Satch Sanders: Basketball Player & Business Man

Part II

It is 1980. The basketball career that belonged to the young man from Harlem has come and gone, the inevitable victim of gimpy knees and aching bones, wheezing lungs and quicker rookies. A light, pre-Christmas snow is dusting the sidewalk in front of 43 Stanhope Street, abutting both Back Bay and the South End when the tall, bespectacled black man pokes his head out the door and grimaces when he sees that the overhead lights have been left on all night needlessly.

"They never remember to turn them off," he grumbles. "Must think that I own Con Edison."
The New York roots still show. But the man is in Boston, where neither he nor the city is a stranger to high electric bills and racial problems.

The wind whisks down the street, and the man ducks back inside in search of the light switch. The green and white awning over the doorway flaps angrily, distorting the single name overhead: Satch's. The luncheon crowd begins to drift in, and one young man, seeing the tall figure disappear into the doorway, turns to his girlfriend and says: "There. Did you see him? That's the owner. That's Satch."

Tom Sanders would have you believe that the best thing about his restaurant is that it is one of the few spots in the Northeast where you can order baby back ribs - which sound like just what they are, tender pork ribs cut from high on the back of young pigs - that he has made the house specialty.

But there is something else going on at Satch's.