Big Five Hall of Famer Pepe Sanchez treasures time at Temple
It can't be a coincidence, Pepe Sanchez told himself. Sanchez played in the NBA - he was the first Argentine player in the league - and started at the highest level of European professional competition. He made plenty of money in a long and productive career.
It can't be a coincidence, Pepe Sanchez told himself. Sanchez played in the NBA - he was the first Argentine player in the league - and started at the highest level of European professional competition. He made plenty of money in a long and productive career.
"The two places where I played my best - Argentina's national team and Temple," Sanchez said Saturday over the phone. "Both places, you don't play for money. You play for play, to represent. It was too much of a coincidence."
Monday night at the Palestra, Sanchez will be inducted into the Big Five Hall of Fame. Playing for John Chaney, Sanchez was a third-team Associated Press all-American as a senior in 2000 even though he averaged fewer than 6 points a game. Sanchez became one of the quintessential Chaney point guards, the savviest of passers, always a top-rate defender, able to use his guile and his Argentine sports background to blend with what Chaney taught and demanded. Sanchez still is third on the all-time NCAA steals list.
In addition to short stints with the 76ers, the Atlanta Hawks and the Detroit Pistons, Sanchez went on to be the starting point guard on Argentina's 2004 gold medal-winning Olympic team, a career highlight for the ages. He also won a Euroleague championship playing for the Greek club Panathinaikos and went on to play for a number of clubs in Spain, including Real Madrid and Barcelona. He eventually realized that he could make far more than the NBA minimum playing in Europe and, he said, that his level of athleticism wasn't a perfect NBA fit, so he stopped trying to make NBA teams.
Long before, Sanchez was ahead of the curve in coming to the United States as an Argentine ballplayer. When he first got to Temple, he said, "I had no idea I would be able to play. Maybe I'd sit for two or three years. I didn't know if I was good enough."
Chaney gave him the ball but never eased up on Sanchez. Leading Temple to the NCAA Elite Eight was great, but as Sanchez put it, "He's a tough man - as soon as you feel comfortable, he's going to break that and make you feel uncomfortable."
Maybe it took until after he left, Sanchez said, for him to really get it.
"Now I look back and I can understand a lot of things," Sanchez said. "The lessons of Coach, at that time, I couldn't understand. It's not to be understood at that time. It's meant to be followed. From my experience, either you take the challenge and you fight through it, or you've got to go home. . . . At the same time, he built something that's unbreakable. It made me really, really, really tough, not just in basketball, in life."
Sanchez came from an Argentine soccer culture, he once explained, where turnovers weren't just tolerated, but ignored if you could deliver the big score. He's proud that he thrived under Chaney and in Temple.
"Not everyone can play in Philadelphia," Sanchez said. "That's something I'm really proud of. A lot of people, they don't understand the tradition - the Big Five, I embraced it and I love it. It's my city."
Retired now, Sanchez splits his time and his work between two countries. He owns a professional team in his hometown of Bahia Blanca, Argentina. He also does the Spanish-language analysis for the Los Angeles Lakers. He was talking Saturday from L.A. before flying in for the induction ceremony.
"My team, it's not like a business thing, it's more like giving back to the city and being around basketball," Sanchez said of the Argentine club. For a couple of seasons, he was the player-owner before retiring. "I'm pretty busy. It was hectic in the beginning. I pretty much built the team from the scratch; I taught the managers to do it the way I like it."
On Monday, Sanchez, 37, will join Penn's Ugonna Onyekwe, the late Daily News sports columnist Stan Hochman, and broadcaster and La Salle graduate Bill Raftery in going into the Big Five Hall of Fame.
Sanchez thinks about what Temple gave him, he said, and it was more than just basketball knowledge.
"Basically, it reshaped my whole point of view - when I got to Temple, to college overall," Sanchez said. "It gave me a whole perspective, of the language, which is very important. That helped me. I really took advantage of the college. It really opened my mind about a lot of things in life. I cannot look back and see myself without that experience."
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