After stroke, former NBA player aims to help others
Kenny HOLLYWOOD, FLA. — Anderson has a mantra: “Basketball is easy. Life is hard.”
The story of the New York point guard prodigy turned 14-year NBA veteran backs up that notion for him.
Hoops often came easy to Anderson, the No. 2 pick in the 1991 NBA draft, but life has dealt him his fair share of obstacles — from growing up in a rough section of Queens, to sexual abuse as a child and filing for bankruptcy after NBA retirement.
“I’ve been through it all,” Anderson says.
Most recently, it was a health scare. Anderson, 48, suffered a stroke in his Pembroke Pines home on Feb. 23.
Basketball is easy. Life is hard.
“It’s something that I always believed in,” Anderson said, “and when I got the stroke, I really believed in it.”
Like he has done with his past issues, he is proving resilient once again in overcoming the stroke. Anderson’s athletic background is what Dr. Alan Novick, medical director at Memorial Rehabilitation Institute in Hollywood, believes has helped Anderson reach different goals in rehab.
“He has been a very determined and very hard worker,” Novick said. “And I suspect his athletic training, where he’s used to putting in the work to get the results, I think that really paid off in his rehabilitation.
“We set goals in every phase of the recovery _ whether it’s we want to get you walking 50 meters with a cane, you know, we set all types of goals,” Novak continued. “Usually, patients aren’t used to that sort of goal-setting, but in Kenny’s case, I think because of his basketball career, he was very used to that. You’re coached toward a goal, you work toward a goal, and he very much was goal-oriented and hard-working, and he achieved.”
Nearly five months since the stroke, Anderson, has made enormous strides in recovery.
“I’m feeling great,” he said. “I’m almost back to normal.”
The Saturday morning of Feb. 23, Anderson was in his South Florida home visiting for a weekend off after his first season as men’s basketball coach at NAIA Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tenn.
“My right side couldn’t move, and then I went blind on my right side,” Anderson recalled. “And I went ‘Whoa!’ and I fell back . ... It came on and it knocked me out.”
Anderson’s wife, Natasha, was away from the house working out. The family dog woke up his 18-year-old daughter, Tiana, who called 911 because she recognized the signs of a stroke from a health class she had taken in school. An ambulance arrived, and Anderson was initially sent to Memorial West in Pembroke Pines.
“I was out of it. I was completely gone,” he said.
Anderson was in the intensive care unit for two days, where he received tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), a clot-dissolving drug. He was moved to a regular room while doctors continued treatment, tests and prep for inpatient rehab over another five days. Memorial Rehabilitation Institute then took over for inpatient rehab over eight days. He was discharged and continues to do occupational therapy, speech therapy and physical therapy three times a week, four hours each — with some additional homework to continue exercises away from the facility.
“They’ve just been great for me to work with every morning — Monday, Wednesday, Friday,” Anderson said. “I look forward to coming here. I really do.”
Anderson believes the stroke happened because he stopped taking medication for high blood pressure. Novick notes that controlling blood pressure is one of the three most common preventable causes of strokes, along with smoking and diabetes management.
Anderson experienced an aphasia, according to Novick, which impacted his speech, struggling at times to think of the words he wants to say or having difficulty getting them out.
On Thursday morning, reading the first edition in his children’s book series “The Adventures of Lil’ Kenny” to patients at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, he got the words out just fine as he read and had conversations with about a dozen youngsters. His inspirational series will tell the true story of Anderson’s rise as a basketball phenom on the streets of New York to national recognition as a touted recruit at Archbishop Molloy before attending Georgia Tech and eventually reaching the NBA.
“I wanted to be able to inspire others by telling my story on how I grew from a streetball player to becoming a professional athlete,” Anderson said. “To how basketball saved me from the perils of the ‘hood — but also taught me valuable lessons that I carried through my playing days and today. Lessons on how to be a team player, on how not to give up on my goals, especially now that I’m overcoming this new challenge of having a stroke.”
Although basketball comes easy for Anderson, it’s no surprise that he may face challenges in speech and memory. It helps that he has been able to get back to Nashville multiple times since the stroke, resuming some coaching duties at Fisk.
“I’m back on the court. I’m back looking at talent,” said Anderson, who recently conducted his freshman camp for newcomers on the team. “It’s really difficult off the court, but on the court, when I step into a gym, I know what I’m looking for, I know how to talk to these young men.
“I love the game of basketball, and it’s taught me so many lessons, and that’s where I need to be. I’m at my best on the basketball court. I know what I’m seeing. I know what I’m doing. ... It’s just outside of basketball, it’s been really difficult for me to get my bearings together.”
Anderson says the main difference in coaching is that instead of just being able to blurt out all the instructions to his players, he now jots notes down on a piece of paper he keeps with him.
He talks hoops like he hasn’t missed a beat. Anderson lights up when the topic of New York City point guards and where he ranks is brought up. Almost as if he has no speech difficulties, he reels off names of those he looked up to in New York: Kenny Smith, Dwayne “Pearl” Washington and Rod Strickland among them. Novick isn’t surprised at how sharp Anderson is in recalling the more distant past.
“Depending on the type of stroke, it really is common that sometimes remote memory is far more preserved than recent memory,” Novick said. “So sometimes you can remember what you did 30 years ago, but you may not know what you did yesterday.”
In a top-10 list of New York point guards MaxPreps created in 2009, based on high school accolades, Anderson was given the top spot – ahead of names such as Bob Cousy, Lenny Wilkens, Nate Archibald, Mark Jackson and Stephon Marbury.
“Maybe you can say I’m the greatest, but you really can’t say,” Anderson said. “Yearly, how I did it, I did it pretty good — high school, college and pros. How many guys did it that long? I don’t know.”
Anderson finished his high school career as New York’s all-time leading prep scorer with 2,621 points. He has since been surpassed by Lance Stephenson, Sebastian Telfair and some more recent players. Earning multiple All-American honors at Archbishop Molloy, he was a consensus All-American at Georgia Tech in 1991 as a sophomore. After reaching the Final Four with the Yellow Jackets, he was drafted by the Nets with the second pick.
By his third season in the NBA, the slick ball-handling lefty was an All-Star, averaging career bests with 18.8 points and 9.6 assists per game in 1994. Getting drafted, his time in New Jersey and then with the Portland Trail Blazers and reaching the Eastern Conference finals in 2002 alongside Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker on the Boston Celtics are career moments he’s most fond of.
Anderson’s steadfast commitment to therapy has allowed him to make progress with his speech. Physically, he has gotten back to making a three-mile walk to and from a nearby Starbucks — a walk that has become a trademark of his nearly 15 years living in South Florida. Anderson is going to move to Nashville full time for work at Fisk and tears up at the thought of letting go of his morning-walk tradition.
Today, the message he wants to get across is to control the preventable causes of strokes and to be educated in recognizing the signs of one to get help quickly.
“People need to take care of themselves,” he said. “If you have high blood pressure, take your meds, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Novick notes that the problem with high blood pressure is it’s often asymptomatic, so someone may feel fine and not take medication, but it could lead to greater issues long-term. He stresses the importance of acting quickly in getting medical help and recovering with top professionals and technology in stroke rehabilitation.
“Brain tissue is very sensitive. It doesn’t take very much time to have irreversible damage,” Novick said. “It’s really important when you have certain signs of stroke — like if you’re having trouble speaking, if you’re having weakness on just one side — get to the hospital as quickly as possible so you can mitigate the damages as much as possible by trying to get the circulation back.”
Basketball may be easy and life hard for Anderson, but every day since his stroke, he is closing that gap in difficulty.