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...ders starts cracking up. Get it? He has just made a joke. “I can sit and talk with my oldest son for hours and hours. Barry and I could never do that. But the last time he called, he asked to talk tome. We talked for quite a while. Barry, he used to make me mad because he was just like his mother. Looks like her. Quiet like her. I wanted him to have something of me. But I wouldn’t let him be outgoing. ‘Barry,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to be different.’ Ask him. He’ll remember.”—William Sanders, Barry’s father Peter Schaffer, one of Sanders’ agents, lives in Denver. He belongs to a health club where Sanders and former Michigan receiver Mercury Hayes joined a pick up basketball game last year. Sanders! , who’s 5-feet-8 and 203 pounds, wore a plain T-shirt and shorts. Hayes’ shirt said“Michigan” on the front. The next day, a couple of Schaffer’s friends who played in the game sought him out. “Hey, it was sure fun playing basketball with Mercury Hayes!” they said. Schaffer didn’t have the heart to tell them who the other guy was. Stories like that one are still as popular as they were in 1988 -- the year Sanders won the Heisman Trophy as a junior at Oklahoma State and turned down an invitation to the White House because he said he had to study. Or how about the time two years ago in Miami when Sanders spent the evening in the lounge at the Marriott? Think you’re onto some juicy gossip, right? Well, Sanders wasn’t attached to any bar stool. He and Steve Atwater of the Denver Broncos were in a corner, playing Pop-A-Shot basketball all night. Former Lions offensive tackle Lomas Brown has a good one, too. He can list the times Sanders has been over to his house for dinner, but you! wouldn’t have known he was there. “You know how it’s kids in one room, adults in another?” says Brown, who spent 11 years with the Lions before he signed with the Arizona Cardinals last February. “Well, most of the time Barry would be with my kids, sitting on the floor playing a video game or eating off their plates watching a movie.” Sanders, who has one year left on a four-year, $17.2-million contract he signed in December 1993, still lives in the $175,000 house in Rochester Hills he bought in 1989 after the Lions made him their first-round draft pick. But back in Wichita, he moved his parents into a new 7,000-square-foot house three years ago. The white brick home, which sits on 11 acres with a private pond stocked with bass, crappie and catfish, replaces the three-bedroom, 850-square-foot home Barry and his 10 brothers and sisters grew up in. “You do what’s right,” Sanders says with a shrug. Well, that includes everything from paying the college tuitions for his brothers! and sisters to making sure his Nike contract still has a clause that says the company must supply his former high school football coach with 60 pairs of shoes a year. One person who knows Sanders best outside his family is Mark McCormick, a newspaper reporter at the Wichita Eagle. They grew up on the same street, Volutsia, on the city’s north side, and have been friends since McCormick got over the day Sanders beat him up in kindergarten. When Sanders was attending Oklahoma State, McCormick was studying journalism at the University of Kansas. He was on a tight budget and got sick, losing 30 pounds one semester. “Dang, what’s going on with you?” Sanders asked. “I’m in college,” McCormick replied. “I’m starving.” Sanders wanted to help and offered his Pell Grant money, which McCormick refused. A few years later, after Sanders joined the Lions, he heard that McCormick was evicted from an apartment after getting his first job. He mailed him $500. “I’m at the point now in our rel! ationship that I can never repay him unless I give him a lung or a kidney,” McCormick says. “And he still calls me all the time.” After rushing for 1,470 yards and breaking Billy Sims’ single-season club record his rookie year, Sanders gave each of the Lions’ offensive linemen a Rolex watch, valued at more than $10,000. On the back was the inscription: “Thanks for a great ‘89 season. Barry Sanders.” When center Kevin Glover came home one day last February, a box the size of a small refrigerator was sitting in the driveway near his garage. In it was a big-screen TV and a thank-you note from Sanders. “It’s not expected, but he does it,” Glover says. The TV “is something I’m going to cherish. When I retire, I plan on getting a plaque for it that will say, ‘A gift from Barry Sanders.’ “ All of this giving, all of this helping, and Sanders still turns down most of the endorsement offers that come his way, deals that could bring him an additional $4 million to $5 million a year, Sc! haffer says. “You can put $1 million in front of him that he turns down, but he’ll say yes to the Michigan state seat-belt patrol campaign,” Schaffer says. “A lot of football players have tremendous egos. They like to see themselves on TV. Not Barry.” Sanders doesn’t decline everything, though. He has endorsement deals with more than a half-dozen companies, including many of the prized ones—Nike, McDonald’s, Cadillac, 7-Eleven, and, soon to be announced, Little Caesars. “He needs to let himself take off,” Perriman says. “He should be the Michael Jordan of football. He could be that. Playing eight years, he knows he’s not going to be playing forever. I tell him, ‘You better get what you deserve and what you can while you can.’ He needs to be as large in commercials as he is a player.” But Sanders won’t. He is doing more, but he won’t do it all. “I wish there were another way of doing it,” Sanders says of endorsements. “I’m definitely more comfortable with the game being bigger than the person.” That has been Sanders’ philosophy since the fourth grade. That year, in his first football game ever, the first time he touched the ball, he scored on a 70-yard sweep. The next Saturday, his coach tried him out on kickoffs. He ran the first one back for a touchdown. His father was there. “It was 1977 and I was sitting in my ‘63 Pontiac listening to Texas beat Oklahoma, 13-6,” William Sanders says. “Must have run for three or four touchdowns that day.” In his first few years with the Lions, much was made about Sanders’ upbringing, about the stern father and quiet mother, par! ents who had their own distinct ways of raising their children. “Growing up, the kids would get together and just kind of ask the question, ‘How in the world did these two get together?’ “ Barry says with a laugh. Barry was especially close to his mother—and still is. Shirley Sanders had children spanning three decades, beginning with Diane, born in 1959, and ending with Krista, the youngest of the eight girls, born in 1974. Shirley delivered Barry, No. 7 on the family’s roster, on July 16, 1968. His mother speaks in a soft voice and is bashful around strangers. “I love it when he comes home,” she says. “We sit and talk for hours. I miss him. I feel for him sometimes—all the attention he gets and doesn’t want.” When her husband pipes up and offers one of his gruff opinions (“I don’t like boys to be close to their mothers because it makes sissies out of them,” he says), Shirley smiles and rolls her eyes. Last month at the Sanders home in Wichita, Shirley spent part of the eveni! ng in her kitchen listening to Christian music while her husband sat on his leather recliner watching a basketball game. Indiana was beating up Princeton. Shirley says she missed many of Barry’s football games when he was growing up, mainly because Friday night was reserved for choir practice at Paradise Baptist Church. Religion is a central theme of the Sanders family. One of the proudest moments in her life came when Barry sent $200,000 of his $2.1-million signing bonus to Paradise his rookie year. While Shirley is quiet and unassuming, her husband is anything but. William Sanders listens to Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura, smokesWhite Owl cigars and rarely leaves home without his Cleveland Browns jacket. His favorite college remains Oklahomabecause he listened to the Sooners broadcasts on the radio when he was growing up. He points out that he has collected only two autographs for himself through the years—Troy Aikman (because he played two seasons at Oklahoma) and Bernie Kosar! (Cleveland). In 1994, William Sanders brought a football to Dallas, where the Cowboys were playing the Lions. When the teams were warming up, he was introduced to Emmitt Smith. Sanders asked if Smith could do him a favor and sign his football for a friend. “He said he’d get me after the game,” William Sanders says, angry as he tells the story. As it turns out, the Lions won the game in overtime. When he asked Smith to sign the ball, he refused. “My Barry would never do that,” Sanders says. Until this past summer, William Sanders was working six days a week as a freelan...