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Papabear
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TUESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2007
Anucha Browne Sanders beats odds, Garden to win harassment suit
BY FILIP BONDY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Sunday, December 23rd 2007, 10:12 AM
Benz/AP
Anucha Browne Sanders
Anucha Browne Sanders remembers the day it happened back in January, 2006, when she was dumped by the organization that was once going to provide her with a life's purpose. She had been on track for important things. Browne Sanders was named as one of the up-and-coming young sports executives, in Sports Business Journal's 40-under-40 list.
And then, after complaining to the company about sexual harassment, she was told to pack up her belongings.
It was the defining moment for Browne Sanders, for the Garden, and maybe for a generation of female employees in the business of sports who are operating in boardrooms, but often under worse than locker-room conditions.
"I'd never been fired in my life," she says. "They destroyed my career. I was in disbelief. When I brought (the sexual harassment charges) up, which is required by law, they pushed backwards. They said, 'Go away. Please go away.'
"It was beyond belief. And that's when I started pressing the stuff I'd been complaining about for a year and a half."
Browne Sanders began pushing, and didn't stop until earlier this month, when James Dolan finally, reluctantly caved to pressure from David Stern and promised Browne Sanders $11.5 million to settle a lawsuit she had already won in a civil trial. She had convinced a jury that Isiah Thomas used inappropriate language toward her, and that a culture of inequity and abuse toward women existed at the world's most infamous arena.
For pleading and winning her case with such uncanny tenacity, and for working so diligently for the cause of gender equity, Browne Sanders has been named the Daily News' New York Sportsperson of 2007. If every city athlete demonstrated this much pluck, surely all our pro teams would have made the playoffs this year.
She didn't necessarily want to be this kind of hero. Browne Sanders always most enjoyed competing and winning on level playing courts. She played against the boys growing up in the playgrounds of Brooklyn. She was tough and smart and could take the charge.
By the mid-1980s, she was a transcendent star on Northwestern's basketball team, where she set Big Ten career records in scoring (2,307 points) and rebounds (951). She averaged 30.5 points per game one season, leading the nation.
But there was no WNBA back then, no viable domestic professional league for women, and so Browne Sanders turned to the corporate world, a different kind of cutthroat arena, to make her living. She worked for IBM for 11 years, and then in 2000 came this opportunity to go back home with the Knicks at the Garden, as a marketing director.
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12/25/2007 6:14 PM
