Bob Ryan has an emotional piece in the Boston Globe on Len Bias, on what whould have been his 40th birthday.

Without being an expert on basketball or Bias, I think the odds were against him having as much impact as the people quoted in the piece assume; the odds against such stardom are always longer than most people realize. (Just imagine what people would have said and assumed if - God forbid - the player in Bias' situation had been Ralph Sampson?) But that is precisely the promise, and tragedy, of young lives cut short; the improbabilities are blotted out by the final impossibility.