Kenny Anderson is remembered as a New York City hoops phenom and an All-Star point guard in the NBA, but until now there was something that nobody knew about the retired NBA veteran.
Anderson, who overcame numerous adversities on his path to the NBA was also a victim of sexual abuse growing up. Like most victims of sexual abuse, Anderson bottled up that secret for much of his life. Anderson wasn't even safe on the basketball court, where one of his coaches took advantage of him. Anderson isn't ready to name his abuser yet, but said he plans to soon.
Via SB Nation:
Kenny Anderson will say it: he was sexually abused, in two separate instances and by two separate monsters, during a multiply harrowing early life that he will also tell you about. That life — ungoverned by a mother too addicted and conflicted to be much of a parent, then ungovernable by dint of the heavy freedom his talent for the game gave to him — did not prepare him for any kind of life but the one he’d suffered through. It bruised and broke him, as of course it would. It helped make him a person he no longer likes much, or much resembles. He wants to talk about it now, all of it.
When Anderson sat down to talk about all this, he had just finished a cruise with his wife, which they’d taken in part to prepare for what is happening now, and will happen next. This is not the sort of thing that gets said just once, and Anderson — whose career was not what it could have been, by his own weary admission, but which was still what it was — will now have to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it, after decades of not.
