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UNITED STATES - MARCH 09: Coll, Basketball: NCAA playoffs, Maryland's Len Bias (34) in action vs Duke, Greensboro, NC 3/9/1984 (Photo by Heinz Kluetmeier/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) (SetNumber: X29723)
Maryland’s great Len Bias died 40 years ago Friday after doing way too much cocaine following the 1986 NBA Draft.
Red Auerbach, as usual, outsmarted the rest of the league, trading Gerald Henderson to Seattle in 1984 to get the pick. He had no way of knowing how things would pan out, obviously, but he knew there was an extraordinary talent in D.C., where he lived in the off-season.
Then, just two days after the draft, Bias overdosed on coke, essentially frying his heart.
Larry Bird called it the cruelest thing he ever heard of. He was very excited about Bias joining the Celtics. In typical Auerbach fashion, the future of the franchise was secured. Bias would take over for Bird in a few years (Bird said he would have retired in 1988 if Bias hadn’t died), and the dynasty would roll on.
Of course, that didn’t happen, and the sense of loss echoed up and down the ACC, then still a pretty compact league of eight teams, all between Maryland and Atlanta.
After hearing the news, a traumatized Johnny Dawkins went to Cameron and gave himself an emotional shootaround, telling the media that he thought Bias had been “virtually indestructible.”
Everyone felt it. Even people who couldn’t stand Lefty Driesell and Maryland felt the keen sense of loss.
But no one felt it like Maryland folks did. Longtime Terps fans and D.C.-based journalist Robert Novak felt it, departing from politics briefly to write about Bias’s death (this was just a few days after it happened, and he infuriated a lot of people by saying Bias was responsible for his own actions, but it’s hard to argue with him).
Coach Lefty Driesell reacted poorly, seeing to it that Bias’s room was sanitized, but no one doubts that the death of his greatest player, a kid that everyone loved, hit him hard. How could it not?
And it hit ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt hard too.
We don’t know Scott, but a while back, he objected to something we said here, and we had what we thought was a pleasant, civil exchange. He made his point well, we listened, and he made an impression as a very decent, kind man, enough to where we just sort of forgot about him being a Maryland fan.
He just seems like a very decent sort of guy. You could even imagine watching a Duke-Maryland game with him and enjoying it.
Well, as long as Duke won, anyway. Kidding!
But he is clearly a decent, kind man who disagreed in a decent and kind way and helped us to get better, which is still deeply appreciated.
Anyway, this video is of Van Pelt talking about how deeply Bias’s death affected him. He was 19 at the time, grew up in Brookeville, which is not far from College Park, and he was a student there in 1986.
It’s one thing to hear about something like that when it happens to other people, to another fanbase, but when it’s one of your own, it would be absolutely devastating.
You get a clear idea here of just how much it wounded him, his friends, and the entire Maryland fanbase.
This is not the type of video we usually select for this feature. It’s sad, to say the least. But it’s also reflective and honest, and you get a very real sense of the time and the world this happened in.
He was out running around, doing stuff, there were no cell phones, and while you could find news instantly on the radio, he didn’t have it on at the time. Someone he knew asked him, did you hear about Bias? And that was how he found out.
It’s almost trite to say this now, but if you’re young and drugs are tempting, look at where Bias was. He was about to conquer the NBA. He was a legitimate Hall of Fame talent.
All of that crumbled in mere minutes. Maryland grieved. Boston was stunned. People like Van Pelt have never gotten over it, and we haven’t even mentioned his poor family (to make matters worse, his younger brother, Jay, was murdered four years later. He and Len died in the same emergency room).
Please take a few minutes to watch this one. It’s quietly powerful and moving.
Len Bias' legacy lives on@notthefakeSVP reflects on the day that changed everything. https://t.co/I77r2ETUV7pic.twitter.com/4BbkK3QBD5
— Maryland Men’s Basketball (@TerrapinHoops) June 19, 2026
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