Out Like A Lamb

After four days of taking the temperature of nearly everyone associated with Barry Sanders's retirement except the elusive Sanders himself, one is left feeling like a dog who has chased his tail till exhaustion.

It has been 33 years since a brilliant football player ended his career so mysteriously in his prime. In the summer of 1966, the NFL's alltime rushing leader, 29-year-old Jim Brown, shocked the world by announcing his retirement in London. Last week, despite needing only 1,458 yards to become the NFL's alltime rushing leader, the 31-year-old Sanders shocked the world by issuing a statement announcing his retirement while he was on his way to London.

At least Brown, who was filming The Dirty Dozen when he quit, had postfootball plans. Best anyone can tell, Sanders, vacationing overseas, has none. At least he didn't reveal any in the respectful, 17-sentence statement that he chose to release on July 27 to his hometown paper, The Wichita (Kans.) Eagle. (The Lions first read the statement on The Eagle's Web site.) "The reason I am retiring is simple," the statement read. "My desire to exit the game is greater than my desire to stay in it." He was cryptic about his future even with his agents. When one of them, David Ware, asked Sanders whether he'd reconsider his decision if a trade could be arranged, he says Sanders told him, "That situation doesn't exist."

Whatever the future holds, Sanders's announcement blindsided pro football and its fans. The NFL uses Sanders, a humble and clean-living sort, in publications and video promotions to represent all that is good with the league, and it scheduled the Lions-Broncos game on Christmas Day in the late-afternoon national TV slot, when Sanders's chase for Walter Payton's record of 16,726 career yards might have meant blockbuster holiday ratings. When Detroit vice chairman William Clay Ford Jr., attending an NFL meeting in Chicago, heard about Sanders's exit, his knees appeared to buckle. Club officials had to scrap a plan to feature a great Sanders run on each of the Lions' 10 home-game tickets this year. Training camp attendance for the first three practices at Saginaw (Mich.) Valley State totaled 12,600, down 32% from last year.

The overriding question in Saginaw last weekend was, How could this happen? How could a multimillion-dollar business lose contact with its most valuable employee for seven months, hear the news of his retirement in a conference call with his agents and then have to retrieve his retirement statement off the Internet? Sanders has to be either a) the most intensely private star in sports history; b) fed up with the mediocre play (78-82 plus 1-5 in the postseason) of the Lions for much of his career; c) very unhappy with the Detroit front office and coach Bobby Ross; or d) all of the above.

Let's start at the beginning, in Wichita. Sanders, the seventh of William and Shirley Sanders's 11 children, was taught that no matter how fervently he or his siblings might disagree with their father's orders, their only answer could be, "Yes, Daddy." As William said last Friday, "They couldn't question me, and I told them that in school their coaches and teachers had the same authority." It was that same dutiful respect, perhaps, that kept Barry from publicly expressing frustration over his role or with the Lions' maddening inconsistency. "Barry has always been professionally vague," says wideout Herman Moore, who has been with the Lions since 1991. "Once I saw him in the huddle looking a little upset after a play was called, and I said, 'You upset?' All he said was, 'What do you think?' He'd never tell you he was upset, or why."

One of Sanders's friends, who asked not to be identified, believes Sanders was insulted by what he saw as management's penurious stance during contract negotiations two years ago. Early in the talks Sanders got the impression that the team would not pay him more than unspectacular Detroit quarterback Scott Mitchell. "The clear communication to us was that the quarterback normally makes more than anyone else on the team, and the same tier system should apply here," adds Ware. If Sanders's anger over those negotiations contributed to his decision to retire, it was a monumental miscommunication. In fact, Mitchell's contract was for $21 million over four years (including an $8 million signing bonus). Sanders's deal was worth $36 million over six years (including an $11 million bonus). Lions chief operating officer Chuck Schmidt, who negotiated Sanders's contract for the club, said last Saturday that he was shocked to hear that the team's salary structure might be an issue. "Never, ever did we say to Barry's agents we would pay Scott more than Barry," Schmidt said. "In fact, we told Mitchell, 'You will not be paid more than Barry Sanders.' "

Mitchell, who originally signed with Detroit as an unproven free agent in 1994 and was immediately handed the starting job, was benched early last season and in March was traded to the Baltimore Ravens for a third-round draft pick in '99 and a conditional middle-round choice in 2000. According to Sanders's friend, however, the damage had already been done, during the negotiations; since then, he says, "it's been like pulling teeth to get Barry to play."

Sanders missed three days of training camp before signing the new contract in July 1997. The Lions had fired laid-back coach Wayne Fontes after the '96 season and replaced him with Ross, a much-needed whip-cracker. Sanders welcomed the change, but one of Ross's first moves was to add a full-time fullback to the Detroit offense for the first time in Sanders's pro career. Time and again, a source said, Sanders quietly complained about running behind a fullback, but the new set worked: Sanders had his best season ever, rushing for 2,053 yards, the second-highest total in NFL history. "I asked Barry about the two-back set," Ross said last Saturday. "He was polite, sort of noncommittal. He had no objections about it to me."

Nevertheless, William Sanders remembers the call he got from his son after mat remarkable '97 season, during which the Lions went 9-7 and were a wild-card team. "He wanted to quit," William says. "He was disenchanted with the offense. I told him no, give it a year." Last season Barry's frustration grew. His father said he has never seen Barry as low as he was on Oct. 4, after the Lions blew a 27-10 second-half lead to the Bears in Chicago and lost 31-27 "A lot of times," Barry told SI a week after the Chicago debacle that left Detroit 1-4, "after a bad loss like that, I go home and I'm ready to quit. I just can't stand it."