Edition: U.S. / Global

BASKETBALL; A Mother's Day Gift From Mr. Chips

Published: May 12, 1991

The day her youngest child left home, when the suitcases were piled by the apartment door, and all the goodbyes and tears had been shared, the mother found herself wanting to say something more, something profound. But what?

This was the one who never seemed to need the advice. The one whose decisions, with or without a ball in his hands, always seemed to work out right.

"Just give me two years," Joan Anderson finally told her son, Kenny, who was about to board a plane for Georgia Tech in Atlanta, to become a famous college basketball star.

Why just two years, she was asked. Why not four?

"I was being realistic, which is how I always tried to be with my kids," she said. "I gave them life, but I couldn't live it for them. I knew what Chippy was going down there for. He wasn't going to be a doctor or a lawyer. I didn't want him thinking he'd disappoint me if he didn't stay. You raise four kids by yourself, you're realistic about what you can or can't do."

Kenny Anderson, endearingly nicknamed Mr. Chips by his mother as a baby and ultimately known to the family as Chippy, thus returned this weekend to Lefrak City in Rego Park, Queens, having granted his mother's modest wish. Now he has come home with the idea of fulfilling a dream, several weeks ago having declared himself ready for business, that of the family and the National Basketball Association.

"He says he wants to buy me a house, so I guess I'm going to get a house," Joan Anderson said. "You can say I'm living in the projects and all that, but it's not like we weren't happy. We could stay here. He's still got his room."

She opened the door to the small bedroom adjoining the kitchen and offered her visitor a look around. There was a bed, a dresser and a small black-and-white television she bought for him when he was a boy. Newspaper clippings patched the walls, along with a photo of a girlfriend and a large poster of another woman he apparently admires.

"Yeah, Chris Evert, for some reason, he always liked her," Joan Anderson said, pointing to the smiling tennis star. "And Larry Bird. It's always 'the Bird, the Bird, the Bird.' You'd think Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan. But Chippy never went for what everyone else said he should. He made up his own mind. Probably kept him out of trouble, too." Ties That Bind

Advice being free, available in journals nationwide, Anderson has frequently read he is making a mistake leaving Georgia Tech after his sophomore year. He isn't ready for the N.B.A, he has heard. At 20, not chronologically. At 168 pounds, not physically. He ought to stay in school. He owes it to the program, or to himself another chance to win a National Collegiate Athletic Association title and, better yet, a college degree. And all the hoop mavens and champions of a more virtuous student-athletic universe were wasting their time because, as Kenny Anderson insists, this is a story of a mother, a son and an unyielding bond.

"I said I was leaving school mostly because of my mother, but I don't know if people believed that," Anderson said recently in a telephone interview. "But it was 90 percent of my decision. Ever since I was a little kid, I dreamed of wanting to give her something special, to show her my appreciation for what she did for me, for all of us. She struggled to keep us going."

Joan Anderson raised Kenny, his brother and two sisters by herself, working odd jobs, a balancing act of a life supported, in part, by her father, James McLaughlin, a retired construction worker. She proudly revealed that her father actually helped build this very apartment complex overlooking the Long Island Expressway. Eventually the construction money paid for a house with a fine landscaped yard in Jamaica, where, dating to when she was a teen-age mother, she was forced for years to take shelter with her kids.

Kenny, she said, never had such a closeness with his own father. "He doesn't know him," Joan Anderson said. "It was something that didn't work out a long time ago. I got a son out of it, a beautiful son, and was thankful for that."

She was asked if Kenny Anderson's father knew his son was now a big New York City basketball name.

"Oh, he knows," she said. "They just, for whatever reasons, haven't gotten together. Maybe in time. If it's meant to be, it'll be. But it doesn't bother Kenny. He's together. He's got me right here."

In this very apartment, she opened her home to the army of college recruiters who came with pictures and promises of campus wonder. She was there to beam and wrap her arms around her son's slender frame when Jack Curran, the basketball coach at Archbishop Molloy, invited him to attend the private high school she couldn't afford to send him to. She was there to take the trophies he brought home and line them proudly along the living room wall.

"Except the first one," Kenny said, laughing. "I was in, maybe, 7th or 8th grade, and I'd started playing in tournaments at the park. I brought home this big trophy one day. She said, 'Where'd you get that?' I said, 'I won it.' She thought I stole it. She didn't realize I was getting pretty good."

Not until one day when she was strolling by the park, and noticed his loping stride, and the ball dutifully obeying the commands of his left hand. Instantly she was reminded of her late brother, James, who was about the same size, 6 feet 2 inches, and, like Kenny, left-handed, and could brighten a playground just this way before his heart gave out when he was 24.

While he was at school, Kenny Anderson said he worried about the health of his mother, who is a youthful looking 47, but who has a troublesome ulcer. It bothered him that she was alone in a neighborhood "getting bad." But he is back now, at least until he is drafted next month to some distant N.B.A. outpost. The prospect of having him home excited Joan Anderson earlier this week, though she was hoping she wouldn't have to remind him about Mother's Day.

"His grandmother lives in Baltimore," she said. "It's just impossible to get that child to send a card."

Photo: Joan Anderson, mother of Georgia Tech basketball star Kenny Anderson, who has announced he will enter the National Basketball Association draft. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times)