Journeys of Jack Tripper

20 years ago, Len Bias lost his life to a cocaine overdose.

1986 marked the awakening of my sports-conscious being. While I vaguely remember sitting in the back room of my parents' first house in 1984 and watching Carl Lewis completely pwn the rest of Earth's Olympians (minus the Soviets who were sitting out because we totally ditched their party four years earlier. Place was dead anyway), I wasn't really sports-aware until 1986.

It started, of course, with Super Bowl XX. Those dancing, rapping Chicago Bears and their "Super Bowl Shuffle" were the stars of the first major sporting event I really remember watching with my father.

(Who let the unbelievably white/uncoordinated backup QB Steve Fuller dance in the front row? Even worse, they LET HIM SING! Err, "rap." Mike Singletary is particularly bad, too. And check out the punter! More cowbell!!!)

That's about the same year some outfit called the "Bleacher Bums" recorded a song about a man who was my idol, both athletically and professionally. Did I mention I just received my throwback #20 Orange Bowl jersey of his? Of course I didn't. But here's "Bernie, Bernie" to remind all you Clevelanders of the good ol' days. (Listening to it again, I swear I hear Peter Griffin in the background.)

Anyway, 1986 also found me discovering hockey, thanks to Jill, my babysitter who was from Buffalo and a rabid Sabres fan. (Until this point, I'd been a Red Wings fan without really knowing why. This is pretty much still the case.) I watched Montreal defeat the Calgary Flames in the Stanley Cup finals and am pretty sure no Canadian teams have been back since then.

(Sorry? Edmonton went this year? Cool... I would have watched, but I couldn't figure out what channel the games were on.)

Yet it was the NBA season that really got me interested in professional sports (outside of Cleveland, at least). My father loved Larry Bird and the rest of the Celtics, maybe because of our Irish heritage, or maybe because Larry Bird is freaking awesome. The Cavs were a year away from being any good, so I latched onto the Boston Celtics bandwagon and watched them dismantle the Houston Rockets in that year's NBA Finals.

Days later, the Celtics took Maryland star Len Bias with the 2nd overall pick in the NBA Draft. (I am not entirely sure how the Celtics had the 2nd overall pick after winning the championship, but the draft also had five more rounds then than it does now.) I was excited for this new player, and read all the newspaper articles about the role he would play as the future to Larry Bird's past and present on the Celtics.

Two days after the draft, Bias died of a cocaine overdose.

Of course, the news shocked the sports world, from Tony Kornheiser's fantastic column in the June 20, 1986 Washington Post to Sports Illustrated:

I was a mess. All of seven years old, I didn't really understand drugs, or drug abuse, but the name "Len Bias" and the words "cocaine" and "overdose" would forever be inseparable for me.

They still are.

I break several laws every day. I do stupid things, dangerous things, and consume mind-altering substances with regularity (caffeine, alcohol, etc). Yet I have never touched cocaine, and never will.

Why? Len Bias.

The Benoitian restorative goal in the post-Bias period was that the incident would serve as a stronger deterrent to drug abuse than any Nancy Reaganesque "Just Say No" campaign. Transcendence trumping tragedy, if you will. Unfortunately, the government wasn't willing to hinge the future of drug control on that kind of incident, and Democrat Tip O'Neill introduced strong anti-drug legislation in Congress as a response to the outrage that rightly followed the Death of a Dream. The repurcussions -- millions of Americans jailed for drug possession, and billions of taxpayer dollars wasted to the incarceration of nonviolent offenders -- resonate as violently twenty years later as they might have seemed to the sports world after Bias' death.

I don't know how many other men my age have stayed away from cocaine because of Len Bias. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Lonise Bias has dedicated her life to helping her son's legacy be a disruptive one; getting in the way of possible paths to drug abuse. They're finding kids today don't react like the children of Generation X. It seems it was necessary to experience the shock... the horror... the disbelief... to create a fear response far stronger than any curiosity could overcome.

This has been entry #1 in an attempted "30 in 30" campaign, invented by StevenL and brought to my attention by Charlie.