This Day in Basketball History (Bradley Nets 2,000th Pt. Vs. Columbia)

January 15, 1965—Bill Bradley’s 41-point effort in Princeton University’s win over Columbia was seemingly uneventful compared with two games before and immediately after: his epic showdown against the Cazzie Russell-led Michigan just before the New Year (recounted in a prior post of mine) and his hot-and-cold game against Cornell the following night.

But the crowd at Morningside Heights that night got to see something special nonetheless: the 2,000th-point in the collegiate career of the future Basketball Hall of Famer and U.S. Senator from New Jersey.

New Yorker writer John McPhee’s fascinating if hagiographic account of the Princeton years of “Dollar Bill,” A Sense of Where You Are, treats the Columbia game in uncharacteristically desultory fashion, noting merely that my alma mater “went down without incident.” I gather that the score was not only not especially close, but that the outcome was never even in doubt.

The squad that Bradley and coach Butch van Breda Kolff faced that night was under the watchful eye of Jack Rohan, the most successful coach in the Lions’ history.

Rohan’s recruiting efforts had not fully borne fruit yet—that would have to wait until the 1967-68 team, led by Jim McMillan, which reeled off 23 wins against five losses, winning the Ivy League championship—but his team could still pull off surprises.

One of these was recounted in a post on Columbia’s Web site by Mike Griffin, a 1965 grad. In January 1964, a capacity crowd at University Hall got the best of both worlds: a typically stellar Bradley performance (36 points) and a thrilling 69-66 victory for the Lions.

Any hopes that history would repeat itself on Morningside Heights—that Princeton, playing away from home, at the end of a period of intense cramming for exams, would play flatfooted--fell by the wayside. When Bradley notched the 2,000th point of his career, play was stopped to present him with the ball. Until that point, only 16 other players in college basketball history had gained as many points.

What happened the next 24 hours proved far more eventful, as the Princeton squad left immediately for Ithaca, N.Y., by bus—in a blizzard. Perhaps that, along with a 20-minute delay of the game against Cornell, unsettled Bradley, because in the first half he was ice-cold: 10 points, but only two field goals made out of seventeen attempted.

In the second half, Bradley ignited, pouring in 30 points and helping to erase the 16-point deficit that the Tigers faced with 14 minutes to go. But Cornell won the game by a point with a jump shot in the closing seconds. That would be Princeton’s only Ivy League loss that magical season.

In the decade to come, Columbia fans who rooted for the home team in professional basketball would be glad to see Bradley on their side for a change. Later that year, he would be drafted by the New York Knickerbockers, where he became an integral part of two championship teams that put into beautiful practice coach Red Holtzman’s philosophy: defense, moving without the ball, and hitting the open man.

This Day in Basketball History (Future Knicks Bradley, Russell Meet in Holiday Tournament)

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.

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

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 1990s, 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!”)

This Day in Basketball History (Bernard Shows Nets He’s King of the Court)

December 25, 1984—Bernard King, dealt to the New York Knicks in a trade for another talented but troubled player, Micheal Ray Richardson, showed his former team the New Jersey Nets what they had passed up when he scored 60 pounds against them at Madison Square Garden. 

It all went for naught, however, as the Nets still managed to defeat the Knicks 120-114.

King’s achievement—a record for a single player at the Garden, not surpassed until recently by Kobe Bryant—capped a 2 1/2-year period when the 6-ft.-7-in. small forward became one of the unstoppable offensive forces of the game. 

He was a mission on a mission--not just to lead his team to a title, but to overcome the drug addiction and problems with the law that bedeviled him early in his NBA career.

King took care of the second, more personal issues, but the first part was beyond his control--especially when, a couple of months later against Kansas City, an injury ended his season and his dominance.

Between the great Red Holtzman era of the late Sixties and early Seventies and Pat Riley’s Patrick Ewing-led squad of the Nineties, the one bright spot was provided by King. His two full seasons prior to his record-setting Christmas Day explosion contained 20-point-per-game scoring averages, but that doesn’t really gauge his importance.

You really have to look to the playoffs, where King elevated his game—really, carried an otherwise mediocre team on his back—in epic showdowns against powerful opponents. 

In his first season, the Knicks lost in the second round to the eventual champion Philadelphia 76ers. 

In his second season, he prevailed over Isaiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons, overcoming fever and two dislocated fingers to pour in 44 points in helping New York capture Game 5 and the series. More amazingly, King forced a Game 7 against a far better balanced (Bird-McHale-Parrish-Johnson) Boston Celtics lineup before losing in Beantown.

By Christmas Day ’84, King was leading the league in scoring with a 32.9 ppg average. He poured in 40 points against the Nets by halftime in this game before Nets coach Stan Albeck decided that if he were going to be beat, it would have to be by someone else. To that end, King faced one different matchup after another in the second half, all designed to deny him the ball. 

It worked--or, at least, slowed him down. (The one Net who didn’t guard him was kid brother Albert King, then sidelined with an injury.)

Bernard’s own later knee injury meant that this explosive player never achieved the Hall of Fame status for which he seemed destined. It took him two years to rehab it, by which time the team brass decided that keeping their fingers crossed that the recovering King would mesh with their prized rookie Patrick Ewing wasn’t a feasible proposition. They released him in 1987. 

(Closing a circle, King finished his career--which included more than 19,000 regular-season points and countless TV highlights--with the team where he started: the Nets.)

On any short list of top moments at the Garden in the last 40 years, King’s ferocious Christmas Day performance would have to place high. No other Knick left as many what-ifs, or left you shaking your head so much asking, "Can you believe what he just did?"

This Day in Basketball History (Magic, Bird Duel in NCAA Tournament)

March 26, 1979—In what remains the most-watched NCAA final ever, Earvin (Magic) Johnson and Larry Bird gave a preview of their NBA duels over the next decade.

The game itself was anticlimactic, as Indiana State couldn’t compensate for the subpar performance of the double- and sometimes triple-teamed Bird and fell to the Magic-led Michigan State, 75-64. But with the much-ballyhooed show, “March Madness”—the winnowing down of NCAA tournament teams on “The Road to the Final Four”—took a giant step forward, the same way that the Super Bowl did with Joe Namath’s guarantee of victory did before the Jets’ contest with the Baltimore Colts.

Some years ago, after another championship with the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan produced much head-shaking when he referred to his teammates as “my supporting cast.” But the ancillary players were precisely the ones who made the difference in the Bird-Johnson final in ’79.

With Bird only connecting seven of 21 field-goal attempts, it was imperative that the rest of the previously undefeated Indiana State players step into the breach. But the next two highest ISU players only produced 27 points. Meanwhile, MSU—already benefiting from Johnson’s 24 points—received an additional boost from the combined 34 from teammates Greg Kelser and Terry Donnelly.

The self-styled “Hick From French Lick” was disconsolate in the lockerroom after the loss, dismayed as much by his inability to produce a victory for the ISU fans he had come to cherish as much as by his poor performance. Years later, this ultimate competitor still politely but firmly declined to discuss the defeat with reporters working on retrospectives—it still hurt too much to remember it all.

But Bird would have other days of glory, as would Magic, of course. Their arrival in the NBA in the coming year would be a godsend for a league suffering from perceptions that its stars were one-dimensional showboats who put their need to shoot before all else.

Bird and Magic revived, in all its glory, the concept of team basketball—the kind that Knick fans of a certain age such as myself still yearn for whenever we remember the mantra “Look for the open man” preached by Coach Red Holtzman.

In the new-look NBA for which Magic and Larry Legend helped to pave the way, one of the emblematic moments became Jordan’s willingness to pass up the chance to win the championship himself by flipping the ball instead to his wide-open teammate John Paxton. It’s the same style that the two future stars of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics were demonstrating in 1979. In other words, they were elevating the level of the game for their teammates.