William Moore McDowell 11/16/38 - 11/16/06

After the memorial service for long time Virginia sportswriter Bill McDowell on November 20, 2006, a couple of gentlemen who I did not know were exchanging conversation with me concerning some of the work Bill did.

One of the men recalled an article Bill had done in the Fairfax Journal after the death of Len Bias, the University of Maryland basketball star who was the second overall pick in the 1986 draft by the Boston Celtics and who died shortly thereafter of a cocaine overdose.

The other gentleman (I don\'t know his name either; we were strangers to each other), immediately responded that he also remembered that well written article from 20 years ago.

After that, I just had to go to the archival room at the main library in the city of Fairfax to find it and retype it for those who are interested.

I have also attached a short article which Bill wrote way back on October 14, 1974 when he was working for the Alexandria Gazette concerning sportsmanship.

For about 20 years, from the early \'70\'s to the early \'90\'s Bill was doing all of the tiresome, repetitive work of driving all around the state for cross country and track and field meets.

Copying results down by hand and then having to go back to the office to type results out on a typewriter (no spell check back then, boys and girls) was not that easy \"back in the day.\"

He was always getting results printed in the paper and always having previews and summaries of meets. From the pre-computerized era, they are just about the only source that track and field and cross country runners from the Northern Virginia area now have of those previous accomplishments.

He could also take a break from the sometimes endless agate results to just plain write very well on a lot of different subjects.

These following two articles seem to me to have pretty much a timeless effect. Even though they were written years ago, most of what is contained in them still seems pertinent in today\'s world as well.


Mr. McDowell had a column which ran three times a week in the Fairfax Journal called \"Nobody Asked Me, But .....\" and this was from June 27, 1986, which was eight days after the death of Len Bias.

THE HIGH PRICE OF PRESSURE



Dear Chris and Jamie.

Listening to and reading about the death of basketball star Len Bias has been pretty scary for me. I\'m not sure how the two of you - as high school athletes and teenagers - have been affected by it. I hope, however, it scared you as well.

His death probably didn\'t get to you the way it got to me. When you\'re 17 and 15 you walk around with this feeling of immortality. Death is something that happens to someone else, not you. When you are almost 48 like your dad, you don\'t feel very immortal anymore. Death seems a lot more real and much more personal.

It\'s not that you haven\'t been touched by death. Our entire family went through it this spring by losing a close personal friend. It was hard on all of us. Our friend was just 18. One day he was there, and the next day he wasn\'t because of a brief but fatal mistake in judgment.

Len Bias made a mistake also, and he, too; paid with his life. When a young person dies it never seems fair, nor just, nor part of a larger scheme of things beyond our grasp of understanding or even our faith.

We live in a super-charged society. We have instant communication, instant pudding, and we often long for instant gratification. For Len Bias, had he lived, there would have been almost instant wealth as well.

We live fast - too fast for my taste a lot of time. And partially because of the fast-paced living, most of us also all live with pressure. I know you feel pressure in your athletics, in your schoolwork, in your social life, and at home. Your mom and I operate under a lot of pressure as well. Our pressures aren\'t the same as yours necessarily, but they exist just the same.

We all handle pressure in our own way. Some of us cope better than others. Some of us don\'t cope very well at all. Some of us can\'t cope period, or give up trying to cope. In today\'s society, unfortunately, many of those who quit trying to cope are kids your ages, and they have become part of a rising statistical line on a cold chart of teenage suicides in our country. That scares me.

Remember earlier this month, when the good distance runner from North Carolina State, Kathy Ormsby, jumped off the bridge in Indianapolis at the NCAA track and field championships? She didn\'t die, but now she\'s paralyzed for life. Folks think her lack of being able to handle pressure had a lot to do with that.

Earlier this spring, I saw Kathy set the collegiate record for 10,000 meters at Penn Relays in Philadelphia. She ran a brilliant, gutty race. But I guess being No.1 puts little devils in a lot of us, no matter what we do. We have this feeling the world expects us to continue to be No. 1. Those little devils prod us into believing that, whether the world really cares or not.

Kathy was behind in her race in the NCAA championships - the race she was expected to win because she was the national recordholder - but she wasn\'t behind by all that much. But apparently something snapped in her head. She ran off the track, climbed a fence, ran across a couple of playing fields and jumped off the bridge. That\'s pretty scary, too.

Most of us never experience the kind of pressures that Len Bias or Kathy Ormsby reached in their sports. Maybe we fantasize about being in a position to experience those kinds of pressures, but that fantasy doesn\'t usually include the reality of having to try and cope with being the best every day.

Spending as much time around teenagers as I have these last 18 years, I have a pretty good idea how kids try to cope. The lucky ones can use strong family ties or their faith in God to see them through. Sometimes a good friend, or teacher or coach can do for them what a parent or religious teacher can\'t.

But you know and I know there are kids who turn to drugs, to alcohol or a combination of both to get them through the day. At the same time they usually abandon those they most often need. Instead, they find a person or group of persons who they feel will not exert the kind of pressure they\'re trying to escape from. Sometimes, however, experimentation with alcohol or drugs begins more innocently. It may not seem to have anything to do with the pressures in our lives.

It may begin simply because someone says, \"Hey! There\'s a party, let\'s go by and see what\'s happening.\"

You know and I know that the chances are good around here that there\'s going to be beer at the party or pot or coke or whatever. How many times have you heard your friends or people you know spread the word that so-and-so is having a kegger (for the uninitiated, that\'s a party with one or more kegs of beer)?

That doesn\'t mean, of course, that just because you go to the party you\'re going to drink or do drugs. But I\'m not naive enough to believe that if the opportunity is there, you\'re not going to be tempted to experiment or try it to just go along with the gang.

What I hope, however, is that you\'re smart enough to understand what alcohol and drugs can do to your head, to your body. Len Bias may have done cocaine only one time. He may have just wanted to escape, if only for an hour or so, from the zoo he\'d been through. He paid the big price for his experimentation, for his attempted hour or so of escape.

You can\'t say, \"That won\'t happen to me, that can\'t happen to me. It can happen. Len Bias is the ultimate proof of that. It is the testimony he has left to us all.

It\'s easy to say one beer isn\'t going to hurt or that one joint won\'t matter or that anybody can handle one line of cocaine. Maybe it won\'t or maybe it will. But after one, it becomes a lot easier to say, \"Two won\'t do me any harm.\" You can go on kidding yourself like that all evening. By the time it can harm you, unfortunately, the chances are you won\'t really care.

You\'ll do things you wouldn\'t have done otherwise, like accept a ride home from somebody who is in as bad or worse shape than you are. You won\'t know the difference.

You may try to drive home on your own. You may forget that you can call home for a ride. You may not recall that I\'d rather have you with me, no matter what your condition, than never have you again.

Do I trust you? Yes, I trust you. Do I worry about you? Yes, every time you walk out the door, not because I don\'t trust you, but because I know you\'re human just like me. That we can all make mistakes, however innocent they may seem at the time. I likewise understand, perhaps better than you do at 15 or 17, how fragile life really is.

And when we increase the potential for all too human mistakes with alcohol or drugs and combine that with the natural fragility of life, my blood runs cold with the fear of what can happen, what does happen more often than we all care to admit.

So the next time you go to a party or the next time you\'re out riding around, or the next time you\'re looking for an escape from something in your life, stop and consider for a moment the example of Len Bias. He paid too much for his escape. He didn\'t believe it could happen to him, but it did.

I love you both, Dad.