On He’ll Die If You Don’t Get Him In Water

Until 1990, my hometown had two newspapers: The Durham Herald, delivered in the morning and the Durham Sun, in the afternoon.

My father retrieved the Herald before I got up, shuffling to the end of the driveway barefoot, clad in a tattered robe. He would settle into his orange chair with one leg draped over the side and savor his morning coffee while reading the news of the day. The Herald had bold headlines and pithy commentary. If it happened after 7 p.m. it didn’t make it in.

I, on the other hand, would grab the Sun as I trekked home from the bus stop. I would spread the sports page out across the kitchen table and munch on a Steak-umm, a Pizza Quick, or some other microwaveable snack. The Sun had the luxury of covering all the stories that happened later in the day or overnight, particularly sports.

My father taught me to read box scores at an early age, teaching me to trace the columns with my finger. First with football, then basketball, baseball and everything else. There was even a point when we tracked NASCAR results, discussing the race by laps led or average speed. It was the one thing we did together that was truly ours, something we didn’t have to explain to anyone.

Washington was my father’s favorite team, so we paid particular attention to them. He would quiz me on what the score would be if a touchdown was made, or how many passes Joe Theismann completed. It was a skill that I used to ace 2nd grade math, my teacher affixing the prized Math Wizard sticker to my shirt when I correctly recited my seven times tables before we had learned them.

Living on tobacco road meant I tracked college basketball the closest. Duke, Carolina and NC State were favorites, but I paid attention to all eight teams in the ACC. I still remember the joy of analyzing every box score from the historic 1983 title run of Jim Valvano’s Cardiac Pack. I was sorry that there wasn’t a stat for coaching, because he would have led in every category that year.

By the time Len Bias entered his senior season, I could tell the tenor of the game simply from reading the stats. Most of Maryland’s games weren’t televised in the triangle, so I followed the season in black and white.

And what a season it was. He was the ACC Player of the year, averaging nearly 55% from the field, an astounding stat for a wing player taking mid-range jumpers. After an especially impressive performance against Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium, he was saddled with the moniker of “the next Jordan.”

Once the season was over I continued to follow his story, tracking who might make him a millionaire. On June 17th, The Boston Celtics selected Len Bias as the second overall pick, trailing North Carolina center Brad Daugherty. The celebration was short-lived: two days later, he died of a cocaine overdose.

That fall I turned fifteen. Got a license, a job, and a girlfriend all in short order. I still watched basketball but stopped devouring the sports page the way I had before. My father and I were connected but it was different. Our shared language didn’t seem as important.

The death of Len Bias took away the magic of the sports page. Suddenly the outcomes became unpredictable and with death in the equation the numbers didn’t quite add up. I longed for the days when my biggest worry was if I could bait a hook with corn.

A few years later the papers merged, rechristened as The Durham Herald Sun. My father continued to read it every day. One of my last memories of him was reading the paper to him.