At this point in time, even the most optimistic projection of Len Bias’ career would have him retired. But this is the part of his life where I have the most optimistic hopes in “what if”.
If Len Bias were alive, he’d have been out of basketball for a while. I’d like to have pictured him as someone who would have looked back at his youth with maturity, enough to shake his head and be thankful he survived to grow into a better stronger person, with a family and an appreciation for how hard life’s lessons are. I’d imagine Len sitting next to Darryl Strawberry at basketball games while they watched DJ, and with Ray Lewis at football as he cheered on his brother Keon Lattimore — being famous but talking about family, with the understanding of the responsibility they had learned with age. A trio of athletes with miserably arrogant youths tempered by the responsibilities and humilities that come with time and importance.
I imagine Len Bias the Boston Celtic calling Joe Smith and Exree Hipp, telling them to learn from his mistakes, that he has better advice for them than Chris Webber and Juwan Howard. I imagine him telling Chris Wilcox to stay in school. I doubt they would have listened, it wouldn’t have been helpful for them at the time… but it would have maybe meant something to them when they became older as well. Many profound life lessons people try to teach you only come to you later when you realize that what you have discovered was what someone else was trying to give you in the first place.
Len Bias was a young man, a sports star who did drugs and God knows what else. I used to wish Len Bias the NBA star existed, as I am now older, I wish more that Len Bias had a chance to survive it. I believe in Len Bias, not in terms of scoring records or NBA titles… I believe that there was an older, wiser Len Bias who was killed that night by a child Len Bias so blind to his potential as a man–so different than the boy that the boy had no idea who he was risking, who he was killing with his actions.
If you have ever been a Marylander, or even moreso, if you have ever been a Terrapin, you know the impact that this death had in making the world we inhabited. Len Bias came up a lot still at Maryland, even in the late 1990’s. Even during the national championship year. People who are deeply a part of the University of Maryland and invested in the school’s identity as part of their own carry two celebrities in their heart always: Jim Henson and Len Bias. We love Jim Henson, but our school has become the place that it is because of Len Bias. It is because of Len Bias that Gary Williams would call me and ask me if his atheletes were coming to class or if they needed straightening out. It is partially because of Len Bias that Maryland started to take a hard look at the fact that a healthy percentage of its non-athletes were also wrapped up in a hard partying culture that the University’s culture was too accommodating towards. Len Bias didn’t make the Maryland honors program, the scholars program, or the James A Clark School of Engineering, but Len Bias made an administrative culture that would not dare to look idle when initiatives at the school were proposed to make things better.
Today, on the ESPN front page is a very nice article about Len Bias. There is a link to the comments section for the article. There are two common responses in the comments section. Theme one is the “I remember when…” comments, testimonials about the impact of that moment (when I heard the news, it was the first time I had ever heard of the University of Maryland). Theme two is the “Len bias deserves no pity/ Len Biases mother is exploitative of her children’s death” variety. I’d like to think that the way that arguments between these two themes has played out shows the value of both a good college education and of maturity. I wonder if we react so strongly to Len Bias’ death still because we are so haunted by the difficulties of responsibility and judgment in our own lives, and the almost randomly harsh or lenient punishments that seem to accompany many lapses of the same kind. We can react with overwhelming sympathy, or overwhelming disapproval, but I think that for most of us it is the burden’s of our own life’s importance to others and the continual challenges to make it work that teach us how to come to terms with such things more than anything else. Such things tend to arrive with time. Kent says to King Lear the great shame is that he got old before he was wise. I want to believe that the great shame of Len Bias is that he never got to get old.
We never know what time will teach us, only he could have known what time would have taught to him. This is the “great what if” of the retirement age Len Bias. When he was younger, we would wonder how his career would have turned out. Now he would be the age where he would discover life beyond basketball. I wonder what would he have found. I don’t believe in the innocent youth Len Bias. I don’t believe in the basketball deity. I believe in an older, reflective, repentant man whose body has quit carrying the rest of him, who, after coming to terms, looks at his middle age and beyond and sees new possibilities for a happy life. In the parallel world where we have a Len Bias, when everyone else would be starting to forget Len Bias, that’s where I want to start believing in him. If you cannot mourn for the Len Bias we knew, I think at least a little respect is owed to the possibility there was one we never will.
June 26, 2008 at 12:30 pm |
This was easily the best writing I’ve ever seen from you, even if you and I have nearly completely opposite ideas of what is tragic about Len Bias. You believe his severe punishment for what amounts to a common mistake is tragic, that he was never able to get old and see the error of his ways; basically, you think it tragic not that we lost a singular individual with singular skills in a singular role, but that he lost what so many of us are lucky to have: the wisdom of time.
I believe that his death was simply an occurrence on an elongated spectrum of outcomes from terrible actions. He could have gotten so high from the drugs that he went out an bought a lottery ticket despite his soon-coming wealth, and won the lottery. Instead, he died from a somewhat negligible amount of dope. Such is life. The outcome itself isn’t tragic, Len Bias was unlucky, but not so far outside the bounds of “fairness” as to be considered tragic.
Tragic was what we as a community lost. Yes, Maryland is a much better institution 20 years later because of what happened. But Maryland also received a legacy of sadness generally, a legacy of bittersweetness behind every sporting victory, and more than anything, a loss of was a once-in-a-lifetime force, not just on the basketball court, but in daily life where, I’m led to believe, there wasn’t a moment where he wasn’t smiling.
And more tragic is that, in this particular instance, fate could have been thwarted. The mechanisms to avoid this disaster and this particular sadness were in place, or should have been. This wasn’t some bright, undereducated inner-city kid, nameless to everyone but his mother, trying crack one time, and eating a bullet, or taking a bad hit to end his life. This was a grown child, who had given so much to so many, and had much more to give, being abandoned the way parents abandon their kids to childhood obesity. The tragedy is really that we had some means of choosing our own happiness, and as ever, we failed to do so.
Bias should not be absolved of his mistakes, and he shouldn’t necessarily be mourned either. He should simply be an example of greatness that we continue to eschew, that we continuously fail to pursue, and at times, actively choose against. He is, as you suggest, every person who was never able to grow up and realize their mistakes. I think it more tragic that, had he gotten lucky/less unlucky, no one would ever learn their lesson.