Quote (valeckvalem @ Jul 3 2015 10:35am)
RIP Charlie Sanders :cry:
Charlie Sanders left giant, lasting imprints with every step he took in a football career that began as a youngster in North Carolina and took him to stardom as a Hall of Fame tight end with the Detroit Lions.
With every role in each step – player, assistant coach, player personnel executive, broadcaster, advisor, trusted confidante – Sanders was a resource of undiminishing value and depth.
For all that he accomplished, and all that he left behind as his personal legacy of excellence, he had one quality that put him in an elite category as a role model for others.
Charlie Sanders was a great human being. Sanders died today after a long battle with cancer. He was 68.
As tributes pour in to memorialize one of the NFL’s all-time greats, a comment made decades ago by the late Russ Thomas, long-time general manager of the Lions, still rings true.
“If there ever was an original Lion,” Thomas said in a private conversation, “it’s Charlie Sanders.”
He arrived in Detroit in 1968 as a third-round draft pick out of the University of Minnesota and never left. Sanders served in numerous capacities with the franchise, all with distinction, style and grace.
Sanders was a seven-time Pro Bowler, first team All-Pro three times, and he held the franchise’s career record for receptions with 336 when he retired before the 1978 season. A lingering knee injury forced him to retire.
Although he grew up in North Carolina, he never left Metro Detroit after his first day as a Lion.
“This is home,” he once said. “The city has always been nice. It’s been nice to me, nice to my family. I enjoy coming to work. “I just enjoy the Lions.”
After retirement as a player he worked as a color analyst for the radio broadcasts and was an assistant coach in charge of wide receivers from 1989-96. At the time of his death he was assistant director of player personnel.
If one point defined the brilliance of his career, it was his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2007.
It put Sanders in the company of the elite of the elite – the best ever to play football -- and was the crowning achievement of a 10-year career.
It was a long, difficult climb to reach the NFL’s summit from his roots in Richlands, N.C., but he faced every challenge head-on to hurdle whatever stumbling blocks were in his way.
Making the Hall of Fame never overshadowed what in his mind were the commitments and sacrifices an athlete must make to maximize his natural ability.
“My sights were never getting to the Hall of Fame,” he said before his induction ceremony. “It was about being the best I could be.”
Quite simply, Charlie Sanders was driven to succeed, and he made career choices to achieve that goal.
He followed a path that would make him the best – whether it was his choice of colleges, signing his first pro contract with the Lions when an offer from the Canadian Football League offered a viable alternative, maintaining his competitive level throughout his career, and ultimately realizing that age and injuries told him that it was time to call it a career.
“You could have played him anywhere, and he would give you 100 percent,” said Joe Schmidt, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker on the Lions’ championship teams of the 1950s and head coach when Sanders joined the Lions as a rookie in 1968.
“He wanted to be the best. He could make big plays for you. He had a passion to be the best. He was just consumed. He was such a competitive guy.”
It remains a mystery for why it took Sanders so long to make it to the Hall of Fame. His stats were worthy of induction. In addition to his 336 career receptions he had 31 TD catches, and he was one of the best blocking tight ends of any era.
He finally made the final ballot in 2007 – 29 years after retiring -- as a Seniors Committee choice, and was voted in.
Only eight tight ends are enshrined in Canton, and at the time Sanders was inducted, only three had begun their careers before him – Mike Ditka (1961), John Mackey (1963) and Jackie Smith (1963).
While others had more catches, none made more acrobatic catches than Sanders, and he made them at a time when a tight end’s primary job was to block. Receiving was a secondary requirement for the position.
Sanders played with reckless abandon, with no regard for his physical wellbeing.
“He just concentrated so much on catching the football that I think he lost sight of where his body was,” Greg Landry, the Lions’ quarterback for much of his career, once said. “He never really fell softly.”
It was something Sanders never gave much thought to, but he agreed with Landry.
“I realized he was right,” Sanders said. “The level of concentration – I would actually lose sight of where I was and what I was doing and focus on the end result, being catching the ball.
“Where your body is, where it ended up, what happened to it – whether you call that fortunate or stupid, it didn’t matter. I thought about what was going on at the moment.”
William Clay Ford, owner of the Lions from 1964 until his death in 2014, once marveled at Sanders’ ability to overcome injuries to remain in the lineup.
“Charlie would hobble around, and you’d think ‘he can’t play today,’” Ford once said. “And 10 minutes later he’d be stretched out in midair, making some great catch.”
If he had hard landings on the football field, he began his life’s journey at his birthplace in Richlands, N.C. with obstacles in his path.
His mother, Parteacher, died when he was two. His father, Nathaniel, enlisted in the Army, leaving Charlie and brothers Nathaniel and Adrian in the care of their aunt Flora for several years.
Charlie’s father left the Army and the family was reunited in Greensboro when Charlie was eight. His father remarried, got a degree in engineering, and became a professor at North Carolina A&T.
Charlie and his brothers got tough love from Aunt Flora, which Charlie acknowledged, and strict rules from his father.
“The biggest and baddest of them all was my Aunt Flora,” Charlie said, using football terminology to explain how she set the rules. “She had no regards for five yards, hands off. What I learned from her was invaluable -- to work hard, stand proud, and to give in to nothing. I will always love her.”
Basketball was Charlie’s first sport of choice at Dudley High School in Greensboro. He didn’t play football until 10th grade.
No matter what sport he chose, it was No. 3 on his father’s list of priorities for his sons to follow. Charlie spelled them out as follows:
“You had to have grades. You had to have a job. Sports came next.”
Charlie had scholarship offers to play football from many of the major colleges, including Wake Forest close to home, but his mind was made up to head north, where the weather was cooler and the racial climate and acceptance of African Americans was considerably warmer.
He once recalled an incident that occurred when he was working in a restaurant during his senior year in high school. He heard a young girl call him the N-word.
“Her mother apologized,” Sanders said. “I told her, ‘She got it from you.’”
He accepted a scholarship at Minnesota and played under Big Ten coaching legend Murray Warmath. Sanders started out on defense and was switched to tight end as a senior in 1967. He led the Gophers in receptions with 21.
The Lions drafted him in the third round in 1968, and he was invited to play in the College All-Star Game in Chicago along with quarterback Greg Landry, the Lions’ first-round pick that year out of Massachusetts.
Sanders got his first taste of the business side of pro sports as a rookie when he had competing contract offers from the Lions and the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL.
As he once told the story, he was at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel when he called the Lions about the two offers, both for three years: a first-year salary of $15,000 vs. $16,000 from the Argos for the first year.
The Lions upped their offer to $17,000 in the first year and a signing bonus of $20,000.
It was a lot of money for a young man some two months away from turning 22, and Sanders splurged. He bought a fully-loaded Plymouth GTX, introduced in 1967 as a “gentleman’s muscle car” that could go from 0-to-60 in 4.8 seconds and hit 105 miles an hour in a quarter mile.
When he got to training camp, he was on a fast track to becoming one of the Lions’ all-time greats.
At 6-4 and 215 pounds he was built like a basketball player and played like one. He had big hands, and he could run and jump.
His teammates began calling him “Little Mackey,” as a comparison to perennial All-Pro and eventual Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey.
It wasn’t long before Sanders had his own identity. As a rookie, he caught 40 passes, averaged 13.1 yards per catch and made his first of seven Pro Bowls. It was the first step of a Hall of Fame career, and there were no stumbles.
He played – and played well – until his body broke down to the point where it could not recover to a level that allowed him to compete up to his lofty standards.
When he announced his retirement before the start of the 1978 season, Sanders said there were three things he could still do – swim, ride a bike and jog “20 to 30 yards.” None of those were sufficient for him to play football.
“My personal expectations carried the greatest influence on the decision,” he said. “I know who Charlie Sanders is and what he’s done. I always knew this day would come. It’s one thing to play in pain, as I often have. Pain is a mental factor.
“I’d like to think the way I played the game was the way it should be played. To look at a guy not putting out the way he’s capable of putting out, that disturbs you. The presence of talent has a lot to do with the blessing of God.”
There was a void in his life that never was filled in his playing career, or in any of the positions he held after his retirement.
On the day of his enshrinement ceremony into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Sanders paid tribute to his mother, Parteacher, to fill that void.
“Of all the things I’ve done in football, and I’ve done a lot, there is one thing I really, really regret,” Charlie said. “Many times I’ve seen an athlete, college and pro, often look in a television camera and say, ‘Hi, Mom.’
“I always thought that was special, and always something I wanted to do. So I take this time, right here, right now, in Canton, Ohio, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, to say ‘Hi, Mom. Thank you for your ultimate sacrifice.’
“This day belongs to you, for it was written.”’
For Charlie Sanders, so it is remembered – Hall of Fame player, Hall of Fame human being.
I'm going to miss him on Sunday mornings. He has been on the Ford Lions report every Sunday in Detroit for a while now. He was a hell of a player and a guy and he had a great personality all around. He will be missed, The original Sanders from the motor city. RIP