fame, the Shocker Sports Hall of Fame, the National Baseball Congress Hall of Fame and the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame. That’s a lot of speeches and because he doesn’t think anybody at Sunday’s ceremony will know who he is, he’s going to talk a lot about being in the company of Mickey Mantle during his years as a New York Yankees minor-league player.

Everybody knows Mickey.

Sanders, who still goes to his insurance company office on South Broadway every day, is as humble as he is acclaimed.

He was a football quarterback at the University of Wichita after being badgered by the coach, Jim Trimble, to come out for the team. He went to WU on a basketball scholarship out of North and also played baseball for the Shockers in the spring, although he says those seasons were played mostly in obscurity.

The baseball coach?

“Anybody that would take the job,” he said. “I coached us for a while – well, I kind of got guys to come out that played ball around here.”

Sanders was a letterman for the basketball team as a sophomore, playing for Ken Gunning. Then Miller was hired in 1951 after a successful tenure at East High. Sanders said he and John Friedersdorf were the only returning lettermen from the 1950-51 season.

But Sanders was also a football player, so he reported to basketball practice late.

“The first workout I get dressed and come on the court and Ralph says, ‘Saunders – he always called me Saunders – come over here.’ He told me I wasn’t going on this trip to all these wonderful places (New Mexico, Arizona, San Diego State, Pepperdine) that I had been looking forward to so much. I said, ‘What do you mean I’m not going on this trip?’ ”

Miller proceeded to tell Sanders that it would take time for him to make the transition from football to basketball and that he wasn’t ready.

“Ralph said that he had played both sports at Kansas and it took him two weeks to make the transition,” Sanders said. “He told me it would take at least a month.”

So Sanders stayed behind while the Shockers went West on a train to play six consecutive days in Albuquerque, Tucson, San Diego and Malibu, Calif.

“I was just sick,” Sanders said. “They were going to all these real nice venues and I always loved riding on the train in the club car.”

Sanders did eventually work himself into basketball shape and became the Shockers’ sixth man. But he had a complicated relationship with Miller.

“I thought he hated all of us, which probably wasn’t the case,” Sanders said. “We were playing somebody like Southwestern once and he says, ‘Hey, Saunders, now you know we’re playing a zone press?’ I said, ‘Ralph, I’ve been sitting here on the bench the whole game, I know what we’re doing. Now let me get in the game before it’s over.’ ”

Sanders grew up near Seneca and Douglas and loved all sports. He’s one of those guys who can play anything well, which is why he was able to excel in three sports in college while maintaining “decent” grades.

He became a huge WU fan and idolized Linwood Sexton, a great Shocker tailback and track and field sprinter from 1946-48.

“I went to every football game, every track meet that he was in,” Sanders said. “He was the greatest athlete, the greatest guy, there ever was as far as I was concerned.”

When Sanders was in the ninth grade, he and others gathered on weekend afternoons at Henrion Gymnasium on the WU campus to play basketball. Sexton was working in maintenance at Henrion to help pay for his scholarship, Sanders said.

They got to know one another and Sexton invited Sanders to his house for Sunday dinner.

The first couple of times, Sanders rode his bicycle from South Vine to Ninth and Cleveland, a trek of several miles. Suffice it to say the blacks who lived in Sexton’s neighborhood were not used to seeing a white kid on a bike riding down their streets.

“A lot of times he would follow me home,” said the 89-year-old Sexton, who has remained close to Sanders over the years. “I would ask him what in the world he was doing in this neighborhood? But he would eat with us almost every Sunday and my dad would always say that we couldn’t start until Dick arrived. We never looked at color, we just respected the person he was. And we’ve had some great experiences over the years. Dick is like a brother.”

Sanders played six seasons in the minor leagues for the New York Yankees, most of it in Triple-A. He had his best season in 1957, splitting time between Denver and Richmond while batting .259 with 22 homers and 83 RBIs. He also played in eight National Baseball Congress World Series and was selected as the All-America third baseman three times.

He officiated football and basketball in the Missouri Valley Conference for 18 years and basketball in the Big Eight for six and only once had his life threatened.

“I was assigned to work a Louisville-Cincinnati basketball game in the middle of the week, probably in the early ’70s, with Tommy Richards,” Sanders said. “I loved working games with Tommy because he was about 5-foot-8 and really fast. So when a ball was intercepted or something, he would come out so fast that he’d go baseline to baseline and I’d just move from the top of the circles.”

In this game, Sanders said, a television viewer called in a threat at halftime, upset at the way the game was being called.

“We got to the middle of the court and here’s eight big cops telling us to get in the middle of them,” Sanders said. “We got to our dressing room and the big sergeant comes in and didn’t say anything, so I asked what was going on. He said that a guy had called and said he was going to come down and shoot one of the referees during the second half so they were just taking precautions. I asked if he said which one and he said, ‘Yeah, the tall one.’ ”

Nothing happened in the second half, but Sanders was prepared. He tried not to run in a straight line.

“Since he was going to shoot the tall one, which was me, I wanted to at least be a moving target,” he said.

This story was originally published October 3, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Bob Lutz: Dick Sanders prepares for his final Hall of Fame."