Anucha Browne Sanders wore her game face the day she made history. The six-foot-one former college basketball star stood unmoved as the judge awarded her damages of $11.6 million in her sexual harassment lawsuit against former New York Knicks general manager Isiah Thomas, Madison Square Garden and James L. Dolan, chairman of Madison Square Garden. Having fought and won the truculent and very public landmark case, this former executive for the Knicks waited until the judge, jury and press filed from the courtroom to allow herself to react. “She got emotional,” says Ruth Browne, Anucha’s sister and mentor, who was by her side each day in court. “She started crying. She’d been under so much stress coming into the courtroom each day, smiling and not looking undone when every effort was being made to discredit her. I said, ‘Okay now, pull yourself together so photographers don’t get your tear-strewn face. Chin up. You won!’” They were tears of relief. “I was happy the truth came out,” says the mom of Roy, 18, Spring, 15, and Dakota, 12. “Many of these cases settle, and you never hear the details. I was glad people saw the environment and the conditions I was working under.”  

Battle of Her Life

The conditions, says Anucha, included a workplace that felt more like a frat house than one of the most valuable basketball franchises in the country. Nine years earlier, the Knicks had recruited Anucha from IBM to be vice president of marketing; a year and a half later, she was promoted to senior VP. But when the team hired a new GM in 2003, Anucha found herself facing a hostile work environment. Thomas made unwanted advances, often invited her to leave the office for trysts and harassed her verbally, calling her a whore and a bitch.

Complaining of Thomas’s behavior yet again, Anucha insisted it stop, and it did—with her termination. She filed her lawsuit in 2006, she says, because she believes it’s the responsibility of company leaders to set the standard for a comfortable workplace environment. “This happens every day in offices across America,” Anucha says. It happens because of “poor leadership from the top down.” The instinct to fight where others might have fled can be traced back to Anucha’s athletic training.

Before she spent half a decade at the Knicks and 11 years in sales and corporate marketing at IBM, Anucha was a fan favorite on the Wildcats women’s basketball team at Northwestern University—where she holds the all-time conference records for scoring and rebounds. Her athletic prowess prepped her for something else: motherhood. Her children, she says, are both her greatest joy and her biggest challenge. This is where teamwork dynamics are critical—even more than on a court, says Anucha. She acknowledges that she owes much of her success and strength to her extended family, who served as backup care for her kids throughout her career.

A Mighty Heart

Today, as the senior associate athletic director for marketing at the University of Buffalo, Anucha manages corporate marketing, event management and game promotions and has a hand in shaping the women’s basketball, volleyball and softball programs. She also oversees gender equity as it relates to the department of athletics. Above all, she practices the management and leadership qualities that she preaches. “Anucha has such a big heart,” says Shannon O’Brien, 22, who is working on a graduate degree in student personnel administration and interns for her. “She’s here to help people and make them better and make the athletic department grow. I never imagined a boss like this.” Not that Anucha is a pushover. “When I’m working on a project, she will always challenge me to make it better,” Shannon says. “She expects the best from everyone, and she brings out the best in everyone.”

Managing her team much as an athletic coach would, Anucha explains that tough but compassionate coaches bring out the best in their players. She understands this full well, having benefited from top coaching talent during her years as a basketball player. “Kids need coaches who are stern but who care,” she says. “They need to get positive reinforcement. Parents shouldn’t need to rebuild their kids’ self-esteem when they get home from a game.” Her own parents were “strict, loving and a lot of fun,” she says.

Raised in Brooklyn with five brothers and sisters, Anucha describes her mother, who was director of area development for the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation before she passed away in 2004, as a hands-on parent. Her father, a microbiologist, was also always there. “We were very connected,” Anucha says. Just as her parents encouraged her, Anucha is now a strong advocate of encouraging children to get involved in sports, especially team sports. “They teach kids how to accept each other’s differences,” she says. “They build leadership and coping skills, providing a great way to relieve some of the pressure they’re under.” And that’s the goal—to relieve pressure, not create it. “A lot of parents push their kids into sports because they themselves didn’t succeed,” Anucha says. “I see kids at age five or nine specializing. But doctors say kids need to diversify and play multiple sports to build different muscles.” Here, too, she walks the walk—her daughter plays basketball, volleyball and lacrosse. “I see her greatest potential, but whatever she wants to do is cool,” Anucha says. She’s also careful not to cheer for every point scored: “My kids say, ‘We know you’re brutally honest, and we respect that.’ When I give them a compliment, they know they did really well. I look at it as preparing them for life. If you’re not doing well at your job, you don’t get a raise or a promotion. So why tell kids they’re awesome and great at a game if they’re not?”

In the Stands

Fame wasn’t the only thing Anucha scored on the basketball court—it was also where she met her future husband, Roy Sanders. “We evolved from being good friends,” she says. “We complement each other.” Roy, whose career is in social work, is also an accomplished painter of African-American art. “The kids love his creativity,” she says. Getting married and having three children while working full-time was made easier thanks to the flex schedule at IBM, where, she says, “they had respect for the individual.” And she loved her job working on prestigious Olympics projects, which meant travel to Japan and Russia. But she was always very clear on her priorities: her kids. “Work never defined who I was,” she says. “When I wasn’t able to be there for my kids, my family was there. My kids never went without support. They never looked in the audience or stands and saw nobody.” Always having someone in the stands is a family axiom. While Anucha was going through the lawsuit, she could count on seeing someone from her family, especially her brother, sisters and dad, in the courtroom. “I don’t think anyone anticipated how many resources Madison Square Garden would tap,” says Anucha’s sister, Ruth. “They hired private investigators to dig up anything to discredit Anucha. We told her, ‘No matter what, you have your dignity preserved. Hold your head high.’”

The Breaking Point

Court was a last resort, says Anucha: “I tried very hard to work through this within the Knicks organization, to gracefully talk about what was going on, because I loved my job. I was learning a tremendous amount. But the attitude was, How dare you complain? You should be happy to have a job. I was told, ‘Why not give him what he wants? He has a different style.’”

Her breaking point came a year and a half later when she learned that people who reported to her had similar complaints. When she took action, she was fired. There are no statistics on the number of sexual harassment lawsuits in which the plaintiff prevails, says Anne C. Vladeck, Anucha’s attorney and a partner at Vladeck, Waldman, Elias & Engelhard in New York City, who specializes in employment issues. That’s because once filed, many cases are thrown out or settled. She advises women to pay close attention to the papers they sign when starting a new job, because these could include the company’s sexual harassment policy and the steps you need to take to file a complaint. “If you don’t follow the policy, a judge could say you didn’t give the company a chance to correct the problem,” Vladeck says. Now that the lawsuit is history, Anucha says she has moved past what, in the end, took the greatest toll on her—a media-crafted image of a greedy woman who went after the Knicks in hopes of a big payday. Though the newspaper clippings about the trial that her kids brought home from school still haunt her, she says: “When I look back on the experience, I’m happy I brought the lawsuit, but more for other working women than for myself.”