Feeling a little Tormented...

I am tormented. At this moment on this day, I am tormented by the 101 blog postings that should already be archived under ‘The Audacity of Hype’ but instead of being archived they’re still banging around inside my head. I don’t have a ‘big head’ as some may think. I have a lot in my head.

On my desk is another stack of blog outlines waiting for a treatment and posting. The best cure for my own problem is to loosely describe a couple of the blog outlines and allow a natural progression to determine what gets treated for posting and what can be put off for another day.

An example of a blog that’s been boiling over inside me is the way Len Bias was misconstrued in life. On or about February 13, 1986, the late University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias helped his team beat the N.C. State men’s team that also featured future number one NBA pick Chris Washburn. After that game, Len Bias joined Chris Washburn for an evening of cocaine sniffing. I should know, I was there. Most people have never made the connection but know that Len Bias was suspended a game for missing curfew following the NC State game. Len Bias did lose his life accidentally but he was certainly no stranger to cocaine.

What really troubles me is how offended people’s sensibilities were at the notion Len Bias may have used cocaine prior to that fateful evening. Red Auerbach even acknowledged illegally or inappropriately testing Bias before the draft that supposedly revealed nothing. The team has admitted they would have drafted him anyway. His college coach, Lefty Driesell, must have known of his drug use since it was confirmed that he instructed that drugs be removed from the player’s room after the story broke.

A local reporter who had interviewed Bias in the hours before his death reflected that he’d asked Bias directly about night life and drug usage in the NBA and suggested that Bias’s answer indicated that he had -and would have - no connection to either night life or drug usage. That wasn’t the answer Bias gave him at all and I realized it the moment I heard the response. Bias said “That’s why you have to control that stuff.” Control that stuff. Not “I haven’t, I don’t or I won’t.” Control that stuff. I cried for a while the moment I found out Lenny was dead but he would want people to know he wasn’t lost as innocently as suggested.

The medical examiner had it right the first time he reported on the condition of the body following death. Bias was described in an autopsy report two days following his death as a "well-developed young Black male," 6-foot-7, 221½ pounds, otherwise fit and healthy and clean, with the exception of the copious amount of cocaine in his system. This report was tempered later to suggest that he didn’t have the heavy amount of cocaine in his system that was obviously there.

Somehow, the countless lives that were impacted by Len’s transgressions were unfairly persecuted. Len killed himself yet fellow players were victimized, the University and it’s programs suffered not to mention the 1,000’s of Black men who served near life sentences due to crack cocaine laws passed quickly after Len’s death. And all because no one wanted to believe that Len spent a good bit of time inside a drug culture he supposedly knew nothing about.

Another thing that has tormented me since before Barack Obama was actually elected and inaugurated as the first Black President of the United States is the fact that Ida Elizabeth Stover was not white. At the very least, Ms. Stover was born to a Mulatto lineage and most certainly gave birth to the 34th President of the United States - Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Had some fun recently at the neighborhood barber shop. My Obama Loving nemesis has been a lot easier to deal with now that it is obvious Dem Disaster may be on the horizon. For months, I’d been trying to figure out where I knew his daughter from but couldn’t put my finger on it and suddenly it clicked in my head when she interrupted our weekly argument to return his keys. His daughter looks exactly like Eisenhower’s mother or at least looks like a wedding photo of her in 1885. When I sprung it on him - no one in the shop could believe the likeness and as my friend put it “both my daughter‘s parents are definitely black.” That’s just one of the things that bugs me about Obama. He’s just not who he portends to be. Ike passed as White. Obama is passing as Black and not doing a very good job of it!

I’m feeling a lot less tormented now…