ESPN will celebrate Michael Jordan and Len Bias with a game from 1984. Let's also celebrate their mothers - and my own

In advance of the latest installment of "The Last Dance", basketball fans can watch what had the makings of a terrific rivalry that was derailed when Bias did two years later

ESPN’s decision to show the classic 1984 matchup between Michael Jordan and Len Bias as college players at North Carolina and Maryland was certainly made as a prelude to the fourth installment of its five-week, 10-part series “The Last Dance”.

Fittingly, Mother’s Day seems to be perfect platform, given how big a role Deloris Jordan and Lonise Bias played in the lives of their famous sons. It’s also fitting for me given how influential my mother Ruthe, going strong at 95, was in shaping my future.

Deloris Jordan is shown several times during the 10-hour documentary, but it was in Part 5 that she seemed to play a leading role. It came when her son was deciding which athletic shoe company to sign with after being drafted No. 3 overall by the Chicago Bulls in 1984.

Jordan wanted to sign with Adidas, whose famously striped sneakers he had worn with the Tar Heels. While its U.S. reps thought Jordan would be more relatable to the average consumer, the company’s executives back in Germany only wanted to sign 7-footers like Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

Converse, which had dominated the market since first introducing the canvas and now classic Chuck Taylor All-Stars in the late 1920s, already had three of the NBA’s biggest stars in Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and an aging Julius Erving, paying them each a then whopping $100,000 a year to wear their leather Chucks.

Nike? 

It was a track shoe company coming off one of its worst sales years, having been passed during the early 1980s running boom by Reebok.  (Interestingly, that was the company Bias was going to sign with after being drafted by the Boston Celtics No. 2 overall  in 1986.)

In “The Last Dance” documentary, Jordan’s agent, David Falk, recalled how he couldn’t convince his newest client “to get on the damn plane” to Portland, Ore. to meet with Nike executives Phil Knight and Howard White. That’s when Deloris Jordan stepped in.

“My mother said, ‘You’re gonna go listen to then,” Jordan said in the documentary. “‘You may not like it, but you’re going to go listen.’ She made me get on that plane and go listen.”

Jordan’s late father, James Jordan, also played a role during that now famous trip  to Nike’s Beaverton campus. It came after Nike offered his son $250,000 a year and his own signature shoe, which of course became the iconic “Air Jordan”.

“I go into that meeting not wanting to be there and Nike made a big pitch,” Jordan said in the documentary. “My father said, ‘You’d have to be a fool not taking this deal. This is the best deal.’”

As things turned out, Jordan’s mother and father knew best.

While it was Bias’s father, James Bias, who accompanied him to Reebok headquarters outside Boston the day before the former Maryland star died of cocaine-intoxication after partying back in College Park, it was his mother who became a national motivational speaker and life coach in the aftermath of his tragic death.

One of the last conversations I had with Bias during his senior year at Maryland - his second straight season as the ACC’s player of the year and the first season I covered the Terps for the Baltimore Sun - came after he had abruptly stopped talking to the beat writers late in the season for no apparent reason.

After The Sun ran a big color spread on Bias that included a picture of him smiling, a fat gold chain around his neck, he came over to me to ask for a copy of the photograph. Bias told me the gold chain had been a Christmas gift from his mom. I told him I would get him the original, but on one condition.

He had to answer a couple of questions for another story I was writing.

My fellow scribes never did figure out how I got him to talk.

Three months later, he was dead.

Since I was relatively new to the beat, I knew his parents only to say hello, but had never really developed any relationship with them. A couple of months after his death, the Biases invited the local media out to their house in Prince George’s County, not far from the Maryland campus. 

It was to be their first public comments since their son’s memorial service at Cole Field House a few days after his death. At the service where Jesse Jackson, Red Auerbach and Lefty Driesell all spoke, Lonise Bias had shown her amazing strength. She did again at the family’s home.

When the moment seemed appropriate, I went over to Mrs. Bias to offer my condolences and told her that I wished my religion - Judaism - gave its followers the same kind of fortitude in dealing with the death of a loved one, especially one’s child, that she seemed to possess as a born-again Christian.

“My mother could never be this strong,” I said. 

During the conversation, we talked about she and her husband believed that their son’s death would serve its purpose in order to teach young people the dangers of drugs.

Sadly, they would be forced to muster that kind of strength again when their middle son, Jay, was shot and killed at a local mall a few years later.

Over the years, as Lonise Bias became more of a public figure, I marveled at how she used that message over and over again throughout the country. I also wondered how her husband and their two other children were holding up as Jay’s death. 

I never spoke to her again, and neither  she nor anyone in the family returned my calls over the years when I did various stories making the 10th, 20th and 30th anniversary of Len’s death.

I thought I would get the chance during the ceremony for his much overdue selection to the University of Maryland’s Athletics Hall of Fame back in 2014, but because it was scheduled on the eve of the most solemn of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, I couldn’t go. 

I will certainly be watching ESPN’s showing of the Jordan-Bias matchup, a game that I have written about over the years and have watched some clips from on YouTube as well.

I would love to view it with my own mother, who though not a big sports fan has been a willing audience for me over the years since I would ask her to test me on my knowledge of batting average and strikeout totals on the backs of baseball cards.

I will visit my mom today, and spend some time talking from outside her apartment building, but the pandemic will prevent us truly sharing it together. I’m not sure that watching Bias and Jordan was exactly how she’d want to spend a couple of hours anyway.    

When I wrote a book about Maryland basketball a few years ago, she devoted many hours reading and rereading it, then asking me questions about the coaches and players I highlighted. I had dedicated to the book to my two sons, Russell and Jordan, who grew up hating Duke, and my wife Judy, who sat with them in the upper reaches of the Georgia Dome when the Terps won the title in 2002.

I probably should have included my mom in that dedication, because she has always been my biggest fan. Whenever I visited her after the book was published, she would always request a few copies that she could give - and sell - to her friends. She even tried to set up a speaking engagement for me at the community she lives in nearby.

As Deloris Jordan and Lonise Bias played roles in their sons becoming basketball superstars, my mom had even played a role in me becoming a sportswriter. A few years after I stopped collecting baseball cards, she took me to see the movie “The Odd Couple”, which had opened in New York. I was in the ninth grade.

There was a character named Oscar Madison, a slovenly sportswriter who quickly became - and some close to me might argue still is - my role model. For my next English assignment, I wrote a composition titled “The Day In The Life Of A Sportswriter”. 

Now I will get ready to watch Jordan and Bias from Cole Field House in 1984.

Happy Mother’s Day.