The circulation desk was still closed early on a recent Monday morning in the Peter W. Rodino Jr. Library, on the fourth level of the Seton Hall School of Law, where Braeden Anderson settled by a desk in the corner. He flipped an accordion-size textbook to Page 563.
Just outside, pale sunlight cast the hallways in a periwinkle glaze, nearly matching the color on the coffee mug resting before him, with Seton Hall’s logo, a patch-eyed pirate, splashed across it. The watch on Anderson’s left wrist read 7:35 a.m. Like most of the other first-year law students, he had almost every minute of the unfolding day mapped out. Except that his schedule included basketball practice that afternoon.
His days, then, seem to carry out like a stream of buzzer beaters. He has learned to thrive on less sleep — five, maybe six hours — than is recommended for a Division I athlete, and tailored his diet to handle the toll that the academic-athletic duality of his life can take. But Anderson is not one to complain. In fact, as he skimmed line by line through a textbook on torts, he insisted there were aspects of his studies that amused him.
Take this case, for example, he said, pointing over at Page 557. Bencivenga v. JJAMM Inc. (1992). Guy at a nightclub gets beaten up by some other guys.
“Torts is actually funny sometimes,” Anderson said.
He chuckled at the details before arriving at the crux of the article, the actionable dispute that landed the case onto his pages of study.
“Can you apportion a percentage of liability to an unnamed party?” Anderson asked.
“See, the facts are pretty straightforward,” he added. “But the legal analysis is actually pretty tricky.”
At 6 feet 9 inches, with thick tattooed arms, Anderson, 23, would make an imposing courtroom presence. On the court for the Pirates, he plays sparingly but aggressively, pursuing rebounds with abandon and setting an active tone on defense. A graduate transfer from Fresno State, Anderson is a selfless role player, comfortable setting screens, running the floor and moving the ball.
He said his goals had changed over the years.
Growing up, Anderson wanted to play in the NBA, and when he was a top prep school prospect, it appeared as if he might be on that track. A serious car accident in 2013 affected that trajectory, though. His focus shifted more toward academics. He still wanted to earn money for his family, but now it is as a corporate lawyer. He also still wanted to play basketball. Who said he could not do both?
Anderson scored 161 in one attempt on his Law School Admission Test, landing him in the 82nd percentile. He seriously weighed an offer from Penn State’s law school, but with no basketball option. Finally, Seton Hall gave him the chance to test his skills in both arenas.
Class began at 10:30, and Anderson scrunched his tall frame into a swivel seat in the fifth row of a 90-seat lecture hall for his final class before the exam. He estimated that he had missed five classes in the first semester traveling with the team. But when the Pirates left on a Thursday to travel to Penn State for a Friday night exhibition earlier in the fall, Anderson remained behind, attended Friday class and drove to State College, Pennsylvania, with an assistant to make it before tipoff.
“Braeden,” his professor, Brian Sheppard, called midway through class. “What was the lower court’s decision?”
“They found in favor of the plaintiff,” Anderson said, drawing a quick nod in response. Yes, indeed, he had studied Bencivenga.
After class, Anderson made plans with fellow students to meet back in the library for a group study session, 12 hours after he had arrived. But first, he had to drive to South Orange, New Jersey, Seton Hall’s main campus, where a strength coach was waiting for him to work out, a trainer was waiting to tape him and his teammates were waiting for him to practice before a big game in Washington.
This normally left him with just enough time to grab lunch, and so he put on a thin jacket and walked briskly out into a bright and blustery afternoon. There was a cafe nearby. A good panini spot. He took a bite and chewed on the question of why he was doing all this.
“I realized that people are governed by this narrow-minded vision of what they think people can do,” he said. “I’ve learned to shatter those boundaries.”
‘What do I have?’
The night of Sept. 3, 2013, Anderson lost a game of rock-paper-scissors with a friend and had to ride cramped in the back seat of a Fresno State teammate’s pickup. He nearly lost his life.
Anderson’s head rested against the truck’s ceiling, and when the driver swerved to avoid a roadside collision, crashing into another car in the process, the force ejected Anderson upward. He broke his neck in two places.
As he lay waiting for paramedics, Anderson could move his fingers and toes. But X-rays later revealed that he his fractures had come within fractions of an inch of impinging on his spinal cord, which very likely would have paralyzed him.
He recalled this while driving east along Route 510 toward South Orange. Bryson Tiller’s “Sorry Not Sorry” played softly through the car’s speakers. A pinkish 3-inch scar below his Adam’s apple stands out against his skin. It is one of two he has visible from operations after the accident; a longer one runs along his upper spine, like a zipper.
Anderson was raised in Okotoks, Alberta, a suburb of Calgary. His mother, Lori, is Irish, and his biological father, with whom Anderson has had only a sporadic relationship, is a former player on Nigeria’s national basketball team. Anderson loved football growing up, but his Amateur Athletic Union coach, John Hegwood, persuaded him to focus on basketball when he was 14.
At the time, Anderson was living in and out of the house with his mother and stepfather, who he said was verbally and physically abusive.
“I lived with friends and relatives,” Anderson said. “There were times I wasn’t safe to be there.”
Anderson, who was found to have attention deficit disorder, also acknowledges that he could sometimes be a handful. Lori Anderson, who has since divorced, confirmed her son’s account of living in an unstable household. Attempts to reach Anderson’s stepfather for this article were unsuccessful.
The trouble at home fueled Anderson to seek ways to flee.
“What do I have?” he recalled asking himself. “What do I have at my disposal? What do I have that can get me out of this situation? And all I had was basketball.”
But Calgary was not a basketball hotbed. This was several years before Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett made Canada a destination for college recruiters.
Hegwood encouraged his young star, who had grown to 6-foot-8 by his junior year, to look for prep school options in the United States.
Anderson thought he found the perfect opportunity in North Carolina, at a place called Christian Faith Center Academy, steered there by a coach, Ro Russell.
Anderson described the living conditions as wretched, but college coaches flocked to games. He soon received offers from Arizona, Memphis, Florida and Kentucky, among dozens of other programs.
Anderson ultimately chose to play for Kansas. But early in his freshman year, in 2011, Anderson met with Kansas coach Bill Self in his office. Self told him that he had been ruled academically ineligible to play, stemming from an investigation into his time at Christian Faith. A subsequent investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. program “The Fifth Estate” alleged that Russell had misled Anderson and 10 other players by creating a nearby school that had a similar-sounding name but was not CFCA. The NCAA deemed Russell’s school to be bogus.
Now Anderson was out of a scholarship. Kansas wanted him to attend junior college and return in two years, but Anderson had bigger academic aspirations. So he made his way to Fresno.
‘The worst nightmare’
Anderson never thought he would die after the accident. But there were points during his recovery when he said he wanted to. The pain was sometimes unbearable, and he received so many injections that the veins in his forearms calcified into brittle twigs. It took time to regain feeling in his left hand. He spent 28 days in Stanford Hospital and underwent four major operations.
“I really went through hell,” Anderson said. “It was the worst nightmare. It was something I didn’t think I could physically get through.”
When he was released from the hospital, Anderson was not initially concerned about playing basketball. His fear related to academics — he had missed a month of classes.
His mother assured him that it would be OK if he returned to Okotoks, but Anderson declined. So she propped his laptop on top of several books, bringing it to eye level, because Anderson could not bend his neck. Then he began emailing professors.
“You just can’t knock him down,” Lori Anderson said.
Anderson went to Fresno to pick up the pieces on his basketball career. At Kansas, he was projected to be the next in the succession of big men to reach the NBA, following Cole Aldrich, the twins Marcus and Markieff Morris, and Thomas Robinson, each a first-round pick. But the accident — and its nine-month rehabilitation — effectively obliterated his professional aspirations. Anderson missed the entire 2013-14 season but traveled with the team. He said he used a lot of that time to study for the LSAT, which he took in June 2014.
Since 2006 — the year the NCAA adopted its graduate transfer rule, allowing a player with remaining eligibility to transfer immediately if he seeks a graduate degree in a major not offered by his current school — it has been rare for a Division I athlete to attempt law school while competing. Notre Dame’s Chris Stewart, an offensive lineman, took first-year law courses in 2010. More recently, so did two women’s basketball players: Baylor’s Sune Agbuke and Iowa’s Kathryn Reynolds.
Jay Bilas, an ESPN analyst who attended Duke Law School while he was a graduate assistant, said he had never heard of an active men’s basketball player doing both. “Really impressive,” he wrote in an email.
Anderson graduated from Fresno State in three years. Though he is four years out of high school, Anderson had used only two years of eligibility before this season. According to a Seton Hall spokesman, Anderson has applied to the NCAA for a waiver to play again next season and retain the scholarship that covers the $50,000 tuition for law school.
“For a while, I had a Plan A and a Plan B: Plan A was NBA; Plan B was law school,” Anderson said. “Somewhere along the lines there I said, Hey, I don’t need to have two plans. They’re both the same plan. It’s to be successful, to make the most out of every situation, to achieve, to do it all.”
Anderson lives on his own in East Newark, New Jersey, and said his teammates often did not know what to make of him — a basketball player who happily trades video games for textbooks. The same could be said for his law school classmates.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Shivang Gandhi, 27, of Edison, New Jersey, who sits near Anderson in class. “It takes tremendous discipline. I don’t know how he does it.”
At 2:15 p.m., Anderson was running into the athletic center to change before practice. He hustled into the weight room for a 20-minute speed workout. By 2:35, he was plopped on a training table as Tony Testa, Seton Hall’s director of sports medicine, taped his ankles and wrist.
“Did the professor call on you in class?” Testa asked.
Anderson smiled, and then he was off, running again, toward the film room for a review of the coming game with George Washington. Then practice, and the typical torrent of invectives from Seton Hall’s volcanic coach, Kevin Willard.
Then back to quiet study in the library.
The breakneck transitions from one demanding activity to the next did not give Anderson a moment’s pause.
“I am doing a million things at once, all the time,” he said. “I’m thinking about basketball at times in class, and I’m thinking about class sometimes when I’m playing basketball.
“But it’s all kind of grouped into one thing for me. It’s almost impossible to separate the two.”
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