Remembering To Remember Roy Tarpley

“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”

Len Bias was a martyr. At least that was the story we were told growing up in the eighties. Supposedly, Bias tried coke and keeled over, proof that experimenting even once could be deadly. The crack epidemic had us believing that if you survived that initial taste, the wretched life of an addict was but a few steps away. He was the ultimate cautionary tale, as well as an ideal symbol: supremely gifted, relatively innocent, and then dead from a single bad decision. Len Bias could be any one of us; at the same time, we all wanted to Bias, or at least someone like him. He was an aspirational figure — except for the part that was supposed to teach us hard lessons about human frailty.

Roy Tarpley, who passed away last Friday, was a very different kind of cocaine casualty. Part of the same 1986 draft class as Bias, Tarpley was drafted seventh overall to the Dallas Mavericks. That first-round was littered with players who wrecked their careers with drugs, but the pair that that still stands out is Bias and Tarpley. Bias, he of great career that never even got started, and Tarpley, a borderline All-Star in Dallas for four seasons before being suspended for nearly four years and then banned outright.

Bias was a tragic figure and a convenient vessel for hysteria but Tarpley was just as edifying: the guy who made it and then spent his life watching it slip away over and over again.

To say Tarpley fell from grace overstates his Bias-like purity. It also makes it seem as if his struggles ended the day David Stern sent him into exile, when in fact he spent another decade as basketball nomad, criss-crossing the globe as he chased what was left of his hoop dreams. Len Bias’s overdose remains a horror story, but it’s an incomplete picture of your brain on drugs. Tarpley, who had it, lost it, and then continued to deteriorate, is the face of addiction, which corrupts lives and ruins people. It brings you this close to the edge and then pulls you back in to suffer some more. That’s a lesson as powerful as the Legend of Len Bias and one that, you could argue, is a more realistic one.

Bias taught us that death could strike at any time; crack had us thinking that drugs could make zombies of men if given the slightest opportunity. Tarpley showed us what happened when a person didn’t die or immediately descend into sub-humanity. It still wasn’t pretty, but through Tarpley, we got a far more accurate picture of drugs ravaging a life.

I can’t pretend that I spent my formative years monitoring Roy Tarpley as closely as those unfortunate enough to be Mavs fans did during this time did. I did know, though, that he was a very good player who was erased from the league in his prime. If you spent a few minutes with his stats, you’ll see a player who was averaging over 20 and 10 when he was first suspended in 1991. When he returned for 55 games in 1994–95 at the age of 30 — still a perfectly respectable age for a big man — Tarpley was still going for almost 13 and 8. The decline is there but hardly steep or disastrous. There was something functional about Tarpley, an aspect of drug use that lacks the clarity of Bias. There’s doom and then there’s the real, ongoing attempt to make peace with demons. And there is also that stark divide between finding trouble and being a troubled person, one who screws up as much as he doesn’t until one day, everything catches up with him. That’s when addiction starts to overtake everything else. That’s when you can no longer run, hide, or mask it any longer. That’s when changes start happening — however gradually — that one day will become impossible to reverse.

Len Bias may have shown us just how punishing and final drug use could be. But Roy Tarpley stood for something else altogether: a reminder that even if you made it, even if you got away with your life and most of your dignity intact, the real problems were just getting started. Tarpley reminded us, on and off the court, that slow death was still a form of death. While Bias terrified us, Tarpley endured as a symbol of addiction’s real-life toll.