The legend of Bill Bradley was born here when the tall, angular boy of 14, the ever-proper Eagle Scout, the one who seemed to spring from the wholesome pages of Boys Life, walked into the high school gym.
Three hours every weekday–and eight on Saturday, five on Sunday–on the varnished wood of the basketball court, he engaged in a solitary, almost obsessive ritual. He dribbled around chairs, wearing glasses with cardboard taped to the bottom to limit vision. He placed lead in his shoes to improve jumping. He practiced pivoting and shooting, always shooting.
No session ended until he had made at least 10 of 13 shots from designated spots around the basket. In the retelling, the number sometimes grew to 25 straight.
Probably no child in this small Mississippi River town 37 miles south of St. Louis had shown so much dedication about anything. While other kids did whatever teenagers did in those feel-good Eisenhower years, Bradley, with a Calvinist bent for self-denial, found pleasure in the arduous.
“By the time I was 14, I had become self-motivated,” Bradley wrote in “Life on the Run,” his memoir about life in professional basketball. “Whatever raced inside me was more demanding than any pressure applied by parents or teachers.”
Whatever raced inside him also paid off. By his senior year in high school, the young man wearing No. 52 on his cream and crimson jersey averaged 38 points a game, earning All-America honors, leading his small-school team to the state finals.
He flourished off the court too, winning election as president of the Missouri Student Councils Association. To his mother’s delight, he delivered an outspoken sermon at Grace Presbyterian Church that left many in even greater admiration of this almost painfully upright young man.
All the while, as the expectations for him grew, he never wilted under the collective weight. As a writer once put it, he really was the son his mother thought him to be.
Since his teenage years, William Warren Bradley has lived with the burdens of celebrity and expectation, more than 40 years of maintenance of the American hero legend.
He has dealt with those burdens through exhaustive preparation and tightly wound control. Through one lens, he can be seen as a model of discipline and sacrifice; through another, as distant and self-righteous.
Though people talked openly about the young man someday holding high elective office, Bradley almost never did. Little League teammate Eddie Evans recalls, however, walking down Mississippi Avenue when a 12-year-old Bradley turned to him and said, “One of these days I am going to become president of the United States.”
“I said, `You’ve got to be kidding. Forget about that,’ ” Evans said. “He said, `You watch me.’ This kept burning in my brain–maybe this guy is serious.”
Bradley is nothing if not serious. His is a carefully edited life in a tell-all age, revealing only when he controls the storytelling. To his many questioners over the years, he consciously has tried to be uninteresting.
Ask Bradley a personal question and his body language implies that you have entered a forbidden zone. Some find the quality off-putting, leading them to question whether he can maintain such a perch in a modern presidential campaign. For Bradley, pursuing the presidency provides the ultimate test of his capacity for preparation and control.
Bradley has chosen to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination when it is at its most difficult to obtain, taking on an incumbent vice president who has the support of the president and the party establishment. The nomination might have been Bradley’s for the taking in 1988 and 1992, but he kept saying an inner voice told him the time was not right.
His life has been marked by such confounding moves. Instead of attending Duke University on a basketball scholarship, Bradley chose Princeton, which did not offer athletic scholarships. He went on to lead the U.S. Olympic basketball team to a gold medal in the 1964 Olympics and Princeton to the NCAA Final Four. A fabulous shooter, Bradley often had to be ordered by his coach to score. He bypassed an instant NBA career in favor of a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University, reading Camus instead of competing against Jerry West.
After Oxford, he spurned advice to become a lawyer and went on to play for 10 years with the New York Knicks, helping the team win two NBA titles. While others cashed in on their fame, Bradley refused to endorse products. He initially was attracted to his wife, Ernestine, friends say, because she did not know who he was.
When his basketball career ended, he rejected advice to run for a lesser office in Missouri in favor of a U.S. Senate seat in his adopted state, New Jersey. As a basketball player, Bradley was known for teamwork. In politics, some consider him a loner.
He has lived with the duality of at once being famous and trying to live outside his fame, even as a presidential candidate. While other candidates release private, revealing letters, Bradley refuses to allow access to even the official papers that cover his life as a professional basketball player and a U.S. senator.
Living under the glare of celebrity in ways to which few can relate, he has for decades been lionized in magazines, newspapers and books, even in a U.S. government-commissioned Cold War propaganda film.
While others have defined him throughout his life, Bradley now is trying to define himself on the largest possible stage.
“I never allowed other people’s expectations to determine whatever course I took,” Bradley said in an interview. “I had to reach a decision about what I was going to do based on what I felt inside myself.
“I am also somebody who can imagine life being whole in many different careers, so I run with wanting to run a certain way, knowing that I can win, but also knowing life will be rich whatever happens. . . . I’ve never allowed my political life, or my life as a basketball player, to define the totality of my humanity or my personality.”
A small-town boy
Bradley says he was shaped by his boyhood in Crystal City, then a one-stoplight town of 3,492 named for the silica sands in its hills, used to make glass in the now-shuttered Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. factory.
Its social and economic circles revolved around the company’s fortunes, and the Bradley family was prominent in both. Warren Bradley, the president of the Crystal City Bank, cashed the workers’ checks and kept their deposits.
The Bradleys lived in a well-tended stone house the son inherited after his parents’ death in the mid-1990s. It is maintained almost as a shrine, from the basketball backboard in the back yard to the yard plaque that still bears his father’s name.
Though Bradley hasn’t lived in Crystal City since he was a teenager, he remains its favorite son. By the hundreds, residents turned out this fall to watch him formally launch his campaign, a nostalgic moment for many.
“It wouldn’t take you long if you were around him to know that he was presidential material and has been since he was a young boy,” said former neighbor June Leon. “All through my life, I told my kids what they could be if they could be like Bill Bradley–morally clean–and to live like Bill did.”
Across from his boyhood home is the Grace Presbyterian Church, which Bradley attended. Two blocks away stands the bank where his father rose from “shining pennies” to become the majority shareholder.
Warren Bradley lived by the credo “moderation in all things,” a disciplined, contemplative sort. He had dropped out of high school to help support his mother and as an adult suffered from calcified arthritis of the lower spine. The disease limited his ability to walk, tie his shoes or drive.
The son who would make his living through athletics had a father who couldn’t throw him a ball.
The father was a moderate, pro-business Thomas Dewey-Dwight Eisenhower Republican. Until college, Bill Bradley was Warren’s son politically, supporting Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. His views today are largely centrist, though on issues such as national health care and gun control he is decidedly liberal. Bradley said he became a Democrat when, as a Senate intern in 1964, he saw the Democrat-controlled Congress pass historic civil rights legislation. Yet that summer he supported the presidential bid of William Scranton, a moderate Republican governor from Pennsylvania.
A committed mother
Susie Bradley was the opposite of her taciturn husband, all energy and commitment, an avid golfer and a devout Christian who took her son to tent revivals and limited his idle time. She furnished him with lessons in everything from the French horn to boxing. She created a social life for him with parties in the family basement, prodding him to an unyielding sense of performance and obligation.
She refused to allow him to think he was special. If there was a backyard race and Bradley won, she would say, “You didn’t win, Bill. The other kids won too–you just happen to have longer legs,” said Bradley’s aunt, Hardeman Bond.
“I think the training he received from childhood up was that he wasn’t the most important kid in the backyard,” said Bond, “that he had to be considerate of the little kid.”
At the same time, Bond said, Susie Bradley quietly built enormous scrapbooks documenting her son’s success.
The Bradleys weren’t showy with their money, though young Bill had a television in his room and an arcade-quality pinball machine in his basement.
Bradley also was influenced by Alex Maul, a black handyman and bank janitor who worked for the family. Because of Warren Bradley’s disability, Maul carried Bill home from the hospital as a newborn. He helped put up the basketball net in the back yard, and he taught him how to box. The Crystal City of Bradley’s youth, much like the Crystal City of today, was largely segregated, and blacks did not hold positions of prominence.
The Little League was racially integrated before the school system was. Evans was the team’s catcher and one of Bradley’s friends. When their team traveled to Joplin to play in a tournament in the early 1950s, the hotel owner refused Evans a room. Evans said Bradley’s mother confronted the hotel owner and eventually the team found a place to stay.
They went to a restaurant where Evans was refused service. The team walked out. “Bill said, `You know, we could go to the store and get balogna, salami and cheese and still beat this team tonight,’ ” Evans said.
Seventy-five schools had offered Bradley an athletic scholarship. After initially choosing Duke for its blend of academics and athletics, he announced he would attend Princeton, his father’s choice, just four days before classes were to begin.
Another layer was added to the legend: The athlete who could have gone anywhere chose a college that didn’t offer sports scholarships.
At Princeton, Bradley’s light shone on the basketball court but not in the classroom. He struggled with academics, but came to be regarded as a good student, though not an intellectual.
Practice, practice, practice
His fame increased as he led the once-lowly Tigers against the nation’s best teams.
“He probably practiced 100 hours for every one I practiced in my life,” said John Ritch, who played against Bradley while attending West Point. “He knew something that was not well understood by people of that time–that your ability is directly proportional to the number of hours you spend training. Bradley came better prepared than anyone else.”
The legend was nourished during Bradley’s senior year when John McPhee, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, wrote a book-length account of the Princeton star, entitled “A Sense of Where You Are,” drawn from Bradley’s almost preternatural description of how he could make a basket without looking at the goal.
“He’s always working, preparing himself, not wasting a minute, making everything count,” said McPhee, who has remained a friend.
Bradley calls his decision to go to Princeton “the turning point of my life.”
“Princeton ignited my intellectual curiosity and introduced me to a new social world,” he said. “It . . . challenged me on the most fundamental levels imaginable. It was where I became a man.”
At Princeton, Bradley developed a world view in the tradition of the university’s former president, Woodrow Wilson. Alone among recent presidential contenders, Bradley today puts Wilson on a list of his favorite occupants of the White House.
Princeton also provided him an important part of a personal network that serves his presidential ambitions in fundraising and campaign staffing.
After his senior year, the New York Knicks drafted Bradley for what would likely have been instant wealth and stardom in professional basketball. But Bradley chose a different path, deciding instead to study for two years overseas.
Cecil Rhodes, the benefactor of the Rhodes scholarship, outlined an imposing set of qualifications for future scholars at Oxford, citing “literary and scholastic achievement, fondness for and success in sports, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak . . . and moral force of character and instincts to lead.”
Of the 32 American men who sailed on the Queen Mary in October 1965, none matched that description as well as Bradley.
His classmates all had lived with their own version of great expectations; indeed, a fair number of them thought of themselves as potential presidents. As they became acquainted during the trans-Atlantic trip, Bradley made an impression by trying not to stand out. When they received word that the British press was waiting at the dock to interview the American basketball star, Bradley and Jack Horton concocted a plan, exploiting a British ignorance of basketball. The 5-foot-11 Horton would carry his lacrosse stick, calling it a “basketball stick,” and pass himself off as Bradley.
It worked, with Bradley standing in the background laughing with the others.
Freedom from celebrity
One of the great appeals of the Rhodes experience for Bradley was that his celebrity was a much-devalued currency on Cornmarket Street. He gravitated to classmates from other countries less likely to know of him. “I think he was pleased to make friendships that were not among the crowd seeing him through the prism of the myth,” said Ritch, now the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
At the same time, he maintained a wall of reserve between himself and most of his classmates, appearing friendly enough but always asking more questions–like a journalist seeking biographical information–than revealing himself.
“In those days, it took time to know Bill,” said Michael Smith, his Oxford roommate and now a lawyer in Madison, Wis. “He was a pretty well-defended guy.
“It was a time for self-discovery,” Smith said. “In Bill’s case, he had something he hadn’t had before. It wasn’t perfect, but there was a tremendous release from scrutiny and expectation and observation.”
For the most part, he didn’t change. He answered every letter sent him from the U.S. He studied hard, reading dense books on management, economics and politics.
“I always wondered whether part of his sort of being intellectual was in part a reaction to his being a basketball player,” said Ben Heineman, a Chicago native and now general counsel for General Electric. “That was not the pure identity that he really wanted. He really wanted to be seen as a different person.”
Bradley could not completely escape his celebrity. At one point, a magazine published a picture of Bradley holding a glass of sherry with a professor.
“After that, Bradley got a whole bunch of letters, people saying, `You used to be my hero,’ ” said Tim Londergan, now a physics professor at Indiana University, ” `Now I see you drinking alcohol. You lost my support.’ To me it was just an indication of how much a public figure he was and we weren’t. We could do anything we wanted. Everything he did was scrutinized.”
Return to basketball
Basketball eventually played a role in Bradley’s Oxford life. He joined a professional team in Milan and toured throughout Europe. He also traveled with classmates, going to Russia, West Germany, Poland and the Middle East.
They were at Oxford during the roiling Vietnam era. The Rhodes class, perhaps out of an inflated sense of its importance, vigorously debated what role its members could play in shaping U.S. policy. They decided to write a letter protesting U.S. involvement.
Only a handful, Bradley among them, did not sign the letter.
Heineman, one of the principal drafters of the letter, said he thought Bradley was torn. “I think he had a general agreement with it, but he had some other personal issues none of us had, like being offered the biggest contract in pro history or getting in the reserves and having a good solution to the draft problem,” he said. “. . . None of us were putting ourselves at risk for writing a responsible letter.”
Dan O’Flaherty, now vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council in Washington, recalled Bradley saying to him, “Look, you know, I’ve got advice from people I have been talking to back in the States that it was not a good idea to sign this letter.”
Ultimately, Bradley served in the Air Force reserves, drawing praise from his commanding officers for his diligence in reporting for duty, even when it required taking a red-eye flight from the West Coast during his years with the Knicks.
Though Bradley was famous, he was not outwardly political, showing none of the glad-handing tendencies of another Rhodes scholar, Bill Clinton, whose term at Oxford followed Bradley’s.
Brian Fay, a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University in Middleton, Conn., stayed on an extra year at Oxford and was friends of both men.
“They were so different from one another,” said Fay. “Bill Bradley is a much more private person. He doesn’t reveal lots about himself easily. He has a very high degree of self-reflection. He thinks about who he is and what he’s doing and the ambiguities of things.
“With Clinton . . . he was literally running for president in 1968. . . . The one thing about Bill Bradley is, he always struck me as a person you could trust. He was a person of integrity in a way that you never felt about Bill Clinton.”
`His own compass’
As Bradley completed his work at Oxford, McPhee and others counseled him to choose law school over professional basketball. McPhee now cites Bradley’s rejection of that advice as evidence of his ability to defy what others expect from him.
Bradley’s sense of place proved correct again. “I think he learned more traveling around the United States for 10 years, both within the team and in the other things that he did. He learned a whole lot that prepares him for his run today,” McPhee said. “He has his own compass.”
During his rookie season, the U.S. government added its own chapter to the Bradley legend when the United States Information Agency commissioned a documentary about Bradley’s life. The work, entitled “Old Young Man,” portrayed Bradley as an earnest, youthful hero, depicting his struggles as a NBA rookie, his work with underprivileged children in Harlem and his varied interests.
Phil Jackson, his teammate and former Chicago Bulls coach, remembers Bradley coming to the Knicks as a 24-year-old rookie hailed as the franchise’s savior. Bradley alternately played poorly and well that season, averaging 8.4 points a game. “But more than a player, he carried a certain sense of being his own person,” Jackson said.
Bradley handled the aggressive New York press by deliberately being boring and unquotable. He chose to tell his own story in “Life on the Run.” He said his travels “provided me with a frame through which I saw America and myself.”
Jackson and Bradley became close friends. After their rookie year, Jackson asked Bradley to North Dakota to speak at a banquet. Before that event, Bradley attended a Fellowship of Christian Athletes dinner. For years, Bradley had been an FCA member and had agreed with the group’s approach to faith.
At the FCA meeting, instead of talking openly about his Christian convictions, as the audience expected, Bradley talked about the need to keep his religion private. “He said this was one of the areas of his life (where) he had made a change and he decidedly believed that personal convictions should remain there,” said Jackson, a minister’s son.
During his presidential campaign, Bradley again has refused to discuss his faith. In his latest memoir, “Time Present, Time Past,” he wrote that by high school he had realized that “with hard work, complete self-control, and careful study would I even have a chance of coming closer to the distant God that ruled the universe.”
He wrote that fundamentalism “appeared to be less a God-centered existence than a man-ordered set of demands.”
“I seek my own individual faith. Man’s purpose, I believe, is to glorify God not in an overly pious way or in a socially self-conscious way, or in a naive or rigid way.”
NBA as classroom
During Bradley’s time with the Knicks he continued his habit of exploring cities, continually wandering into neighborhoods, asking people to “tell me your story.”
One involves Chicago lawyer Bob Kelman, who met Bradley at a party in Chicago hosted by another of Bradley’s classmates, Chicago lawyer John Gearen. Bradley was told that Kelman was an accomplished rock ‘n’ roll musician who had succeeded by traditional measures, but was leftwith doubt for not chasing his dream.
Bradley uses that story today to help explain why he returned to basketball after Oxford.
“The point he’s trying to make is that he followed his heart, played basketball and he’s glad he did it,” Kelman said.
The NBA experience added to Bradley’s views about race. He was living and working with blacks who not only were more talented than he, but had entirely different life experiences.
“I can remember him specifically talking to all of the kids who would come on the team, their life, how they got there, what racial problems they faced,” Jackson said. “He had a specific curiosity with that.”
“I’m sure he learned more from Walt Frazier than he did from us,” said Richard Sorenson, another former Oxford classmate.
Bradley also maintained a circle of friends outside of basketball.
Smith, the Oxford roommate who later lived in New York, remembers Bradley’s apartment as cluttered with “stacks of government publications about rather obscure policy matters.”
Despite Bradley’s schedule, Smith said, he always found time for him, at one point helping him through a divorce. “I never had a better friend,” Smith said.
Near the end of his basketball career, Bradley married Ernestine Schlant, a native of Germany and a professor, who had one quality few other women in New York possessed.
“The defining characteristic of Ernestine is that she didn’t have the faintest idea who he was,” Ritch said. “She’s a very smart and very attractive person, but she had that extra attractive dimension, someone he was dealing with totally out of the context of the myth so they could have a genuine love affair.”
Bradley traveled widely in the offseason and immersed himself in issues ranging from prison reform to the emerging cable television industry. Near the end of his playing career, Bradley took polls in Missouri and New Jersey to test his political viability, and he subsequently made his first bid for elective office a seat in the U.S. Senate instead of a lower office.
His first campaign
Bradley’s Republican opponent was Jeff Bell, who ran on an anti-tax platform. By all accounts, Bradley started out as a dreadful campaigner who improved over time. He won convincingly. Bell today has only praise for Bradley and even became an informal adviser on tax reform for him during the early 1980s.
Even among the vaunted collection of egos in the Senate, Bradley arrived with standing. But, as he had done at other moments in this life, he avoided attracting attention, particularly any associated with basketball.
Instead, he threw himself into often arcane issues: tax reform, international debt relief and water in California. The senator who could have been the show horse instead became a workhorse.
Adlai Stevenson III, the former senator from Illinois and a Bradley supporter, met him shortly after Bradley’s election to the Senate in 1978. “I noticed him gravitating to the big issues, even though they weren’t always the most trendy,” Stevenson said.
During his Senate years, Bradley gained the most attention for his work on tax reform. He voted for the Reagan budget cuts in 1981 after his own efforts at tax reform failed. He spent the next several years researching the tax code.
Bradley now takes considerable credit for the tax reform act of 1986 and clearly he played a part. But some who were in positions of far greater authority say he was more a role player than a leader.
Private tragedies
While Bradley assumed a larger political profile, he was also dealing with private tragedies. One of his fellow Rhodes scholars, James Markham, the Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, committed suicide. Smith called Bradley and told him he had to come to New York to help console Markham’s 14-year-old son, Samuel. “I said, `This kid needs you,’ ” Smith said. “And he flew up.
“In the course of sizing up where this kid was at that moment in his life, he figured out he was a passionate soccer player and soccer fan. (Later), he pulled me aside and said, `You’ve got to take this kid to Italy for the World Cup.’ I said, `Let this cup pass from me.’ He said, `You are going to take him to Italy. . . . I will get the tickets. I will talk to Kissinger and get tickets.’ And so he did.”
Smith, his wife and the grieving Samuel went to Italy. “It was exactly right,” Smith said. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me. Bill knew that if (Samuel) was going to get relief in this world, it would be by indulging his passion for soccer.”
Bradley also played the role of single parent during part of his Senate career, when daughter Theresa Anne came to live with him in the mid-1980s while her mother, a college professor in New Jersey, would join them on the weekends. Only recently has he talked about this experience, and overall he has worked to shield his daughter from the spotlight.
Throughout his Senate career, his stature within the party grew, but his string of political victories almost ended in 1990 when a then little-known Republican, Christine Todd Whitman, nearly defeated him.
Voters were angry at him for not speaking out against a proposed tax increase by then New Jersey Gov. James Florio, a fellow Democrat.
The narrowness of Bradley’s victory over Whitman showed a rare vulnerability. He replaced most of his staff and tried to reconnect with voters, focusing more on concerns closer to home.
He considered running for president in 1992, but demurred, as he had in 1988, saying the time was not right. It was fortuitous because in that spring, Ernestine was diagnosed with breast cancer. Bradley poured himself into taking care of her, choosing doctors, reviewing treatments and tending to her. She is now considered in complete remission.
Goodbye to the Senate
After passing up a presidential run in 1992, many thought that Bradley had given up on the White House. Three years later he stunned the political world by announcing his retirement, declaring the political system broken. Some who know him well said they instantly recognized that Bradley was unofficially declaring his White House run.
“I knew the day he resigned from the Senate exactly what was happening, not from him but from knowing him, that he would put together an insurgency against a Gore coronation,” Ritch said.
Bradley considered running as an independent but dismissed the idea as unworkable.
Bradley spent his years out of the Senate teaching public policy at Stanford, Notre Dame and Maryland, building the infrastructure for a presidential bid at the same time. He also made money, raking in millions in speaking and consulting fees. Bradley also owns interests in property in Greece, Nova Scotia, New Jersey, Palm Beach, Crystal City and Washington, D.C. The banker’s son is financially secure.
For his presidential bid, he conferred with long-time supporter Lou Susman, a Chicago-based financial services executive who has known Bradley since the early 1970s.
Susman outlined how Bradley might raise $25 million in 1999, a stunning figure considering Gore’s institutional advantages. Eventually, Bradley raised $27 million, allowing his insurgent campaign to compete.
Bradley’s campaign has followed his life’s pattern, doing the expected in an unexpected way. He started slowly, talking to voters in small groups, refusing to outline positions while others offered 10-point plans. He refused to talk about differences between him and Gore, the better to maintain the mantle of the different kind of politician.
Few thought Bradley would get this far. And though his endorsements from other elected officials are few–New Jersey’s entire Democratic congressional delegation backs Gore–Bradley’s life suggests a danger in underestimating him.
His campaign has recently started to frame the race against Gore in subtle ways, as a question of trust. Such a move will invite greater scrutiny of Bradley, and again test the hero legend.
Rep. William Lipinski, the craftily conservative Democrat from Chicago’s Southwest Side, decided Bradley was worth the risk of an endorsement. He doesn’t think Gore is electable, in part because he believes Clinton squandered people’s trust.
He and Bradley share few positions, but Lipinski has given Bradley his support.
“I believe Bill Bradley,” Lipinski said. “I trust the man. There are not an awful lot of people in politics I trust.”
