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This is a bitter sweet pill.  First you get to see the greatness during the day, and in the evening, you get to see the tragedy, that forever changed Maryland, and possibly the Boston Celtics.   Tomorrow night (Tuesday Night), ESPN will air, “Without Bias” an ESPN 30 in 30 Special on the life and death of Len Bias.  The good news, leading up to the documentary, we will get to see the amazing athlete and dominate player he was for the Terps.

The first game airing on ESPN Classic is at 2:00 PM and is the 1984 game at UVA.  The second game is the 1984 game against Duke in the ACC Championship game.  The final game starts at 6:00 and is the game for which Bias may be remembered most, the 1986 game at UNC, where the Terps handed Dean Smith his first loss in the new Smith Center.

That will take you right up to the start of the documentary on ESPN, where you will get to relive the pain that quite possibly lasted until that fateful night in Atlanta when the Terps won the National Championship in 2002.

For me I was only 10 at the time of his death, and I remember watching it on ESPN in the morning.  I wasn’t necessarily a Maryland fan at the time, but I do remember seeing Bias highlights.  The sports side of it was small when you consider all the press it got every night, and single handily helped President and Nancy Regan start the “War on Drugs”.

I like to think my parents brought me up so I would never want to do coke, but if I ever needed any reinforcement, Len Bias certainly provided that for me.  When it comes time to have kids, and have that talk about drugs with them, you can bet Len Bias will be part of the speech.  In fact, if I could figure out how to record from a DVR to a DVD on my computer, I think the Carolina game, and this documentary might be part of the speech.

There are people who have been involved in Maryland Athletics far longer than I, and to this day, they still talk about the impact Bias’ death has had on the Athletic Department, and the campus for that matter, on how things are done.  While this is not going to be a happy tale, it is one every Maryland fan who wasn’t around on that day should see, to see where, forget about the basketball team or athletic department, how far the school has come.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Maryland Terps Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.