40 for 34 # 5 - May 20

Shining at Five Star

Len Bias Stood Out at the Five Star

Basketball Camp and Met His Future Rival

During the summer after his sophomore year in 1980, Len Bias for the first time attended the Five Star Basketball Camp. There, the top high-school basketball players in the nation gathered annually to learn from NBA or college players as well as such luminary coaches as Bobby Knight, Chuck Daly and Hubie Brown.

The best players received free tuition at the camp, but worked off their fee as waiters. That first year, Bias paid his own way. Brian Waller, Len's teammate at Northwestern High School, also attended the camp. He says Bias’s first Five Star camp experience transformed him as a player. “He either outplayed the other guys or played them evenly,” he remembers. “His confidence changed after the Five Star camp. After that, there was no looking back.”

One of the first people Bias met at camp was Michael Jordan, then a rising-star senior at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. As Waller remembered, Jordan had already been at the camp for a week working with Larry Spriggs, the Northwestern alumnus and at the time a top player at Howard University. He was among the counselors that year.

“We saw Jordan sitting on a bench and Larry said he wanted to introduce him to his homeboys,” says Waller. “Larry introduced me as my nickname, ‘Ice.’ Jordan said, ‘They call me ‘Black Ice.’ ”

With the ice broken, roommates Waller and Bias spent lots of time with Jordan and his roommate Buzz Peterson, who would later become Jordan’s teammate at North Carolina. The four bonded quickly, gathering in each other’s rooms at night talking about their basketball dreams.

By the summer after his junior year, Bias had reached the heralded Five Star camp status of waiter, which provided him free tuition. Howard Garfinkel, who started the camp in 1966 and ran it for 42 years, says that after his second year at the camp Bias received a 5-plus rating – the highest a player can receive – signifying “super” potential to dominate college at the Division 1 level. He also won the Most Outstanding Player award that year over such future NBA players as Johnny Dawkins and Billy Thompson, who helped Louisville win the NCAA in 1986. “He was one of the top 10 or 15 best ever at our camp,” says Garfinkel. “He was an extra-terrestrial athlete and a great scorer. And he was a great person, very likable.”

Excerpted from the book,

Born Ready: the Mixed Legacy of Len Bias

Buy autographed copies

as a Father's Day Gift

The audio for this post was narrated by the author,

Dave Ungrady.

And listen to more about Len's early life in Episode 2 of the narrative podcast series, Len Bias: A Mixed Legacy