Deion Sanders is the only athlete in history to play in both a Super Bowl and a World Series. He spent 14 seasons terrorizing NFL quarterbacks and nine seasons roaming the outfield in Major League Baseball. But sometime in the early 1990s, Prime Time came tantalizingly close to adding a third sport to his resume: the NBA.
How Stan Kasten Nearly Put Deion Sanders in an Atlanta Hawks Jersey
The connection was right in front of everyone. Sanders played for the Atlanta Braves from 1991 to 1994, and during that stretch, Stan Kasten served as president of both the Braves and the Atlanta Hawks. The same executive signing Sanders’ baseball checks also controlled an NBA roster.
“I was close, I mean really close,” Sanders revealed during a 2016 interview with Sports Illustrated. “I was really close to playing for the Atlanta Hawks for one game. When I was with the Braves, I don’t recall the year, Stan Kasten was the general manager of both teams, the Braves as well as the Hawks. He was going to allow me to play in an NBA game so that I could play three professional sports.”
Sanders didn’t approach this as some publicity stunt. He had a plan, broken down with the specificity of a cornerback studying film.
“I convinced him that I could get 10 points,” Sanders explained. “I was going to get two steals, all right, and I could make the layups, so that was four. I was going to get to the free-throw line, and I was going to hit one out of two free throws.
“I know me, I’m not going to hit both of them. I was going to hit a bucket, so now I’ve got seven. Just by being in the right place at the right time, I’d have had two. Now I’ve just got to pray for another point and I’d have 10.”
Whether Sanders could actually have executed that plan against NBA competition is debatable. What isn’t debatable is his athletic ceiling.
At the 1992 Foot Locker Celebrity Slam Dunk Contest, Sanders competed alongside Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, and Michael Irvin. Track star Mike Conley Sr. won the event with a free-throw-line dunk, but Sanders held his own, pulling off a self alley-oop and an off-the-backboard jam that showed legitimate bounce.
He also had a basketball background. Sanders averaged 24.6 points per game in high school and says he received college basketball scholarship offers that his coaches never told him about.
Florida State steered him toward football and baseball. The rest is Hall of Fame history.
Sanders and Dominique Wilkins: The Dynamic Duo That Never Was
Had the deal materialized, Sanders would have shared the floor with Dominique Wilkins, the nine-time All-Star and two-time slam dunk champion who was the face of Hawks basketball throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The two were part of the same Atlanta sports royalty during that era. They were also famous patrons of the city’s influential nightclub scene as hip-hop expanded into the South.
In 2021, after Wilkins was refused service at a Buckhead restaurant, believing it was racial discrimination, Sanders publicly defended the Hawks legend on social media. “Dominique is ATLANTA royalty!!” Sanders wrote. “How can this happen?”
Even Wilkins himself has acknowledged their shared Atlanta legacy with characteristic humor. On the “All The Smoke” podcast, Wilkins joked about the city’s iconic Jheri curl era, noting that he and Sanders were both sporting the look during their overlapping years in Atlanta. “We was in Atlanta at the same time, and his was wet,” Wilkins said of Sanders‘ hair. “Mine was just moist.”
The man who proved you could play two sports at the highest level on the same day would have been an easy sell for one NBA game.
On October 11, 1992, Sanders played in an NFL game for the Atlanta Falcons against the Miami Dolphins, then flew to Pittsburgh, taking a helicopter to the Braves’ NLCS matchup against the Pirates that evening.
His Braves teammate David Justice later set the record straight about Sanders’ commitment to both sports: “Whenever Deion could make it to the team, we loved having him. It was never a problem with us at all. To be able to play two sports at the highest level is incredible.”
If anyone had the audacity to make three sports work, it was him.
Sanders never specified why the Hawks deal fell through. Scheduling conflicts, contract complications, or simple cold feet from the league could all have played a role.
What’s left is a fascinating what-if: Deion Sanders running the floor alongside Dominique Wilkins at The Omni, trying to will his way to 10 points against actual NBA defenders.
It would have been chaos. It would have been must-see television. It would have been very Prime Time.
