Our Bias: A New Honor Cements a Legacy of Loss and Accomplishment

The Winter 2022 issue of ONE MARYLAND Magazine has arrived in the mailboxes of Terrapin Club members soon, but this is a sneak peak of one of its stories. 

ONE MARYLAND features stories of strength and perseverance, of determination and spirit. These stories define our athletics program, and this new magazine will allow us to share these stories with you. 

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He looked invincible that night—a skinny high school kid from the basketball courts of Prince George’s County who had grown into a hometown hero with super strength and the power of flight. He held University of Maryland men’s basketball records in 15 categories, led the Terps to the 1984 ACC Tournament title, earned two ACC Player of the Year honors and had been named the 1986 ACC Athlete of the Year.

It was June 17, 1986, and Leonard K. Bias was sublime as always, dressed in a sharp white and gray striped suit, a green Boston Celtics cap askew, as he addressed reporters after the defending NBA champions drafted him second overall.

Leonard, Lenny, Frosty, the Human Eraser: No matter what he was called, he was on his way to fulfilling the rarest of destinies. He was a Maryland kid, a Terp, the heartbeat of Cole Field House, and he had made it.

“My dream has come true,” he said.

But it all ended less than two days later on the floor of his suite in Washington Hall, where Bias died of complications from cocaine intoxication.

The entire Maryland community and basketball fans across the country were whiplashed from celebration to grief as their man of the hour turned into a cautionary tale for generations. The natural impulse following tragedy—to assign blame, to do something about a seemingly indestructible life ended in an instant—brought a storm to College Park that lasted, to some extent, for decades.

The administration launched investigations into Maryland’s academics and drug use. A grand jury was convened to see if anyone was culpable. Congress, beating the drums for the War on Drugs, passed harsh new sentences for offenders. University leaders received death threats and spent their days dodging the reporters camped out at their cars. Admission counselors had to constantly assuage the safety fears of parents, and coaches struggled to balance the need to win with tighter recruiting standards.

Within five months, the athletic director and basketball coach had resigned. Within two years, Maryland’s chancellor, the equivalent to today’s president, stepped down as well.

And most importantly, there was a family mourning the death of a loving son.

Yet tragedy eventually fades into memory, and stark lines of black and white often soften into shades of gray. Now, more than 35 years since Bias died, he is the subject of far more sympathy than scrutiny, and in November was given his sport’s highest honor: induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

“On June 19, 1986, the Bias family was given ashes, and here we are in November 2021, two days after Len’s birthday, and we’ve received beauty,” says his mother, Lonise. “Len’s death, for me, was not in vain.”

AN ASTONISHING ASCENT

Bias was a beautiful basketball player.

In a sport that rewards rare combinations of grace and power, he could one minute go up for a picture-perfect jump shot—body and arms held straight, seemingly floating, his fingers releasing the ball at his apex with a silky backspin—and in the next, stretch his 6-foot-8-inch frame toward the roof of the gym to deliver a rattling slam dunk.

On Feb. 20, 1986, Bias almost singlehandedly willed the Terps to a landmark upset of top-ranked North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Down by nine with about three minutes left, Bias hit a long jumper, then stole the ensuing in-bounds pass and scored again with a backwards jam. With 15 seconds left in overtime, he flew across the lane to block a potentially game-winning shot by future NBA champion Kenny Smith and help seal a victory.

“Len Bias was not a great player, he was a transcendent player,” says Jay Bilas, an analyst for ESPN who played against Bias while at Duke. “The scouting report on Len was, ‘double team, triple team and hope that he missed.’”

Bias was ferocious and unrelenting at his sport, lifting weights with the football team, calling his point guard the night before games to ask for the ball and finishing first in every practice sprint. Whenever his coach, Charles “Lefty” Driesell, asked Bias if he was ready to play, Bias would respond: “Coach, I was born ready.”

Long before he started dunking a basketball, though, Len was an active and imaginative kid growing up outside Landover. At first, Lonise Bias didn’t see her son’s interest in basketball as anything approaching a possible career. That dawned slowly, as Bias had a junior high growth spurt—“it was like a surge”—and began to draw interest from colleges while playing in high school. The fact that he could get a scholarship for basketball was “just mind-blowing,” she says.

Even as his fame increased and the accolades poured in at Maryland, Lonise says her son honored the humble lessons she and his father, James, taught him and his three siblings, like always using good manners and respectfully speaking to others. Many people have described how Bias remained a quiet and sensitive soul, someone who enjoyed dressing to the nines but also drawing pictures, someone who would shake a rim but also stop to talk to tour groups and skip part of an awards banquet to welcome a visiting poet to campus with flowers.

“In a community sense, this was someone whose promise seemed guaranteed,” says Michael Wilbon, an ESPN commentator and former sportswriter and columnist for The Washington Post. “You wanted to watch it, you wanted to follow it, you wanted to be consumed by it.”

A TRAGEDY AND ITS AFTERMATH

Jeff Baxter was awakened by teammate David Gregg on the morning of June 19 and told that Bias was unconscious in their dorm suite.

It had been just a few hours since Baxter had returned from his girlfriend’s place to catch some sleep before an exam. He had knocked on one of the doors, where Bias was celebrating his new career with Gregg, teammate Terry Long and friend Brian Tribble. Baxter did his “usual—go jump on him, he holds me like I’m 2 years old.”

Now his friend wouldn’t move. Bias—and so much else—was gone.

Not only had an icon of heroic invulnerability died, but he was also a casualty of the foremost public fear of his era: drugs. From kitchen tables and newsroom desks to the halls of Congress, people demanded answers. Every day was an opportunity for headlines to bring fresh pain to a hurting campus, and Bias’ teammates struggled with the combination of sympathy and suspicion of drug use.

“The perception was everyone at Maryland was bad kids. It was like all of us were put in a category,” says Keith Gatlin ’07, a Bias friend and teammate. “The kids are left back with nothing, and their names are crushed.”

Committees were convened by Chancellor John Slaughter on drug policies, enforcement and education, and the academics of student-athletes, resulting in new grade and admission requirements that were the toughest in the ACC. Slaughter also decided to replace Driesell, who was moved to an assistant athletic director position in October 1986, only a few weeks after athletic director Dick Dull resigned.

Driesell, who went on to coach at James Madison and Georgia State, remains diligent in defending his players. He says Bias, who was 21 credits short of graduating, fell behind only because of the numerous meetings and workouts associated with preparing for the NBA draft, and that he never otherwise posed an academic problem.

He remembers receiving a call from Bias on the night of the draft, thanking him for all his coaching.

“I loved him. And I think he loved me,” Driesell says. “I wish I would have said, ‘Lenny, come over to my house and let’s celebrate.’”

No one was found legally responsible for Bias’ death. Prosecutors eventually dismissed misdemeanor charges of cocaine possession and obstruction of justice against Gregg and Long. A jury found Tribble not guilty of drug charges in June 1987, and an obstruction of justice charge was also dropped.

By then, however, the federal government had already made its own judgments. Within four months, Congress passed 26 drug-related mandatory minimum prison sentences. Now a first offense of dealing small amounts of drugs could net 10 years without parole.

“It changed the direction of everything,” says ESPN anchor Scott Van Pelt ’88.

FINDING CLOSURE

As time passed, Bias became little more than a tragic figure in sports history, from warnings at youth basketball camps to explanations for the Boston Celtics’ 22-year title drought and the Terrapins’ woes until the 2002 national championship. He could no longer throw down a powerful dunk, swat away an opponent’s shot, or jokingly tackle a friend in the aisle of a department store to remind everyone of his humanity.

“People failed to realize that he was, in fact, a very fine young man,” Slaughter says. “The only thing they think of is that he overdosed on cocaine.”

That started to shift in 2014, when UMD inducted him into its own Athletics Hall of Fame. At the time, Kevin Glover ’88, a former Maryland and NFL football player who knew Bias and was then president of the M Club, said the honor was a chance to not only heal, but also was “an opportunity to forgive for those that want to blame a young man for a lot of things he wasn’t in control of.”

“The part that has been overlooked for many years is celebrating the person that Len Bias was,” Glover said.

Lonise Bias has spent decades as a public speaker, addressing the loss of not only Len but also one of her other sons, Jay, who was shot to death in 1990. In her speeches at schools and conferences, she emphasizes the importance of making good decisions, taking responsibility and respecting authority. She has been heartened over the years by the number of people who say they never touched drugs because of what happened to her son.

“What I have learned to accept is that life is a bowl with lemon and honey in it. Sometimes it can be sweet, and sometimes it can be so bitter,” she says. “I always tell (audiences), when you have a dream and you are trying to reach the top, you have to be cognizant of who is in your realm of influence and careful of the decisions that you make.”

For Gatlin, losing Bias was like losing a brother, and one of the few places that he could find solace was on the basketball court. While dribbling, shooting and passing, Bias’ friends could imagine that he was nearby, waiting for the right moment to jump to the rafters and slam the ball home.

“That was the only place you felt peace and comfort,” Gatlin says, “that you found a connection to Lenny.”

The most prominent memorial to Bias on campus is in XFINITY Center, a red banner with white lettering and black numbers that hangs in front of thousands of spectators every year and over the players on the court below.

The plain “Bias 34” gives no indication of a legacy any more fraught than “Elmore 41” or “B. Williams 52.” With only a name and a number, in Maryland colors, he is once again just a player who had enough on-court accomplishments—who did enough good things—to deserve remembrance.

“It’s everything,” Van Pelt says of Bias’ legacy. “It’s what he looked like, it’s how he played, it’s how he made you feel as a Maryland fan, it’s how crushing it was that it ended. What will I remember about Leonard Bias? I’ll remember everything and I’ll remember all of it as long as I live.”

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted and updated from the Fall 2014 edition of Terp Magazine.