The first inkling Robert Porcher had that Barry Sanders was considering retirement came immediately after the Detroit Lions’ season-ending loss to the Baltimore Ravens in 1998.

Porcher had settled into his seat on the plane ride home from Baltimore when fellow Lions defensive lineman Tracy Scroggins came up to him in a mild panic.

“He said, ‘Man, you need to go back there and talk to Barry,’ ” Porcher recalled recently. “And I was like, ‘Talk to Barry about what?’ And he said, ‘Man, he said he’s going to retire.’ And I was just like, I was like, ‘Hell, everybody wants to retire after tonight.’ ”

Porcher chalked Sanders’ frustration up to the disappointment of a 5-11 season and a 41-yard rushing performance in the finale that left Sanders just 9 yards shy of a fifth straight 1,500-yard season.

A few months later, after Sanders had no-showed every team function of the offseason, Porcher ran into Sanders while out to dinner at Kruse and Muer in downtown Rochester.

Porcher was walking down the street heading into the restaurant, Sanders was either getting in or out of his car, and the two had a brief conversation before parting ways for what turned out to be for good.

“He said, ‘I know there’s been some talks, man, people saying (I‘m going retire).’ He said, ‘I don’t know what I want to do,’ ” Porcher recalled. “I was like, ‘Barry, look, man. You’re my teammate. I understand. You don’t have to explain anything to me. I’m behind you just like everybody else. All the other guys are behind you. Whatever you decide, we’re behind you.’ And that was the last we talked about him possibly retiring. And then when we came to camp, all hell broke loose.”

[ Albom: Barry Sanders retirement a bombshell we should have saw coming ]

Hell hit the Lions in the summer of 1999 when Sanders abruptly retired on the eve of training camp by faxing a statement to his hometown newspaper, The Wichita Eagle, that read in part, “my desire to exit the game is greater than my desire to remain in it.”

Twenty years later, as the Lions get ready to open another training camp next week, Sanders and his retirement remain a point of fascination for a fan base that has enjoyed just four playoff appearances since the best player in franchise history walked away from the game.

Why did he do it? Why like that? Was it really as much of a shocker as it seemed at the time? And how in the world did the Lions make the playoffs that season with Sanders at home on his couch?

The Free Press talked to nearly 20 people in and around the organization at the time of Sanders’ retirement to get their recollections of that crazy camp and season two decades ago.

Sanders’ agent declined an extended interview request on Sanders’ behalf, but Sanders did talk briefly about his retirement at the Rocket Mortgage Classic at Detroit Golf Club last month.

Time, as always, adds perspective, and in some cases alters memories. But many teammates (and some front office members and coaches) insist Sanders’ retirement wasn’t much of a surprise, and some even said he confided in them about his decision.

Sanders talked retirement 'more than anybody'

Scroggins and Porcher weren’t the only Lions who caught wind of Sanders’ possible retirement months before it became official.

Safety Ron Rice told the Free Press last year that Sanders told him he was finished playing while they shared a cab ride to dinner the night before the Ravens game.

Ron Hughes, the Lions’ vice president of player personnel in 1999, who died in February, said last year that running back Ron Rivers told him Sanders was going to retire weeks before he actually did, though he didn’t believe Rivers at the time.

Rivers, who was close with Sanders, said the Lions’ all-time leading rusher “talked about retirement more than anybody I’ve ever known,” which is why he didn’t give Sanders’ dalliance with retirement much thought immediately after the 1998 season.

But as the two talked more that spring, it became clear Sanders was serious about leaving the game.

“Him talking like that at the end of the year, that’s what he normally does. It’s nothing new,” Rivers said. “But when you call him in the offseason and he’s doing other things other than him working out, cause he works out a lot. He’s doing other things, was like, ‘OK, this might be it, huh, B?’ And he got quiet and so I was just like, ‘I have an idea, bro.’ So it was good.”

Rivers said Sanders was dabbling in finance at the time — Sanders went on to become chairman and majority stockholder of American State Bank in Tulsa, one of the first black-owned banks in the state of Oklahoma, according to The Oklahoman — and often daydreamed about being somewhere other than on the football field.

“Everything was always talking about, ‘Hey, man, I could be doing something different.’ And, ‘Have you ever thought about doing this?’ ” Rivers said. “And I’m like, ‘No, this is what I wanted to do. This is great, what are you talking about?’ And he just had different dreams and different pictures and things he wants to do. It’s just — it’s kind of funny cause everyone talks about retirement, it just seemed like from all the stuff he talks about and was saying that you had an idea that this was it.”

At one point, after Sanders had made his intention to retire clear, Rivers said he asked Sanders to hold off on making the announcement official so the Lions would give him a legitimate chance at winning the starting job.

“If you knew Barry, you had a feeling that the writing is on the wall, so to speak,” wide receiver Herman Moore said. “And he was a man that deserved a lot more out of the stellar career and outstanding, obviously, Hall of Fame career that he had. I think that’s what he was — that was what he was playing for. It wasn’t for money, it wasn’t for fame. And when he didn’t see that, and we were in just such a big rebuilding stage, I mean how much can a person like that take? That’s a hit to his legacy and I think that’s a disservice to him.”

Lions' coach's reaction: ‘So be it’

Around the same time that Sanders faxed his retirement announcement to his friend Mark McCormick, who at the time worked at The Wichita Eagle — McCormick declined an interview request from the Free Press — then-Lions vice president Tom Lewand got a late-night phone call at his home from Sanders’ agents, David Ware and Lamont Smith.

Ware and Smith, who often conducted business with the Lions by conference call (they were in different cities), informed Lewand that Sanders was retiring. Lewand then broke the news to head coach Bobby Ross and executive vice president and chief operating officer Chuck Schmidt, who told owner William Clay Ford, and the group convened at the Pontiac Silverdome to start preparing for life without Barry.

Sanders’ retirement surprised some in the front office, but it wasn’t totally unexpected. Ross said at the time he reached out to Sanders 13 times by phone call or letter after the 1998 season and never received a response — Ross says now he does not remember reaching out that often — and Sanders’ late father, William, had been publicly critical of the coach and the organization.

“My actual reaction was, ‘Well, so be it,’ ” Ross said last month. “I mean because I was 50% expecting it, so it wasn’t like I was surprised. I think Chuck probably felt surprised, but when you’re that close to camp you got to go ahead and go. You can’t mope about it and you can’t get down on it. You got to stay up. And so that was my reaction.”

While the Lions’ front office went about identifying potential trade targets to replace Sanders — they eventually traded for Greg Hill — and fighting with the league for extra salary-cap space, Ross said he addressed Sanders’ retirement with his players only one time, in the first team meeting of training camp.

“I said, ‘Whatever side you’re on, you don’t need to take sides, No. 1, and No. 2, Barry was a great, great player. We all know what he was to this program and he will be greatly missed, but we’ve got to move on. And he’s not here now. We’ve got to play this season and you’re players, you’re in the National Football League, you’ve got to step up.’ … And that’s kind of the way we approached it,” Ross said. “Then from there on, I didn’t address it. You get into watching film and meetings and all that type of stuff. And that’s what camp becomes. You have some R&R, too, but we never brought it up again after that, at least I didn’t.”

Rivers said the media crush was "crazy" at the start of camp and coaches meetings ran a little longer than normal. Porcher said Ross couldn’t hide the stress he was under after losing a Hall of Fame running back. “He’s one of those people where he doesn’t have a poker face,” he said. And most everyone praised Ross’ handling of the situation as he got the Lions ready for the season.

“It’s almost like when a player has an injury and he’s laying on the field and all that, then the coaches just say, ‘Hey, let’s move the drill down 10 yards,’ ” then-Lions vice president of football administration Larry Lee said. “It don’t mean that you don’t care for him being hurt or anything, but you got to continue. That’s kind of how Bobby Ross handled it. He gave it the respect it deserved and talked about it, but he also talked about how the team has to continue forward.”

Lions had hands full replacing Sanders

To say the Lions had their hands full replacing Sanders is an understatement. When Sanders retired, he was on the verge of breaking Walter Payton’s career rushing record. His primary replacements in 1999, Rivers and Hill, finished with less than 4,000 yards rushing combined in their careers.

“You had roster guys, I guess that’s the best way to put it,” then-Lions running backs coach Frank Falks said. “You had guys that were good enough to make your roster.”

Rivers spent the first five years of his career as Sanders’ backup in Detroit, while Hill made a handful of starts with the St. Louis Rams and Kansas City Chiefs. When the Lions acquired Hill days before the start of the regular season, it made for an interesting dynamic in the locker room.

Hill, a first-round pick in 1994, broke his leg in the third game of the 1998 season and lost his job when the Rams traded for Marshall Faulk the following spring. Then-Rams coach Dick Vermeil was honest with Hill when he reported to training camp, telling the running back the team was looking for a better opportunity for him. A few weeks later, he was on the move to Detroit.

Hill said he took the news of his trade with mixed emotions, and that things only got worse.

“Let me tell you what, that Ron Rivers was not happy,” Hill said. “I mean, it was complete hatred from Day 1. … He was cool with Barry so he would be talking to Barry about everything that’s going on each and every week, and I had to tell him one time, I said, ‘Hey man, you keep doing that popping off crap, I’m gonna stuff your ass in this (bleeping) locker, I promise you. Your ass is going to be on IR cause I’m gonna put you there. You better go on with this attitude stuff like this. I didn’t make this trade, they traded for me. I didn’t ask to come here. They traded for me.’ ”

Hill said there was enough friction between the two that “it was probably one of them deals where if he saw me today or I saw him today, I couldn’t tell you that he wouldn’t get it.”

Sedrick Irvin, another running back on that team, recalls some animosity, though Rivers said there was a different root cause.

“To be honest with you, I think the tension came because he came in acting like he was the guy and for us, around the league, we all thought he wasn’t the guy,” Rivers said. “We were like, ‘OK, really, that’s the guy you try to go get to replace us? Really, that’s the one?’ … It was more of that thing where, you know how when you have a great one there and then someone else comes in acting like they were just as good or better than the great one? And so that’s where the whole tension came in from. It was like, ‘What? You’re what? Come on, man. Are you kidding me right now?’ ”

Rivers and Hill co-existed in the backfield for most of the season, with Rivers opening the year as starter, missing time with a broken ankle, then regaining his starting job once he was healthy.

Hill, who was much more brash than Sanders, led the Lions with 542 yards rushing, and Rivers added 295 yards. Looking back, Hill said then-offensive coordinator Sylvester Croom’s unimaginative running game stymied the group’s production.

“I just thought the dude didn’t like running the ball,” Hill said. “We had three running plays. I’m not joking with you. Three running plays. Three. Like, three. And we got four later on in the year. Like one, two, three, four. That’s it.”

Attempts to reach Croom over the last month were unsuccessful. Sanders’ father, William, was critical of the offense at the time Sanders retired. Rivers, though, insists the Lions “actually had 10 running plays” and that Croom did his best to tailor the playbook to Hill’s running style.

“We used to joke in the meetings that he would just run with horse blinders on because he would just run straight.” Rivers said.

More:Barry Sanders at 50: Here are 20 tales about No. 20 you might not know

Irvin, who now works as a high school coach in Florida, said he didn’t realize how simple the playbook was until later in life and that looking back it’s clear coaches “did not trust the situation.”

Hill went a step further and said he believes Croom is why Sanders retired, though he admittedly has never talked to Sanders about that.

“You god damn right (I think he’s one of the greatest running backs ever),” Hill said. “And now I actually think he greater cause that dude was under Sylvester Croom and he did all that.

“The dude that helped run Barry out of Detroit was Sylvester Croom, the offensive coordinator. And he was pissed off because they went and got him instead of some guys that they could have gotten as offensive coordinator and that was a frustrating ordeal because that was like the third or fourth or fifth or sixth time that a move had been made with the Detroit Lions, not thinking about the benefits of Barry or not thinking about the benefits of your offense or whatever and he had just gotten to the point to where the dude was just like, ‘Look, y’all can’t get it right so you’re not going to let me go so I need to just walk away.’ And he never said that, (but) that was it.”

‘Bigger than a one-man team’

Despite the relative lack of a running game — the Lions finished 28th out of 31 teams in rushing that season — the Lions still made the playoffs as a wild card.

They finished 8-8 and lost in the first round to Washington, but opened the season with two straight wins and started a surprising 6-2 before enduring a late-season slide.

Several players said Sanders’ retirement was, in some ways, the impetus for the strong start.

“We felt it was important to get off to that fast start and prove we’re bigger than a one-man team,” quarterback Charlie Batch recalled. “I remember guys were getting a little furious because they weren’t being talked about on like ESPN Countdown or GameDay the day of the first game. We were up in Seattle and guys were frustrated because it was all about Mike Holmgren and him, new coach, all of this type of thing. So those type of things ate with us. That ate up inside and we’re sitting back thinking, ‘Man, we need to go out here and win this game.’ ”

Rivers ran for 96 yards and the Lions had 167 yards rushing as a team in their opener, though the offense relied less and less on the run as the season went on.

Germane Crowell and Johnnie Morton each topped 1,000 yards receiving for the season, David Sloan made the Pro Bowl, and backup quarterback Gus Frerotte led the Lions to a win over the eventual Super Bowl champion Rams after Batch broke his right thumb.

“We wanted to prove that it was a two-part relationship,” offensive lineman Tony Semple said. “Great things happened and Barry made great things happen for us. He did. But we also wanted to show that we had the ability, that you know what, we’re a good offensive line as well. And I remember specifically going, ‘All right, man. This is on us.’ Anytime somebody puts something in your face that you have to prove, you’re going to try to bring your best, you’re going to try to strive and I think that was the accelerant for that performance, I really do.”

No one walked away from that season thinking the Lions had accomplished something special, but 20 years later, Ross said there’s plenty to be proud of in that year.

“I think you have to hold your head up,” he said. “You don’t have to be apologetic for the year because we did accomplish getting to the playoffs. And at that time there were only 12, I think, of (31) that would do it. And we made it. And we probably kind of backed into it. Not kind of, it was that way. But we still got there and I think that it was — I still, I’m not ashamed of it. I thought we did a good job. To lose your best one the day before, when you don’t have the opportunity to plan, is a tough thing to deal with.”

The epilogue to Sanders' retirement

Ross said he believes he reached out to Sanders at some point during the 1999 season, not to try and talk him into returning but to wish him luck and “to thank him for the tremendous contributions he had made to the program.”

The two didn’t talk to each other until five years later, when Ross was coaching at Army and Sanders was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. Ross approached Sanders at the ceremony and offered congratulations, but he said he never asked Sanders why he retired.

“There was a lot of media people around there that wanted to talk to him and that sort of thing,” Ross said. “We couldn’t make it into a long conversation, but I wouldn’t have brought that up anyway at that time.”

That hasn’t stopped others from speculating.

Some believe Ross was to blame. Some Croom. Others say it was the organization’s fault. Many believe Sanders was just burned out on football and ready to be done with the sport.

Days after Sanders’ retirement, Kevin Colbert, then the Lions’ director of pro scouting and now the Pittsburgh Steelers general manager, shared a cut-up of some of Sanders’ runs from the 1998 season with other members of the front office. The film showed Sanders going out of bounds early or down with limited contact, compared with runs from earlier seasons when that wasn’t the case.

Lee, who played for the Lions before joining the front office, said he believes a combination of things led to Sanders’ retirement, including the organization’s direction under Ross and the fact that several of Sanders’ Lions contemporaries, including Kevin Glover, were no longer with the team.

“We kept all those guys in place the first several years of free agency, but then we started losing them one by one. This one’s gone, that one’s gone,” Lee said. “I know Barry looked around and said, ‘Wow, where are all my boys?’ And it seemed like the weight of the Lions was on his shoulders. … He kind of felt like he was carrying the whole organization on his back and that was something he wasn’t willing to do.”

Porcher said he has seen Sanders “tons of times” over the last 20 years and has never asked for an explanation — not that he needs one.

“As a player, you get it,” Porcher said. “You get it. Guys are released every day in the NFL, and without explanation, teams just say, ‘Hey, we’re going in another direction.’ What Barry did was just leaving. Ideally, you want a big ceremony and maybe the Fords would have given him a car and he jumps in a convertible Mustang and drives off the field and everybody’s crying. Maybe we would have loved to have seen something like that, but that’s never really been his M.O.”

Semple pointed to Sanders’ Pro Football Hall of Fame induction speech, when Sanders said “football chose me” not the other way around, as a means to explain his retirement. Moore said that while some people may have felt Sanders left the team in a lurch, his teammates and people who knew him never shared that view.

“If a person’s told us exactly (why he retired), you kind of keep that. You can’t betray the trust,” Moore said. “I’m sure he might be the guy that’s telling each person something different so he can find out who’s really snitching, I don’t know. So, for me it’s whatever Barry said it is, and I can give you my opinion, right or wrong, but what he’s told us is pretty consistent with what he’s told the public. He was just ready to hang it up. So that’s what I’m sticking with.”

Carlos Monarrez contributed to this report.

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Read more on the Detroit Lions and sign up for our Lions newsletter