BIAS DEATH STILL RIPPLES THROUGH ATHLETES' ACADEMIC LIVES

The frantic 911 call from a University of Maryland dormitory came in
at 6:32 a.m. June 19, 1986. A 22-year-old campus hero -- the finest
basketball player in the Terrapins' history, just two days earlier
the second player chosen in the NBA draft -- was sprawled on the
floor between two narrow beds, unconscious, without a pulse.

"It's Len Bias. . . . He's not breathing right," one of his closest
friends, a Maryland dropout named Brian Tribble, told the dispatcher
in a shaky voice. "You've got to bring him back to life."

Bias was rushed to a hospital less than two miles away in Riverdale.
Inside, doctors used five medicines and a pacemaker to try to restart
his heart. Outside, his teammates, coach and mother gathered, stunned
and praying. Across town, his agent phoned a senator's office,
searching for a military helicopter that could deliver a world-class
cardiologist to save him.

At 8:50 that Thursday morning, Len Bias was pronounced dead.

He had been killed, it would turn out, by an overdose of cocaine, a
nearly pure form he and friends had been snorting from a pile on the
living room table. It turned out, too, that he had gotten F's in
three classes and dropped two others in his last semester, leaving
him -- like most of his teammates -- unable to graduate.

At the University of Maryland at College Park and across the country,
the scandal exposed the twin corruptions of drugs and academic
failure in high-pressure, big-money college sports.

In a nation that had not yet lived through the excesses of the O.J.
Simpson trial, had not yet experienced the killings at Columbine High
School, his death riveted public attention.

It was "the most heartbreaking, stunning and paralyzing event,"
recalled Wayne K. Curry, the Bias family's attorney, who would become
county executive in Prince George's. "Nobody could really grip the
enormity of his spectacular rise and sudden demise."

President Ronald Reagan sent Bias's parents a handwritten note. The
Celtics' Larry Bird called the death "the cruelest thing I think I've
ever heard."

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, consoling the crowd of 11,000 that jammed
into a campus memorial service, said: "God has called him to a higher
purpose -- to get the attention of this generation and save it."

For Bias's generation and the next, his death 20 years ago today has
left an uneven legacy.

Some aspects of the events have faded with time. Leland Memorial
Hospital, where Bias died, closed years ago. Cole Field House, where
the 6-foot-8 forward dazzled with his 2,149 points, averaging 23
points per game his senior year, has been turned into a campus rec
center, its gleaming hardwood court sold off in boards to alumni and
replaced with green nylon turf.

Yet the lore and the decisions that have emerged from U-Md. in the
past two decades have made an indelible print on the school's
identity, on intercollegiate athletics nationally, even on those with
no memories of the time.

Dave Neal, a basketball player who lived this year in Bias's old room
in Suite 1103 of Washington Hall, said students would stop by and ask
to see the room.

More deeply, the scandal prompted a soul-searching about the proper
place of college sports that continues today. "I think the Bias
tragedy broke the back of athletic domination of academic life," said
Gary Pavela, a U-Md. administrator who oversees ethics and discipline.

As the academic quality of its student body has improved overall,
U-Md. has imposed rules to prevent athletes from lagging behind.

Meanwhile, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has tightened
academic standards repeatedly.

This vigilance has had tangible effects in ways small and large. On
the road for away games, head football coach Ralph Friedgen lines
players up to get meals in order of grade-point average. Overall,
scholarship athletes, like other U-Md. students, are graduating more
frequently than their counterparts of Bias's day.

Yet the men's basketball program has remained a source of worry, with
few players graduating. Of the 13 years since Bias died for which the
NCAA has data for students who joined the team as freshmen, there
have been seven years in which no one has graduated. In no year, the
NCAA figures show, have more than 40 percent received a degree.

This spring, all four seniors left without graduating. One,
co-captain and leading scorer Chris McCray, could not play last
semester because, under NCAA rules, his grades were too low.

"There is no excuse," said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of
Maryland's public universities. Last month, he was appointed to a
national commission created three years after Bias died to bring
academic and financial integrity to intercollegiate athletics. The
current issues, Kirwan said, "are not that different than they were
15 or so years ago -- a concern about the academic underperformance
of student athletes in certain high-profile sports."

When he joined Maryland's basketball team, Neal asked to wear No. 34
on his jersey, as he had at Bishop O'Connell High School in
Arlington. The number wasn't available. No. 34 had belonged to Len
Bias and was the only number retired in school history.

Neal's dorm room, too, had once belonged to Bias, teammates told him.
Neal guessed that Bias "couldn't take the pressure of what was going
on, the celebrity, and it got a little out of control."

People who knew Bias remember him as charming and unassuming despite
his talent and fame. John B. Slaughter, U-Md. chancellor at the time,
recalls Bias slipping out of the basketball banquet his senior year,
moments before he was to collect awards, so he could deliver flowers
to poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who was speaking on campus that night.

Yet in his final months, Bias was taking on the trappings, lifestyle
and grueling pace of the millionaire pro he was about to become. He
had an ankle-length fur coat, a Nissan 380ZX sports car and a gold
bracelet with diamonds spelling "L-E-N." In the spring of his senior
year, he essentially stopped going to class as he traveled the
country to meet with NBA teams.

On Tuesday, June 17, he wore a stylish white suit with gray
pinstripes to Madison Square Garden, where the Boston Celtics -- a
team that had just won its third NBA championship in six years --
made Bias its first-round draft pick. With his father, James Bias,
and his agent, A. Lee Fentress of Advantage International, Bias
caught a shuttle that afternoon to Boston, and he appeared that night
on the newscasts of all three local TV stations. The next day, he
negotiated a six-figure contract to endorse Reebok shoes, then worked
the room at a Reebok reception.

Bias was exhausted, he told his agent, and wanted to get home to see
his mother. They landed at National Airport at 10 p.m., and Bias
dropped off his father at the family's Landover home and left alone
for his dormitory about 11:30.

He and roommates ate crabs, and then he drove to a nearby liquor
store where, the night manager would say, he bought malt liquor and a
fifth of cognac. He gave an autograph to a clerk, including "30," his
new Celtics number.

Basketball players Terry Long and David Gregg would later tell
prosecutors they were asleep in the suite they shared with Bias when
he and Tribble woke them about 3 a.m. to celebrate, inviting them to
share some cocaine.

At one point, they said, Tribble warned Bias he was using too much.
"I'm a bad [expletive]," Bias replied, "and I can handle anything."

Kirwan remembers watching the news conference after Bias was drafted,
as the beaming young man pulled a green Celtics jersey over his head
for the first time. U-Md.'s top administrator for academic affairs at
the time, Kirwan was walking to his office Thursday morning when a
co-worker asked, "Did you hear about Lenny Bias?" He naturally
replied, "Yes, isn't it wonderful?"

No, the co-worker said.

Bias was dead.

"It was one of those moments in life," Kirwan said, "where someone
says something to you, and the words are so out of context it just
couldn't be reality."

Slaughter remembers a younger basketball player confiding that he
would visit Bias's grave at a Suitland cemetery every day, "then come
back to Cole Field House, and when he would go to shoot baskets, Len
would rise and block him."

Lonise Bias, Bias's mother, remembers she "just could not believe
what was happening." The first flowers that arrived were from Michael
Jordan. Magic Johnson's mother called. It seemed everyone in the
country had known her child.

The summer of trauma was heightened when aggressive Prince George's
chief prosecutor Arthur A. "Bud" Marshall Jr. announced the day of
the funeral that he would convene a grand jury. It went on for
months, with teammates, athletic department staff and campus
administrators summoned to testify. The three friends who had shared
the cocaine with Bias were indicted on drug charges, although only
Tribble was tried. He was acquitted but would be sent to prison four
years later on unrelated cocaine charges.

The university tried to contain the crisis. Allen L. Schwait,
chairman of the university system's governing board at the time,
remembers persuading then-Maryland Gov. Harry R. Hughes not to
intervene so U-Md. could try to solve its problems. The board named
two task forces on drug policy and athletes' academic lives.

Academic reforms, Slaughter believed, were most vital. "The fact that
Len Bias died allegedly from cocaine was not a stamp on the
university," he said, "but the relationship of athletics to the
academic . . . aspects of the university was very central to [its] existence."

At the end of that September, the academic task force -- led by
well-respected physicist J. Robert Dorfman, who did not follow
basketball -- issued more than 60 recommendations and a strong rebuke
of the athletic department's way of operating.

A week later, Athletic Director Dick Dull resigned. Three weeks after
that, university officials forced Maryland's legendary basketball
coach of 17 years, Charles G. "Lefty" Driesell, to step aside.

The academic failures of Bias and his teammates fit into an emerging
pattern. The 1980s were becoming an embarrassing time for college
presidents, amid revelations that players, such as Kevin Ross at
Creighton University, were ending four years of college barely able
to read or write.

The NCAA had responded in 1983 with Proposition 48, which took effect
the fall after Bias died. It required high school students to have at
least a C average and a minimum SAT score to get athletic
scholarships and play as freshmen.

U-Md. went further. The university forbade coaches to sign letters of
intent with recruits unless the admissions office determined that
they were qualified. Linda Clement, admissions director at the time
and now vice president for student affairs, recalls that she began to
interview star recruits the first time they visited the campus "to
get a sense of their character and their attitudes."

U-Md. continues to accept some athletes who fall below its regular
admissions criteria -- mostly football or men's basketball players.
But there are fewer such exceptions than in Bias's time, and those
students are required first to attend a special summer school.

The university's Athletic Council receives detailed reports to
monitor players' grades and class attendance. The council chairman,
criminology professor Charles Wellford, said spending on counselors,
tutors and other academic help for athletes has increased about
four-fold in the past decade to more than $1 million. "The athletes
meet . . . weekly or biweekly with their counselors, and the
counselors meet just as often with the coaching staff to talk about
the students," said Anton Goff, associate athletic director for
academic support.

Neal, the player who lived in Bias's room, said, "We have so much
help with class -- academic support, mandatory study halls, tutors. .
. . They know how to get you through."

University officials said last week that they could not provide data
to show trends during the past two decades in athletes' admissions
qualifications and academic performance.

The NCAA graduation rates, based on the percentage of scholarship
athletes who enter as freshmen and graduate within six years,
indicate that men's basketball remains a problem spot. "We are not in
good shape," acknowledged Athletic Director Debbie Yow.

Coaches and others argue over the fairest way to define how many
athletes graduate. But by any measure, Yow said, "our first goal . .
. is to get to the average" among men's basketball programs
nationwide. "And we're not there."

She and other U-Md. officials say their attempts to focus players on
schoolwork often are overshadowed by a temptation that did not exist
two decades ago: NBA teams now draft many players before they have
finished their four years of college competition.

Wellford, the Athletic Council chairman, said many on U-Md.'s men's
basketball team go to class and make adequate -- if not sterling --
grades until their senior year, when they leave to try to get
drafted, no matter how unrealistic their chances.

Five of the past six men's basketball players who have departed the
campus did not graduate. For instance, junior John Gilchrist left
after the 2004-05 season to declare for the NBA draft. Not drafted,
he plays professionally in Israel.

Gary Williams, the team's head coach since 1989, said he wants his
players to graduate. "Why did the players leave? To train for the
draft or a career in Europe," Williams said. "Who allowed the players
to leave? Their parents. Well, then, what do you want me to do? . . .
If the parents say that is okay, what can I do?"

The athletic department, Yow noted, offers to pay the tuition for
former campus athletes if they return to finish a degree. Some have,
including Keith Booth, now an assistant coach. Still, Goff said, "the
reality is, it's hard to come back here. So we would love for them to
finish before they leave."

At U-Md. and nationally, officials continue to refine their policies
so that all athletes will get a sound education.

The NCAA is phasing in new standards that, for the first time, will
revoke scholarships from coaches whose teams consistently do poor
academic work. And at U-Md., the Athletic Council has drafted new
class attendance rules for athletes with low grades. Until now, it
has been up to coaches to decide whether to penalize team members who
skip classes. Beginning this fall, athletes with poor grades and too
many unexcused absences from class will be suspended from their next
game automatically.

In other words, 20 years after Bias died, the goal of educating
university athletes remains a work in progress. Back then, "the
athletic program was brought under some control," said George H.
Callcott, a retired College Park history professor, "but it was not
revolutionized."

Still, that summer yielded lessons. After four years as a forward for
the Terps, Nik Caner-Medley left school without graduating this
spring and is hoping to get selected in the second round of the NBA
draft in nine days. "It's impossible to be at Maryland and not be
knowledgeable of who Len Bias was and what he meant," Caner-Medley
said. "All the things that come with being an athlete you can learn
from his story. The pressures. The challenges. The temptations."

Staff writers Eric Prisbell, Ivan Carter, Liz Clarke, Ovetta Wiggins
and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.