June 19, 1986 was a Thursday. I was just out of school for the summer with a couple of days off before starting my new job, and I spent that day babysitting for a neighbor. I was sitting in their basement rec room watching tv, waiting for the kid to get up, when I saw the news about Len Bias.
My reaction was disbelief: a heart attack? How could a 22-year-old superman have a heart attack?
By the afternoon news, the reports were explaining the heart attack: cocaine overdose. The story I always heard, and I've never felt need to doubt it, was that that was the first time Bias had done coke.
For days afterwards, you saw it on tv, the cops going through the dumpster behind the dorm until they found a little glass vial, the ER at Leland Memorial Hospital.
Of course this was a huge local story. It dominated the summer and made headlines into the next year, and longer, as the grand jury investigations dragged. Over the years you'd still hear it come up, like when Len's brother Jay was killed in 1990. (I was still at Maryland then, and I remember hearing that on the radio just as vividly as I remember sitting on the neighbor's sofa watching the news in '86. My God, I remember thinking. Hasn't that family suffered enough?)
I always thought of it as a local story, though. I was a little surprised a couple of years ago when a coworker of mine, a guy my age who'd grown up in New York, said "I'll never forget where I was when I heard Len Bias had died."
I've seen Lonise and James Bias on the news many times in the last 20 years. The mother's crusade has been drugs, the father took up gun control. I admire the family very much for the way they've worked through their grief to try to help other people, and I heard an interview with Dr. Bias this morning where she repeated the sentiment:
"When Len first died, someone said take lemons and make lemonade. That disturbed me, because it was one of the most painful things that I had ever experienced. It was very difficult for me," Lonise Bias said. "But 20 years later, I have lemonade. That's been the hardest thing _ sweetening this thing that was so bitter by helping other people and learning through life's experiences."
She says she's gratified when people tell her that the shock of her son's death made them quit using drugs, or convinced them not to start. That's what Charles Barkley said:
I was thinking: 'What the hell is up with this cocaine? I should try this once to see what it was all about.' Then, we heard the reports were that Bias only used it once . . . that it was his first time. When I heard that, it scared me to death . . . scared the daylights out of me. It scared me into not trying it even once, not going anywhere near it."
There's a woman who grew up a Terps fan, who watched the story of Len Bias' death unfold, who went to the University of Maryland the next year after. Years later, she was at a party in a nice suburb, hosted by a couple of professionals, and somebody casually mentioned "There's coke upstairs if you're interested." It took a second for it to register that the guy wasn't offering soda, and then she had one thought as she left: Lenny Bias.
Posted by Nic at June 19, 2006 04:31 PM | TrackBack