TURNAROUND JUMPER
Practice made Matt Sanders imperfect off the court as he turned to alcohol and fighting. His ordeal would test the love of a family.
February 27, 2000
Byline: JEFF MILLER
The Orange County Register

This is how nightmares arrive. They walk up your driveway in a pack. With knives and chains and baseball bats. Twenty, maybe 25 kids. All of them high on rage. Most of them high on something else, too. They are here, at your so-straight two-story, in your so-straight neighborhood, with one so-twisted mission - spilling your son’s blood.
Your wife is inside on the phone, with the police, wondering if this is the day someone really gets hurt, trying not to think what might have happened had your daughter been the only one home.
You are talking the mob back under control, preaching peace, especially to the kid with the sawed-off shotgun. By the time the cops show up, you somehow have succeeded, turning these angry children back into the night.
A few days later, someone blows up your mailbox.
You’re a parent battling to raise a child? This story is for you. You’re a child so adult your first hangover came in the sixth-grade? This story is for you, too.
The one thing this story isn’t so much is sports. Oh, there’s plenty of basketball, and an entire team, the Huntington Beach High Oilers. They won five games this season.
But this isn’t about what a team lost. It’s about what two parents didn’t lose.
It isn’t about hoops. It’s about hopes.
There are a lot of places to start Matt Sanders’ story.
With the parental pressure, Mom and Dad demanding 300 jump shots a day. With the booze, the 12-year-old turning his allowance into alcohol. With the problems at school, the stubborn kid accumulating 160 hours of detention in one year.
We could start with any of Matt’s 15 tattoos or six pierced body parts. The tattoos include a bloody dagger, some flaming cards and a heart with a fist punched through it. He has rings for his ears, lip, nose, eyebrow, tongue and nipples. Yet, he remains enough of a kid that he doesn’t like to smile for pictures because of his braces.
But the best place to start this story is right in the face of the furnace, with that boiling mob wanting to street-fight Matt and his buddies. Because it’s important to remember this didn’t happen to those people or over there. It happened right here, in simple Surf City, to parents who probably are a lot like you. Or a lot like your parents.
So this is where the learning begins, where a mom and dad teach their boy about growing up. And their boy teaches them right back.
Besides, starting with all this hatred makes it easier to see how this family was held together by love.
“I’m so damn happy just to see him playing basketball again,” Matt’s father, Gary, says. “People might think we’re kooky talking about this stuff, but it’s a relief. Matt’s super lucky. A lot of bad things could have happened.”
He has been arrested, charged with assault and done community service. For a while there, he had a friend calling every Friday, collect from jail. He has another friend who lives in a car and spends most of the day wearing a bathrobe.
At some of the Oilers games this season, Matt’s senior year, he had his own cheering section. The group looked like a rack of clothes that grew legs and walked out of a Salvation Army shop.
“As a parent, you can tell a lot about your kid by who they hang out with,” Huntington Beach coach Roy Miller says. “I have to be honest, I never expected to see Matt back here with us. But he proves that even if it’s a long road, the payoff is worth it.”
If the Sanders family had a theme song, the chorus would be the thump, thump, thumping of a basketball. Gary played in college, so did his wife, Kim. Their daughter, Amy, a sophomore at Huntington Beach, is one of the county’s top scorers.
Matt always was among the best, too. Barely out of kindergarten, he was on a fourth-grade team. By fifth grade, he was grouped with the eighth-graders, playing 100 games a year. He was a good student and a better player. There was only one problem. It wasn’t necessarily Matt’s choice to be either.
“He was being pushed,” Gary says. “Emotionally it had to be tough, but I didn’t have sympathy for that.”
And he had no escape. Dad was coaching his club team and Mom his grade-school team. There was a hoop over the garage and no such thing as a good enough reason to miss practice time.
The signs seem clear today, as easy to read as the words - “True Til Death” - written on Matt’s biceps. But, at the time, it wasn’t so obvious this son was reaching for help. At least not to parents who were seeing with their hearts.
It didn’t even register with Gary the day Matt said, “Dad, there has to be more to life than basketball. ” They simply went back to shooting those jumpers.
“When he was growing up, we always told Matt, `You’re great, great, great,’ ” Gary says. “That’s a lot of pressure. He had to start thinking, `What if I’m not great? ’ That wasn’t fair. I think he was rebelling against that.”
Matt started doing something his parents rarely do - drink. He and his friends would hang around outside a liquor store, scouting for a prospective buyer, often settling on some homeless person.
They didn’t act randomly, either. These kids first would go into the store to check what beer had the highest alcohol content.
If you’re a parent and this behavior stuns you, consider this: “In sixth and seventh grade, a lot of kids were into it,” says Matt, now 18. “If they weren’t then, they sure are now.”
His parents soon suspected Matt was drinking. By the eighth grade, he would admit to having one or two when, in fact, he was downing closer to 10. He was 14 the first time he explained to his folks, “I gotta have a couple beers to relax. ” Responded Kim: “Relax from what? You aren’t doing anything.”
After his freshman season, Matt quit basketball and turned to his punk band, a group he named Successful Failure. He plays guitar and piano, writes music and lyrics and has produced two CDs.
That’s another thing to remember here. This is not some fool loser with no talent or purpose. Matt regularly surprises his parents by sitting down at the piano and making up songs. They haven’t discouraged him, even turning the garage into a studio.
But a dangerous slide had begun. Matt’s parents would drop him off at school at 7 a.m. Ten minutes later, he would take a city bus right back home. Then he’d sleep all day. It was tiring, breaking that midnight curfew.
He would come home with knife cuts or welts where the chain had hit his face. He was busted up so much once, he was stuck in bed struggling to breathe. Another time, he showed up with a gash on his head, a loose tooth and a cracked-open lip. That’s what a beer bottle can do.
There was a lot of pressure building now, stress between the parents and their son and between the parents themselves. Matt and Kim often argued, their tempers equally hot. Gary and Kim disagreed on what to do, Dad wanting to hug their son, Mom wanting to push him away.
There were wrestling matches at the front door, Gary literally trying to hold onto Matt, trying to save him from another night. Of all the emotions that would surge - anger, frustration, desperation - there always was that love.
Kim began sending away for information on military schools and camps that guaranteed to right troubled kids. Only she never received any response. It seems Amy, showing affection in her own way, would race back from school each day, go through the mail and throw out the packets before Mom came home.
Didn’t matter, really, because Matt was ready. Fearing someone would come to take him away in the middle of the night, he slept with mace under his pillow and a baseball bat within reach.
“I was going to mace them, then hit them with the bat and take off running,” he says. “I don’t think they would have expected that.”
These were violent, uncertain times. Gary stopped reading at night near the sliding doors, unsure what might come flying through the glass. He eventually became sick over all this, missing a month of work and fighting depression.
Still, he was convinced Matt was worth the pain. On those 10-hour drives to Utah each summer, for the Sanders boys’ fishing trip, their conversations would run long and deep, showing Gary “there’s a good kid in there somewhere.”
He quit on him only once, the day Gary told Matt, “OK, you win.
I give up. ” Ten minutes later, Gary was back in Matt’s room, telling him he didn’t mean what he had just said.
Finally, though, with no other answers, Dad started throwing Matt out. Once, twice, three times. Usually only for a day or two and always with this message: “You mean more to me than anything in the world. No one wants you here as much as I do. But there are certain rules, about curfew and drinking and going to school, and you have to follow them.”
Along the way, the parents took away Matt’s house key, padlocked the garage studio and refused to let him get his driver’s license.
They went to anger-management classes, where Matt would lie, saying things like he didn’t care about his father and wouldn’t mind going to jail.
Mom and Dad heard about the first tattoo from a friend who caught Matt with it at a Del Taco. He had kept it a secret from them for a year. The piercings also were secret until a girl she didn’t know walked up to Kim at a game and said how much she loved Matt’s nipples.
“If a spaceship landed in the backyard, we wouldn’t have been more surprised,” Gary says. “We were so naive as to what was going on.”
The last time Matt was tossed from the house, he moved in with a friend. It was the summer before his junior year. After a month away, he called home.
“OK, Dad, I’m ready to follow the rules.”
So, Matt Sanders’ story turned right there. Not a U-turn, mind you, but definitely a corner, a sharp corner down a better road.
“I realized I was hurting everyone,” he says. “I know I hurt my parents with the things I said. I started thinking, `What if they died tomorrow? ’ I’d feel like crap, especially since I didn’t mean those things.”
He enrolled in summer school and night classes and anything that could shave those 160 detention hours. He called Coach Miller and asked about returning to the basketball team. In one of his first games back, a scrimmage last spring, he fought a player from Cypress, putting the kid in a headlock. Amy ran from the gym.
“You afraid he might get hurt? ” Dad asked her. “No,” she said, “I’m afraid he might kill somebody.”
Matt has another band - Avenged Sevenfold - and still craves tattoos. His next one will be his last name dipped in blood, written across his chest. Then he’ll have them add flames coming up toward his throat.
His parents might not think this is too appealing, but at least it will be covered by the robe this spring, when Matt, completing a remarkable rally, graduates on time.
“The message here is that if your kid is involved in some bad stuff, they can still get out, there’s always time,” Gary says.
“You just have to let them dream their own dreams. You can’t dream their dreams for them.”
Oh, there are still moments, times when Dad has to say, “Matt, just let me be your parent. ” And the only guarantee of a life straightened out is Matt saying, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to end up in jail.”
Mom and Dad overhear plenty about their boy, from other parents wondering who raised the freak. They hear strangers say how bad they must be, how irresponsible and unfortunate.
They only think about being lucky, about living, as Gary says, “almost like the Cleavers now. ” Because even with his shock appearance, even when people see Matt and Amy together and wonder if Matt is adopted, even when he was stopped last year at the door at Mater Dei’s gym and asked to leave, they know going through this is a whole lot better than going through that.
They know their story feels as warm as an embrace this morning, which is a long way from all those cold last nights. They’ll also always have a lesson every parent should remember: Just when you think you’re having no impact on your child, making no difference whatsoever, you instead might be leaving the biggest impression of all.
Gary recently found an English class essay on his son’s desk. It was about children growing up. In there, Matt mentioned the time he was most afraid.
It had nothing to do with whirling chains or flying beer bottles or the handcuffs he has felt cold around his wrists.
No, it was that brief period, those 10 minutes, when he thought his dad had given up on him.