PART 3
I thought about him last March, when the Utah Jazz came into Boston to play the Celtics, I glanced at my program before the game and noticed that Karl Malone was playing in his 16th season for the Jazz. That triggered a Bias flashback for me because the Mailman had entered the league in '85, a year before Bias, well ... you know.
Would Bias still be chugging along, much like Malone? Would he have stayed clean? Did he have a drug problem in the first place? Was that awful night at Washington Hall just an aberration? Would he have approached the 32,000 points and 15,000 rebounds that Malone compiled over the course of his career? What would he look like? Would he still be playing in Boston? Would he have a few tattoos? Would he have a shaved head? Would we call him Len or Lenny?
Finally my girlfriend nudged me, snapping me out of my stupor.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked me.
"Nothing," I said.
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I thought about him later that same month, when I was cleaning out my office and found a yellowed feature that I had written for the Boston Phoenix back in December of '95 called "The Curse of Lenny Bias" -- a piece which described every dreadful moment that happened to the Celtics since Bias' death. You won't find a more vivid example of a single tragedy altering the destiny of a sports franchise. The Celtics has just captured their third championship in six years, they were bringing back the Big Three (Bird, McHale and Parish) in their respective primes, and they were adding the most explosive college player in the country. Within 48 hours, Bias was dead; the franchise would eventually follow suit.
It happened slowly. The champions limped through the regular season in '87, with Bird and McHale logging big minutes from October to June and carrying them to another appearance in the Finals (a painful loss to the Lakers in six, and yes, the Celts were a player short). McHale injured his foot during the last month of the season, returned for the playoffs, fractured that same foot and, incredibly, kept playing on it. He was never the same player again. And Bird's body was never the same after that season; over the next few years, he started to break down like the Bluesmobile.
How many titles would Bias have been worth? How many years would he have added to the careers of Bird and McHale? Is it safe to argue that the addition of Len Bias to the '86 Celtics would have locked up at least two or three more titles in the '80s? We'll never know.
Red Auerbach and the Celtics haven't been the same since Bias' death.
The bad luck continued through the '80s and into the '90s. Bird and McHale broke down for good during a brief resurgence for the team in '91, the last time the Celts ever truly contended for a title. Red Auerbach slowly faded from the scene during that time; many believe that a little piece of Red passed away in '86, given that Red was a staunch Bias supporter during his Maryland days.
Reggie Lewis dropped dead in '93 and sent the franchise into permanent doldrums; not only did the team lose its only All-Star caliber player, but the ensuing "Did he or didn't he use drugs?" soap opera cast a shadow over the next few seasons. Suddenly the team was hampered by salary cap problems and inept management. Once the Boston Garden was pushed aside by the Fleet Center in 1995, the glory days of the Celtics disappeared for good.
My "Curse of Bias" piece from '95 ended with an anecdote from former Celtics general manager Jan Volk, who remembered a moment before Opening Night in November 1986, the same night the Celtics handed out championship rings and raised the '85-'86 championship banner. About two hours before the game, Volk noticed a piece of paper sticking out from a cushion of the sofa in his office. Curious, he pulled out the piece of paper and found that it was an unused plane ticket with Lenny Bias' name on it. The team had given it to him during his post-draft visit to Boston, about 12 hours before his death.
"It must have fallen out of his jacket that day," Volk told me. "To find that ticket on the same night we were raising the '86 banner ... it was eerie. It really was."
Makes you think, doesn't it? Did the Sports Gods decide that too many good things happened for the Celtics over the past few decades? Red, Cousy, Heinsohn, Russell, the Jones Boys, Cowens, Hondo, McHale, Parish, Bird, 16 titles ... when they stumbled into the second pick of the '86 Draft and Lenny Bias in '86, did the Sports Gods throw their hands in the air and say, "Enough is enough!" Does stuff like that actually happen?
These are the things you think about when you're holding a yellowed page with Lenny Bias' picture on it.
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I thought about him last April. A college buddy of mine and I were discussing Shawn Kemp's battle with cocaine, which landed him in a drug rehab program right before the NBA playoffs were about to commence. Neither of us could understand why a professional athlete would even mess with cocaine after Lenny Bias's death.
Bias' death served as a giant anti-drug ad for kids who grew up in the 1980s.
"I remember when Bias died," my friend said, "that put the fear of God in me."
"Me, too," I agreed. "Everyone was like that. It was like this giant brainwashing of all the teenagers at that time -- don't do coke. Len Bias was like a human anti-drug ad."
"Maybe that was his legacy."
"Yeah, maybe it was."
And we moved onto another topic ... but I found myself thinking about it later that night. Why did that have to be Lenny Bias's legacy? Why couldn't they have chosen someone else?
More importantly, 15 years later, why did I still care?
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We'll never know what Bias might have done if he'd gotten the chance to play in David Stern's league.
I thought about him last week. My girlfriend asked me about the topic of my next ESPN.com column, so I told her I would be writing about Lenny Bias. Who was that? she asked. So I told her the whole story. She soaked in everything, finally piping in, "I can't believe that he died two days after they drafted him. That's unbelievable. (pause) I mean, isn't that unbelievable? Has anything like that ever happened before?"
Having just finished recounting the sordid saga, I found myself nodding in agreement. It's the same way I feel whenever I remember the fact that Red Sox pitchers threw 13 different pitches that could have won them the 1986 World Series. That's unbelievable. That's unbelievable. You couldn't make that up. And you couldn't make up the sequence of events that shaped the last 48 hours of Lenny Bias' life.
Imagine having the greatest day of your life. Imagine working towards a goal for years and finally having it come to fruition. Imagine celebrating for two straight days with your family and friends. Then imagine you got a little carried away, and in a flash -- boom! -- paramedics are trying to revive you, but they can't, and things slowly start fading to white ... and then you're gone. Imagine.
Later that same day, I received an e-mail from my friend Tim -- a Maryland native and one of the original Bias fans back in the '80s -- warning me about ESPN Classic's impending show about the 15th anniversary of Bias's death. I wrote him back and explained that I would be skipping the show, but I was toying with the idea of writing a column about Bias.
And maybe that's what this was really about: in a nutshell, 1) betrayal and 2) sadness. It doesn't happen that often in sports, but when those two emotions collide for the proverbial kick in the stomach, you remember. And when that happens in your formative years, you hold onto the lingering side effects forever -- emptiness, grief, anger, disappointment, dismay, everything.
About 15 minutes later, Tim sent me a return e-mail that ended like this: "I will look for the Bias article. Truly one of the saddest days of my life. We all looked up to him."
And maybe that's what this was really about: in a nutshell, 1) betrayal and 2) sadness. It doesn't happen that often in sports, but when those two emotions collide for the proverbial kick in the stomach, you remember. And when that happens in your formative years, you hold onto the lingering side effects forever -- emptiness, grief, anger, disappointment, dismay, everything. You harbor those feelings, each of them, all of them, a permanent grudge. And it doesn't go away. It just doesn't. And if none of this makes sense . . . well, it never happened to you.
That's why I avoided watching that ESPN Classic show about Lenny Bias on Tuesday night. That's why I still have trouble discussing the whole thing. That's why I feel myself getting angry even as my fingers rattle on my keyboard at this very moment.
Yeah, I still think about him.
And I hate it.