She grew up in Brooklyn, honed her basketball game against guys on the Parade Grounds and averaged 25 points a game at St. Saviour High School. As a Northwestern senior, she scored 45 points, had 17 rebounds and blocked six shots in a 74-69 victory over St. John's at Alumni Hall.
By the time Anucha (which means "goddess" in Ethiopian) Browne Sanders' college career ended in 1985, she was the leading scorer in Big Ten women's basketball history, with 2,307 points.
"She was very determined and very focused and could get many jobs done on the floor," said Don Perrelli, who coached Sanders in her senior year. "She could dribble for a big player, and back then, 6-1 was big, shoot from the outside and play inside the paint like no other player I'd ever seen."
Browne Sanders, 43, still plays basketball at a YMCA in Summit, New Jersey. But her on-court abilities are not what have elevated her to fame.
Earlier this week, she filed suit in federal court against Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden, accusing Thomas of sexually harassing her when she was the Knicks' senior vice president of marketing and business operations.
She was fired Jan. 19 after the Garden said that its investigation could not substantiate her accusations.
Since the lawsuit was filed, Thomas has denied the allegations against him. Steve Mills, the president of MSG Sports, who was her supervisor, said that Browne Sanders had demanded US$6.5 million to leave the Garden quietly.
Before Friday night's Magic-Knicks game, Thomas again maintained his innocence, while a spokesman for the Garden, Barry Watkins, said that Thomas had the full support of James L. Dolan, the Garden's chairman.
Power trips
Browne Sanders said she had had a strong relationship with Mills before Thomas' arrival as the Knicks' president of basketball operations in December 2003, but she said Mills did nothing when she told him that Thomas berated her and made sexual advances.
Mills offered strong praise for Browne Sanders in 2002 when she was honored by the Sports Business Journal, a weekly trade magazine, as one of its top 40 executives under the age of 40.
"What makes Anucha stand out is her competitiveness," Mills said. "You see it in everything she does, whether it's her day-to-day work, or when she's on the Garden floor playing basketball with the guys from our ad sales group."
He said some of the men were shocked by her basketball skills.
Sanders wanted to be a figure skater but by eighth grade, she favored basketball. "I liked it better," she said in response to e-mailed questions. "I have a slightly better physique for basketball than Michelle Kwan."
She said she developed her shooting touch in high school, and her skills caught the eye of Perrelli, who was then the women's coach at St. John's. "I would have been happy for her to come to St. John's," he said.
Stephanie Chambers-Duckmann, a teammate at Northwestern, said, "She was a great leader who knew how to take over a game."
There was no WNBA at the time, which compelled Browne Sanders to start her business career. She worked at Eastman Kodak, then at IBM, where she held positions in marketing the Olympics when the computer giant was a worldwide sponsor. Among other things, she developed the company's in-house Olympic Web site.
"She was very knowledgeable, enthusiastic and ambitious," said Eli Primrose-Smith, who was then IBM's vice president for worldwide Olympic sponsorship. "She really wanted to make a name for herself."
She added that after evaluating the work of its Olympic team after the Nagano Winter Games in 1998, Browne Sanders stayed with the unit two years later in Sydney. "She was very good at seeking out people in power to get their advice and say, very upfront, `OK, what do I have to do to get to the next stage?"' Primrose-Smith said. "She would bluntly say, `What do I need to do to improve?'"
Solid references
Another supervisor at IBM, George Conte, described Browne Sanders as "incredibly ambitious, with a tremendous ability to work with other people."
She was recruited to the Garden by Mills in 2000 to be the Knicks' vice president for marketing and was promoted to senior vice president in 2002. She said in her lawsuit that in 2002 and 2003, she received the highest possible rating, a "5," on her company evaluations; Garden policy at the time was that her supervisor, Mills, and Dolan both signed the evaluation.
But last March, after a year in which she made accusations against Thomas, her evaluation fell to a "4."
She was the person in charge of finding new ways to sell Knicks tickets after years of sellouts gave way to empty seats. And Thomas reportedly refused to let her use Knicks players in a current advertising campaign; instead, the campaign uses a series of life-sized cardboard cutouts devised by an outside agency.
"I always found Anucha to be a serious-minded, sober executive, very conscientious in her work and very dedicated to advancing the image and prestige of the New York Knicks," said Seth Abraham, the former president of Madison Square Garden/Radio City Entertainment. "While we did not always agree on marketing strategies, her opinions were always reasoned and well thought-out."
The ugliness of her sexual harassment accusations against Thomas surprised Chambers-Duckmann and Perrelli.
"I do not question her integrity," Chambers-Duckmann said, "and I see no reason for her to make things up."
Perrelli added: "I'd be totally shocked if anything came out to show that she wasn't telling the truth. This is a class individual. I had to do a double-take when I saw it on television."
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