40 for 34 #2 - May 17

Dave Ungrady
May 16
2 min read

Finding a Mentor

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While in the ninth grade, Len Bias meets Johnnie Walker, who convinced Len to start playing basketball with other boys at “The Rec”, where Walker was a coach.

Walker played two years of varsity basketball at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, graduating in 1978. While putting off college for a year, he volunteered as a coach at "The Rec", monitoring basketball activities for neighborhood kids and preparing his players for the center’s summer league team.

Walker taught them fundamentals and conditioning with innovative exercises, such as plyometrics, which he learned from Bob Wagner, his former coach at Northwestern. Wagner wanted to build his new program with the best available talent, so he alerted Walker to keep an eye out for Len Bias, a young player at nearby Greenbelt Junior High School whom he had heard showed promising talent.

During practice one day in the winter of 1979, a kid kept peeking through the doors to the gym at The Rec, yelling to his friend Terrence Lewis. Walker scolded Lewis, telling him to ignore the kid and pay attention. The interloper finally gave up and left.

“Who was that?” Walker eventually asked out loud.

“That’s Leonard Bias,” someone said.

A few months later, while walking to The Rec, Walker spotted Bias riding a bike and approached the ninth-grader, saying he understood that he played for Greenbelt Junior High. Bias tried to sell himself to Walker, saying he was better than Lewis. He told Walker that his parents didn’t let him leave the street much without their supervision, so Walker offered to talk with them and receive permission to serve as his guardian to, from and while he was at The Rec, if he was interested in joining the group. Walker could stop by the Bias house, he told the young man, and meet him so the two could walk to The Rec together. “They said yes, but don’t you think his dad didn’t come up and check on him,” says Walker.

Walker, who would become a mentor of Bias, played a large part in developing his talents.