Deion Sanders almost played for the Atlanta Hawks?

Famous for playing two professional sports in the same city, Pro Football Hall of Famer Deion Sanders nearly made it three by joining the Atlanta Hawks.

In an interview with SI Now’s Maggie Gray, Pro Football Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders said he almost played for all three Atlanta professional sports franchises at the same time.

While he spent four of his nine seasons in Major League Baseball with the Atlanta Braves (1991-94) and five Hall of Fame caliber years with the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons (1989-93), Sanders was very close to playing for the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks in the 1990s.

Sanders said the idea came about in the early 1990s when talking with sports executive Stan Kasten. While Kasten is now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, he spent many years working with the Braves and Hawks in the same role. Both teams at the time were owned by billionaire television mogul Ted Turner.

Sanders told Gray, “I was close, I mean really close. This is a breaking story. I was really close to playing for the Atlanta Hawks for one game. When I was with the Braves…[Kasten] was going to allow me to play in an NBA game so that I could play three professional sports.”

Though Sanders starred at Florida State University as a cornerback on the football team, an outfielder on the baseball team, and even on the track team as a sprinter, he didn’t shoot hoops on the basketball team during his time in college in Tallahassee.

Could Sanders have played a few minutes at guard alongside Dominique Wilkins in the early 1990s? It wouldn’t matter if Sanders had an atrocious jump shoot or couldn’t dribble at all. He was one of the best athletes in his prime as the iconic sports figure known only as Prime Time.

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