December 30, 1964—In a performance acclaimed one of the "All-Time Top 10 College Basketball Moments at Madison Square Garden," Princeton’s Bill Bradley scored 41 points, pulled down nine rebounds, and held the player he was guarding to a single point, hearing the first cheers in the New York arena where he’d make his professional home for 10 years. .
But his effort in the Holiday Festival Tournament semi-final against top-ranked Michigan came to naught. His fifth foul, coming with Princeton 12 points up with less than five minutes to play against their heavily favored opponents, allowed the Wolverines—featuring Bradley’s future Knick teammate Cazzie Russell —to overtake the Tigers and win, 80-78.
For the general public, the performance by the Ivy League senior confirmed that he was indeed the real thing. The crowd that day gave him a three-minute standing ovation after he was forced to leave the game.
But his effort in the Holiday Festival Tournament semi-final against top-ranked Michigan came to naught. His fifth foul, coming with Princeton 12 points up with less than five minutes to play against their heavily favored opponents, allowed the Wolverines—featuring Bradley’s future Knick teammate Cazzie Russell —to overtake the Tigers and win, 80-78.
For the general public, the performance by the Ivy League senior confirmed that he was indeed the real thing. The crowd that day gave him a three-minute standing ovation after he was forced to leave the game.
For Bradley, believe it or not, it may have meant more. I don’t mean simply telling him he could excel at the fabled Garden, a sports venue he had never played before. No, I think it further instilled two bits of knowledge that would serve him in good stead throughout his subsequent career as athlete and politician:
1) Ferocious preparation and self-discipline could help him master any realm in which he decided to enter; and
1) Ferocious preparation and self-discipline could help him master any realm in which he decided to enter; and
2) Despite his best efforts, he might still lose, and he should not treat the defeat as the end of the world but learn what he could from it and move on.
Or, as he told audiences at the time: “You’ve got to face that you’re going to lose. Losses are part of every season, and part of life. The question is, can you adjust? It is important that you don’t get caught up in your own little defeats.”
In cold print, that philosophy sounds almost like a truism. Try telling that to certain politicians, though.
That profession depends, from election to election, on personal validation, and a number of Presidential aspirants, at one time or another in their careers, have experienced defeats at the polls as a kind of second death. Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore all experienced these as soul-crushing, and the losses left them, in many cases, smaller, even damaged, men.
In contrast, Bradley comes across as something like the embodiment of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”—i.e., one of those who can “meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same.”
The most striking instance of this came when he lost the 2000 Presidential nomination to Al Gore. Once a series of losses in the primaries forced him out, he moved on with the next stage of his life, without walking around like a duck struck on the head with a paddle, without making up enemies’ lists, and without biting his lips, turning red-faced, or striking back at opponents in autobiographies.
Bradley started on two Knick teams that won NBA champions, but recalling the ones that got away—without fixating on it—kept his ego in check and his sanity intact.
In the 1970s, I saw him asked in a TV interview about John Starks’ disastrous 2-for-18 shooting drought in Game 7 of the 1994 championship series against the Houston Rockets. Bradley was asked: Would Starks ever be able to live this down?
Sure, Bradley said, though the excitable Knick guard would have to get used to memories of it. He recalled his own experience in 1971, when the Knicks were unable to repeat as champions because he missed a buzzer jumper in the deciding game of the Eastern Conference finals against the Baltimore Bullets. He could still hear from New York cabbies, years later, “Ya bum, how could you miss that shot?”
If you’d like to get a sense of what Bradley was like in his college years, start with New Yorker writer John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are. It’s a fascinating book—for its place in the author's career, for the light it sheds on a great American story, and for its treatment of the major issue changing American society—and, shortly, Bradley’s game—at the time: race.
Not long after his 1977 bestseller about Alaska, Coming Into the Country, McPhee began to write, in almost obsessive fashion, about inanimate objects rather than people (e.g., Basin and Range, The Control of Nature). This might have been the nadir of The New Yorker (not counting when Tina Brown asked Rosie O’Donnell to serve as a “guest editor”), in the period when editor William Shawn made a specialty of the legendary “50,000-word piece on zinc” (perhaps best illustrated by E.J. Kahn’s multi-part series on “The Staffs of Life.”)
But the Bradley profile, more than a decade earlier, showed, despite its sometimes overly worshipful tone, just how good McPhee could be. It’s a great foreshadowing of the athlete-politician’s later career, and filled with all kinds of interesting details (e.g., how Bradley scrubbed his hands before games to eliminate excess perspiration and oil, increasing friction that would enable him to grip the ball better).
Many stories of athletes hinge on the obstacles—poverty, a disability—they faced growing up. McPhee’s profile might be the first I’ve read that shows how a life of privilege posed difficulties for its subject in becoming a basketball great. The banker’s son also sounds remarkably old-fashioned these days because of his college membership in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
The game against Michigan is also intriguing because of the much-anticipated faceoff with Cazzie Russell. The two men, later teammates on the Knicks, proved, after retirement, that there was far more to their lives than the mere ability to shoot a basketball. Bradley’s career, as author and three-term U.S. Senator from New Jersey, is well known. Russell—later a basketball analyst and coach with Savannah College of Art and Design—is a minister, now serving as associate pastor of Live Oak Community Church in Savannah.
In reading McPhee’s account, it’s hard not to be reminded of the similarly starry-eyed treatment that sportswriters (usually white) accorded Larry Bird years later. Both players’ intelligence and self-discipline were extolled. In contrast, their close African-American counterparts in terms of all-around excellence—Magic Johnson, in Bird’s case; Oscar Robertson, in Bradley’s—were often hailed in physical terms.
Bradley, one suspects, would probably be mortified by this unthinking slighting of blacks. As a teammate of African-Americans, he became annoyed at what he regarded as “white skin privilege.” As a rookie NBA player, he’d receive all kinds of ad offers, but black teammates whose skills he regarded as superior received none.
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Bradley’s fame was such that he even inspired a nickname for a nun in my high school, St. Cecilia’s in Englewood, N.J. Her doctors told this Sister of Charity—normally given to teaching the fine points of English and Latin--not to become too excited at games—“ ‘ mind your ticker,’ they tell me”—but she couldn’t help herself.
So, when an opponent dribbled up the court, Sister Margaret Bradley would raise her arms and, in a high, piping voice, exhort our players, echoing the now-familiar chant from Madison Square Garden: “Okay, boys—DEE-FENSE, DEE-FENSE.” As a result, she came to share a nickname with the great Knick, one of two she eventually had: “Dollar Bill.” (The other nickname—“Sister Omar”—led her to tell her class, “I know you call me that, but don’t forget—he was a four-star general!”)
In cold print, that philosophy sounds almost like a truism. Try telling that to certain politicians, though.
That profession depends, from election to election, on personal validation, and a number of Presidential aspirants, at one time or another in their careers, have experienced defeats at the polls as a kind of second death. Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore all experienced these as soul-crushing, and the losses left them, in many cases, smaller, even damaged, men.
In contrast, Bradley comes across as something like the embodiment of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”—i.e., one of those who can “meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same.”
The most striking instance of this came when he lost the 2000 Presidential nomination to Al Gore. Once a series of losses in the primaries forced him out, he moved on with the next stage of his life, without walking around like a duck struck on the head with a paddle, without making up enemies’ lists, and without biting his lips, turning red-faced, or striking back at opponents in autobiographies.
Bradley started on two Knick teams that won NBA champions, but recalling the ones that got away—without fixating on it—kept his ego in check and his sanity intact.
In the 1970s, I saw him asked in a TV interview about John Starks’ disastrous 2-for-18 shooting drought in Game 7 of the 1994 championship series against the Houston Rockets. Bradley was asked: Would Starks ever be able to live this down?
Sure, Bradley said, though the excitable Knick guard would have to get used to memories of it. He recalled his own experience in 1971, when the Knicks were unable to repeat as champions because he missed a buzzer jumper in the deciding game of the Eastern Conference finals against the Baltimore Bullets. He could still hear from New York cabbies, years later, “Ya bum, how could you miss that shot?”
If you’d like to get a sense of what Bradley was like in his college years, start with New Yorker writer John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are. It’s a fascinating book—for its place in the author's career, for the light it sheds on a great American story, and for its treatment of the major issue changing American society—and, shortly, Bradley’s game—at the time: race.
Not long after his 1977 bestseller about Alaska, Coming Into the Country, McPhee began to write, in almost obsessive fashion, about inanimate objects rather than people (e.g., Basin and Range, The Control of Nature). This might have been the nadir of The New Yorker (not counting when Tina Brown asked Rosie O’Donnell to serve as a “guest editor”), in the period when editor William Shawn made a specialty of the legendary “50,000-word piece on zinc” (perhaps best illustrated by E.J. Kahn’s multi-part series on “The Staffs of Life.”)
But the Bradley profile, more than a decade earlier, showed, despite its sometimes overly worshipful tone, just how good McPhee could be. It’s a great foreshadowing of the athlete-politician’s later career, and filled with all kinds of interesting details (e.g., how Bradley scrubbed his hands before games to eliminate excess perspiration and oil, increasing friction that would enable him to grip the ball better).
Many stories of athletes hinge on the obstacles—poverty, a disability—they faced growing up. McPhee’s profile might be the first I’ve read that shows how a life of privilege posed difficulties for its subject in becoming a basketball great. The banker’s son also sounds remarkably old-fashioned these days because of his college membership in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
The game against Michigan is also intriguing because of the much-anticipated faceoff with Cazzie Russell. The two men, later teammates on the Knicks, proved, after retirement, that there was far more to their lives than the mere ability to shoot a basketball. Bradley’s career, as author and three-term U.S. Senator from New Jersey, is well known. Russell—later a basketball analyst and coach with Savannah College of Art and Design—is a minister, now serving as associate pastor of Live Oak Community Church in Savannah.
In reading McPhee’s account, it’s hard not to be reminded of the similarly starry-eyed treatment that sportswriters (usually white) accorded Larry Bird years later. Both players’ intelligence and self-discipline were extolled. In contrast, their close African-American counterparts in terms of all-around excellence—Magic Johnson, in Bird’s case; Oscar Robertson, in Bradley’s—were often hailed in physical terms.
Bradley, one suspects, would probably be mortified by this unthinking slighting of blacks. As a teammate of African-Americans, he became annoyed at what he regarded as “white skin privilege.” As a rookie NBA player, he’d receive all kinds of ad offers, but black teammates whose skills he regarded as superior received none.
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Bradley’s fame was such that he even inspired a nickname for a nun in my high school, St. Cecilia’s in Englewood, N.J. Her doctors told this Sister of Charity—normally given to teaching the fine points of English and Latin--not to become too excited at games—“ ‘ mind your ticker,’ they tell me”—but she couldn’t help herself.
So, when an opponent dribbled up the court, Sister Margaret Bradley would raise her arms and, in a high, piping voice, exhort our players, echoing the now-familiar chant from Madison Square Garden: “Okay, boys—DEE-FENSE, DEE-FENSE.” As a result, she came to share a nickname with the great Knick, one of two she eventually had: “Dollar Bill.” (The other nickname—“Sister Omar”—led her to tell her class, “I know you call me that, but don’t forget—he was a four-star general!”)
John Thompson, the one who coached at Georgetown, did not play for or even (as far as I know) attend the University of Michigan.
ReplyDeletejh6736,
ReplyDeleteThanks for bringing that to my attention. I've deleted the reference.