Johnny Holliday was doing morning sports at radio station WMAL in Washington, D.C., June 19, 1986, when he got a call from someone at the old Leland Hospital, near the intersection of Route 1 and East-West Highway in Riverdale.
Leland, which would close about seven years later, was just a few miles south down Route 1 from the University of Maryland. The anonymous caller told Holliday Terps basketball star Len Bias had just been brought to the hospital.
"It was a little after 7. My news director said, ‘Get in a car and go out there,'" recalled Holliday, who became the radio voice of the Terps in 1979. "I got to the hospital and got word he had died."
Holliday was then told by the radio station to head to the Maryland campus, where Bias had been an All-Atlantic Coast Conference standout. The graduate of Northwestern High in Hyattsville, Md., had been drafted two days earlier in the first round by the Boston Celtics as the second overall selection.
