Sudden Death Has New Meaning

In death, Len Bias and Don Rogers continue to be what they were in life.

Role models.

Great young men, Len and Don, in most ways. Devoted themselves to excellence in their respective sports, honored their parents, made lots of friends, earned respect and admiration. They were beautiful athletes, too, these two, powerful and graceful, truly gifted. Their performances on the field and court were breathtaking.

See, everybody? See what hard work and dedication can get you?

Children and athletic peers looked up to Len and Don and couldn’t help but be influenced by what they saw.

Then Len Bias died suddenly, from using cocaine. Eight days later, Don Rogers died, too, also after using cocaine. You could write off the first death as a terrible freak occurrence, maybe, until you heard about Rogers.

By dying, Bias and Rogers did what the doctors, educators, coaches, parents, media people and drug dealers have failed to do. By dying, Bias and Rogers spread the word.

This stuff can kill you.

On the television news they showed a film clip of Lenny Bias. He knocks in a pretty 20-foot jump shot, then steals the in-bounds pass and roars to the basket for a reverse slam dunk, his muscles rippling, his head ducking just below the rim.

On the TV news they showed a film clip of Don Rogers. He crunches an opposing ballcarrier, then he intercepts a pass and weaves upfield, dodging and busting tackles.

Then in the newspapers we read that the last thing Lenny and Don did on earth was lapse into convulsions, barely having time to cry out for help, then they died.

We learned: Cocaine is stronger than Len Bias and Don Rogers.

Len Bias was the first person I ever heard of dying from cocaine. Don Rogers was the second.

The day Bias died, I talked to a half dozen cocaine users--occasional to regular users--and none of them had ever heard of death by cocaine. I wonder if Len Bias and Don Rogers had ever heard of death by cocaine.

We’ve all heard of the slow death by coke, the spiritual death where you lose your wife and your kids and your job and your friends, and when last seen you are in a boat with no oars, drifting slowly but surely toward the far edge of the world.

But now we’ve got a brand new ballgame. In the age of instant everything, we’ve got instant death by a fun drug.

I read in the L.A. Herald Examiner Sunday that 56 people died from coke in 1985 in Los Angeles, and that 30 have died this year, and those are just the ones the county coroner is sure were killed by coke.

Most of us knew that cocaine is addictive, even if it is snorted. Most of us also were learning that the new rage in the drug world is crack cocaine, which is smokeable coke. It is cheap, plentiful and intensively addictive. It causes a euphoric high, followed by a crushing depression. You can become dependent in two weeks.

By powder or rock, now we also know you can become dead in about two minutes.

There must have been a better way to spread the word than to wait for great athletes to start dying. Education might have been a good idea.

Would it be suppression of an athlete’s freedom to require him or her to take an intense, hard-core drug education course in high school and college, and to have absences and poor performance in class treated the same as absence and poor performance on game day?

And would it be too much trouble to require coaches to attend, too?

And will somebody please tell Red Auerbach and Lefty Driesell that they are not doing Lenny Bias any favors by insisting that the coke experience that killed him was surely his first? Maybe it was, but how would Red and Lefty know? Driesell’s concern and watchfulness over the off-court well-being of his players is reflected in the fact that Bias and four other Maryland players flunked out of school last semester.

Red and Lefty are using Bias’ death as a forum to display their ignorance of the drug world. And right now, ignorance--along with coke and grief--is something we have more than enough of.

But we’re all a little bit smarter this week. Not that cocaine will go out of style. I heard on the TV news that 600 people died using coke last year, out of about six million regular (once a month or more) users. One in 100,000. A lot of users will like those odds. Freeways are more dangerous, they’ll tell us.

Still, because of Len Bias and Don Rogers, it’s going to be a lot more difficult for most of us to use the term “recreational drugs.”

Len Bias and Don Rogers were role models of how to live right and then how to die young. We’re all a little smarter this week, but there must have been a better way.