Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 22, 1992 TAG: 9202220272
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: EMORY LENGTH: Medium
RESIST PRESSURE, LEN'S MOM SAYS
Lonise Bias still does not know how she managed not to break down when she spoke at the funeral service for her son, basketball star Len Bias who died of drug-related heart failure in 1986 two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics."I don't know what I said" to the 3,000 people who attended, she says. She does remember that the mothers of some of the other players presented her with roses, and people reacted positively to whatever she had said.
She has been speaking out ever since - even after the death of yet another son, 20-year-old Jay Bias, who was slain Dec. 4, 1990.
Jay and some other men had had words with someone in a shopping center mall during their lunch break, she said. They were driving back to the bank where he worked when the man they had encountered drove by their car and fired two shots, killing Jay.
Len Bias, a University of Maryland basketball star, had been known as someone who avoided drugs. His death seemed to have been from a one-time experimental use of cocaine.
Bias spoke Thursday night to a packed house in Memorial Chapel on the Emory & Henry College campus, and this time she did know what she was saying. She has been saying it since Len's funeral, which led to an invitation to appear on the Christian Broadcasting Network's 700 Club "and it's taken a snowball effect to here. I've never done anything to promote myself at all."
A former Washington, D.C., bank employee, she now spends her time speaking out on drugs, violence, peer pressure and other issues affecting young people. Her husband manages the work she does.
"It's all right to think. It's OK to like yourself. It's OK to do the things you feel in your heart," Bias told her audience, urging them not to worry about what others may think of them. "Many of you are so hung up on people, you can't see where you're going," she said.
"People change. They can betray you. You can have no confidence in them," she said. "Today the group likes you, tomorrow they don't want to be bothered."
Rather than following others, she said, young people needed to become role models themselves.
"Someone is watching you. You are teaching someone. You are teaching someone by your actions," she said.
Suicide is the No. 2 killer of people between the ages of 15 and 24 in this country, she said. "Why? Because they don't know who they are. . . . Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem."
Irresponsible sexual activity among young people will lead to them dying in record numbers from acquired immune deficiency syndrome in the coming decade, she said.
"AIDS will make drugs and alcohol and poor attitudes look like a cakewalk. . . . If you don't deal with reality, reality will deal with you," she said. "A prostitute knows what her value is. And our young people are just giving it away!"
She said she was not advocating prostitution but making a point about the worth of virginity. Women are wired for feelings and emotions, she said, while sex is often just a physical need for men.
It was painful to her when she heard about basketball star Magic Johnson being infected with the AIDS virus, she said, "and I know exactly how people felt when they heard about my son, Len."
Another part of her message was that death can happen to anyone at any time, and people should act toward others as if those others could be gone tomorrow.
"Learn to give roses to your loved ones while they can smell them," she said. "We take our families for granted. God, why did I have to bury two sons to come here and tell people not to take their loved ones for granted?"
She and her husband have two other children, Michelle, 23, and Eric, 17.
"We're doing well," she told a reporter after her talk. "All of us have our personal times when we ache and we hurt."