Though Michael Jordan was a sophomore on the North Carolina team that had won the previous NCAA championship, Houston was the It Program that season, a traveling road show whose aerial performance art took on mythical dimensions. While he was eventually allowed back, his career effectively ended when he pulled a gun on a classmate after a pick-up game dispute. For years his admonishment to Olajuwon—"When I drop a dime to the big Swahili, he got to put it in the hole"—endured as the gold standard for sports quotes. After that, he disappeared. He literally disappeared, as in, whereabouts unknown. He vanished. He was a jheri-curled version of a phantom. When I realized that “Where is Benny?” was already a parlor game, I joined in. Mention Anders's name to Drexler, and he whistles, smiles and says, "Benny Anders is a mystery. Other former teammates joke about his having entered the witness protection program. Grant called the only Anders listed in the directory of Bernice, La., Benny's hometown. "Heavy pine time," Anders called it. He rejoined the team a few weeks later. This was a guy who showed up to the 1984 Final Four wearing a pink tux. "How can [Lewis] forget the athletes he has on the bench?" Having recalled Anders from when I was a kid, I wondered a few years ago what had happened to him. He was living in Louisiana but going by his middle name, Michael. A day later he called me back, impressed: "Not much on this guy at all. He knows how to hide!" Back row, Benny Anders, Gary Orsak, Larry Micheaux, Dan Bunce, Akeem Olajuwon, ... more Photo: COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON Phi Slama Jama member Benny Anders found after hiatus 1 / 4 Back to Gallery 
 
 Benny Anders, a member of the University of Houston's Phi Slama Jama basketball team who has eluded public scrutiny for 30-plus years, has been tracked down in the Detroit area by an Austin filmmaker and will appear in an upcoming documentary on the famed 1980s team. Or what precisely he is doing now. And then got sucked in, venturing to multiple states in search of the guy. As a former Houston teammate puts it in the film, “It’s like he turned the lights out on his existence.” 
 
 This was remarkable on a number of levels. He looks good, too, weighing far less than 350 pounds, as was rumored. In exchange for an audience with Anders, could SI barter a page of advertising for an AAU team Anders was looking to launch? Perhaps, ideally, he should remain there. The Outlaw persists, and I'm O.K.
– In the 1980s, the University of Houston's Cougars basketball team—aka the Phi Slama Jamas—made their way into three Final Fours. The player described by the Houston Chronicle as "one of the more flamboyant members" has now been found in the Detroit area by a filmmaker, three decades after he disappeared from the public eye. Sports Illustrated reports on Benny "the Outlaw" Anders, the subject of an ESPN "30 for 30" documentary directed by Chip Rives to come out later this fall, and it's such a shocking development that the SI headline reads: "Benny Anders is alive!" Anders was one of college basketball's "enduring mysteries" after he was benched in 1985, quit the team, came back a few weeks later, and then fell off the map after whipping out a gun during a fight with a classmate; he was sentenced to three years' probation for that incident, per a 2013 SI article. And as the current SI article notes, he didn't go back to his hometown of Bernice, La., or keep in touch with teammates or relatives. Instead, he became what SI says was "a jheri-curled version of a phantom." "It's like he turned the lights out on his existence," an ex-Houston player says in the documentary. But Rives, with the help of former teammate and ex-Chicago cop Eric Davis, followed a bunch of leads until they tracked him down in a rental apartment outside of Detroit. The SI reveal doesn't tell much about Anders' current state of affairs, other than noting he works in a local restaurant and "looks good … weighing far less than 350 pounds, as was rumored." Fans will have to wait for the ESPN movie to find out more. (No good news for this former college basketball coach.)