George Kimball America At Large: Before a cast of thousands at the Madison Square Garden Theatre and millions more watching on television, the National Basketball Association conducted its 59th annual player draft last night.
Hope will spring eternal in Toronto, where the Raptors enjoyed the luxury of the first pick. The Boston Celtics were picking seventh, normally an enviable position, but for two decades now folks around Boston have tended to wince whenever the subject comes up. They hear "'NBA draft" and remember Len Bias.
Twenty years ago I was the co-host of a sports programme on a Boston radio station, and for two days running we broadcast live from a remote studio set up at the old Boston Garden.
Although the Celtics were the NBA's dominant team, they had hornswoggled their way into the number-two pick, which they had used to select Bias, a 6ft 8in forward from the University of Maryland regarded as the best all-around prospect in that year's collegiate crop.
Adding Bias to a collection that included the likes of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish was regarded as a major coup. Around 6pm a phalanx of Celtics officials swept into the studio, accompanied by Bias.
We interviewed him on the air for perhaps 20 minutes, but I can't remember a word of the conversation. What I do remember is that Bias had been making the rounds of Boston media outlets for several hours and that someone in the Celtics party ran to a fast-food restaurant and returned with a quarter-pounder with fries.
Len Bias eyed the food warily. He picked at a couple of fries, but never touched the sandwich.
When we went off the air we both headed for the airport, Bias in a limo that would take him to his flight back to Washington, I in a taxi to take the red-eye to Las Vegas, where Barry McGuigan would be defending his world featherweight title against Steve Cruz that Saturday night. When I awoke next morning I checked in with the office.
"How are you doing?" I asked the boss.
"Better than Len Bias," replied Bob Sales, the Boston Herald sports editor.
Less than 12 hours after we had parted in Boston, Bias was dead. He was 22 years of age. Initial reports said it was cardiac arrest, but when Sales told me that I almost laughed.
"Cocaine," I told him. I remembered Bias eyeing his takeout order as if it were dog food. It was a behaviour with which I was familiar.
Tests revealed Bias had died of "acute cocaine intoxication". There followed several weeks of hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Philadelphia had had the first pick in that year's draft, but the 76ers wouldn't touch Bias with a 10-foot pole. ("There's something about him I don't like," said Philly's chief scout, Jack McMahon.) Had the 76ers known something Boston should have?
Celtics president Red Auerbach recalled Bias's college coach, Lefty Dreisell, had repeatedly told him Bias was "a great kid" and would be a credit to the Celtics, but it was clear there had been an absence of due diligence. If Bias had a drug problem, and it appeared he had, it had gotten under the radar.
As I recall, I somewhat unkindly wrote that beyond the obvious human aspects of the tragedy, the Celtics had wasted their draft pick on "a six-foot-eight-inch corpse".
1986 was a bittersweet year for Boston sports fans. The Patriots reached their first Super Bowl, only to be routed 46-10 by the Chicago Bears, then the worst defeat in Super Bowl history.
The 1986 Red Sox came within one strike of winning the World Series, only for a meekly-hit ground ball to roll infamously between the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner and allow the New York Mets score the winning run.
The Celtics did win their 16th NBA championship the year Bias died. They have never won another.
Though they should by rights have been picking last in that year's draft, the Celtics, looking to open up more playing time for guard Danny Ainge, had traded Gerald Henderson to Seattle for the Sonics' first-round pick.
Auerbach and general manager Jan Volk knew then what most fans had only begun to suspect: Bird, McHale, Parrish and Bill Walton were at the top of their games, but shortly they would all begin to grow old together.
How much difference would an infusion of young talent like Bias have made?
"You can never tell how things are going to play out, but I'll tell you this: when you're playing as well as we were in those days, you don't figure on getting a kid like Bias," said Auerbach. "He was a terrific player. I would've had him and Bird as my forwards. They would have been great together." Perhaps for years.
The situation was compounded a few years later when Reggie Lewis, by then Celtics captain, collapsed during an off-season game and died. Testimony in subsequent litigation suggested Lewis's death might also have been drug-related.
Suffice it to say no other team in any American sport has had to endure the deaths of back-to-back number-one draft choices.
The Celtics have been wandering through the NBA's netherworld since. Each year when the draft comes along, Boston fans wonder anew. How different might things have been had Bias lived? Or had the team drafted somebody else?
"This is my 24th year at Duke," the Blue Devils' coach, Mike Krzyzewski, told the Boston Globe a few years ago. "In that time there have been two opposing players who have really stood out: Michael Jordan and Len Bias . . . My feeling is that Bias should have been a great NBA player."
"I remember thinking at the time what a tragedy it was for Bias and his family," said Ainge, now the director of basketball for the Celtics. "It never occurred to me then how it might impact the future of the organisation, but there's no question . . . we're still dealing with the repercussions 20 years later."
