What Never Was

There are a bunch of sports-related things I vividly remember from my youth. Yaz popping up to Graig Nettles to end the 1978 AL East playoff. Cried at that one. The Miracle on Ice. Ran around the living room with my Dad then. Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Got drunk in a hotel room on a high school field trip shortly thereafter. Bird versus Magic, so many times - joy and pain in mostly equal measure. 

But none of those events hit me viscerally in the same way that something that happened 36 years ago today did.

I was a Boston Celtics fan at the time. Red Auerbach had pulled off another draft miracle, nabbing Maryland's Len Bias with the second pick, a selection the defending champions had because of a trade two years earlier. The 1985-86 C's were loaded, and the prospect of adding the hyper-athletic and ultra-competitive Bias to a frontcourt with Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, and Bill Walton was the stuff of giddy-making anticipation.

And then he died, just two days later.

I was watching the local news when the story came over the air. It was the most shocking thing I'd experienced in my young life, and it left an indelible mark. To this day, I've never had any interest in going near cocaine - if it could kill a man of Bias' size and fitness, well that scared (and still does) the everlovin' hell out of me.

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"

The game is one thing. Sadder more is what was lost to Len Bias the person and his family. Still guts me to think about.