The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Bradley’s optical endowments notwithstanding, Coach van Breda Kolff agrees with him that he is “not a great physical player,” and goes on to say, “Others can run faster and jump higher. The difference between Bill and other basketball players is self-discipline.” The two words that Bradley repeats most often when he talks about basketball are discipline and concentration, and through the exercise of both he has made himself an infectious example to younger players. “Concentrate!” he keeps shouting to himself when he is practicing on his own. His capacity for self-discipline is so large that it is almost funny. For example, he was a bit shocked when the Olympic basketball staff advised the Olympic basketball players to put in one hour of practice a day during the summer, because he was already putting in two hours a day—often in ninety-five-degree temperatures, with his feet squishing in sneakers that had become so wet that he sometimes skidded and crashed to the floor. His creed, which he picked up from Ed Macauley, is “When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win.” He also believes that the conquest of pain is essential to any seriously sustained athletic endeavor. In 1963, he dressed for a game against Harvard although he had a painful foot injury. Then, during the pregame warmup, it bothered him so much that he decided to give up, and he started for the bench. He changed his mind on the way, recalling that a doctor had told him that his foot, hurt the night before at Dartmouth, was badly bruised but was not in danger of further damage. If he had sat down, he says, he would have lowered his standards, for he believes that “there has never been a great athlete who did not know what pain is.” So he played the game. His heavily taped foot went numb during the first ten minutes, but his other faculties seemed to sharpen in response to the handicap. His faking quickened to make up for his reduced speed, and he scored thirty-two points, missing only five shots during the entire evening.

  “Ah, there you are, at last, Mrs. Jennings. Your

  horse got back at two-thirty, so we’ll only charge you till then.”

  How Bradley acquired these criteria and became a superstar is not what interests people in basketball. If they think about it at all, they wonder why he did it. “Where did this kid get his dedication?” Macauley asks. “Why did he decide to make the sacrifices?” The pattern of his life seems to provide an answer to the question, beginning with the fact that he used the sport as a way to get to know other boys, for he was an only child.

  Crystal City, which was once an active river port, now has a population of about four thousand, with a preponderance of Italians, Greeks, French, and Slavs, and a considerable proportion of Negroes. Its principal street, Mississippi Avenue, is paved with red brick and overhung with the limbs of oak and tulip trees. Although the town is fully incorporated, its people see it as a collection of unofficial subdivisions, various neighborhoods being known as Crystal Valley, Crystal Terrace, Crystal Heights, Old Town, Downtown, Crystal Village, and North Crystal. A stranger arriving at night and hearing talk of all these areas might well believe he was in a sprawling megalopolis. In reality, the town has a three-man police force; it has one factory, an enormous one that makes plate glass and that indirectly gave the town its name; and it has one bank president, and one bank president’s son.

  The Bradleys live on Taylor Avenue, behind picture windows that look out on the Grace Presbyterian Church, across the street, whose ample churchyard forms a kind of town common. Elsewhere in Crystal City, weeds sometimes grow at 45-degree angles out of the clefts where the streets meet the curbstones, and property owners tend to resign themselves to having brown lawns in summer, but in and around the churchyard everything is trim, immaculate, and green. When Warren Bradley, Bill’s father, goes to work in the morning, he walks halfway around the churchyard to the Crystal City State Bank, where, according to his wife, he “started out as a penny shiner” in 1921. His father had died in 1910, when he was nine, and he had been able to complete only one year at Crystal City High School before going to work, first as a ticket-seller for the Missouri & Illinois Railroad and later as a yard clerk for the Frisco Line. “The feel of money seemed to appeal to me,” he says in explaining his switchover to banking. Sixteen years after joining the bank, he became its president. In the meantime, he compensated for his abbreviated education by reading on his own, and although his son is a Rhodes Scholar, he is still the most incisive and articulate member of the family. He cares about politics with a studious passion and, ignoring the possible effect of his beliefs on his business, is a contentious Republican in a town full of Democrats. He is ordinarily a reserved man, and he has a soft voice, but when something worth reacting to comes along, he reacts, and often bluntly. Four years ago, when his son was under very heavy recruitment pressure from college coaches, Mr. Bradley was disturbed by all the attention his family was getting, because he didn’t think that basketball was that important. One day, a man walked into the Crystal City State Bank without an appointment and asked Mr. Bradley’s secretary to say that Adolph Rupp had come to call. Rupp, known throughout basketball as the Baron, has for thirty-five years been the coach at the University of Kentucky. He works more meticulously and expensively than any other coach, having movies taken at every practice, which he studies each morning as if he were John Huston going over the daily rushes. He once drove Artur Rubinstein out of his gym because the pianist, preparing for a concert, disturbed the concentration of the Kentucky Wildcats. He has won more than seven hundred games while losing only 145, and he once won three national championships in four years. Rupp still gets indignant when he remembers that Mr. Bradley was too busy to see him immediately. Rupp had to wait an hour and a half.

  Thanks to a noteworthy stamina of spirit, Mr. Bradley has overcome the inconveniences of having calcified arthritis of the lower spine, which has made him unable to bend over for nearly twenty-five years. He uses long wooden tweezers to pick up objects from the floor. He was almost forty when he married Susan Crowe, who was a graduate of Central College, in Fayette, Missouri, and was then teaching in a junior high school in St. Louis. She grew up near Herculaneum, a town a few miles up the river from Crystal City, and she played interscholastic basketball for Herculaneum High School—a bit of family history that amuses her son. She is five feet seven, and her husband is six feet one and a half. What Bill Bradley calls the luck of being the son of these parents arises from the marked differences in their personalities. If Mr. Bradley is a contemplative man with “an enlightened disinterest,” in his son’s words, in regard to athletic pinnacles, Mrs. Bradley is an outgoing and amiably competitive woman of immense dynamism. Her father, a coffee salesman, was a big, rough man who could bend spikes in his hands, could do six things at once, liked to tell jokes all night, and was proud of a mark on his forehead where a stallion had once bit him. Mrs. Bradley, who is full of high spirits herself, spends her life doing things for other people, except when she’s on the links at the Joachim Country Club. She says that she couldn’t care less who wins and who loses at any game, but she usually wins, and she has been club champion. Edward Rapp, the principal of the Crystal City High School, grew up with Mrs. Bradley and watched with interest as she raised her son. “Susie knew what kind of a son she wanted, and by dint of determination she has him,” Rapp says. She herself says, “I wanted a Christian upright citizen, and I thought the best way to begin was by promoting things that would interest a little boy.” She always had a busy program planned for him, full of golf lessons, swimming lessons, piano lessons, French lessons, trumpet lessons, dancing lessons, and tennis lessons.

  When Bradley went out on his own, he sometimes encountered attitudes that disconcerted him. The churchyard was a favorite site with boys in the town for pickup games of tackle football. Crossing the street with the idea of joining in, he would sometimes hear the other boys say something like “Oh, here comes the banker’s son,” in a tone that made it clear enough that they did not want him. “This was something that hurt me in a very personal way,” he says. “T
hey would not judge me for what I was.” In one form or another, the stigma of being the banker’s son remained with him for some years, and it made him feel that he had more of a need to prove himself than others did. He gradually became tolerated in the churchyard football games, whereupon he displayed another peculiarity, which no one really minded. All little boys playing tackle do so with the understanding that they are not really themselves but small and temporary incarnations of the greatest playing stars. The other boys in the churchyard would announce their names one by one, all of them claiming to be stalwarts of the University of Missouri or some other Midwestern school. Bradley, for his part, always told them that he was Dick Kazmaier, of Princeton, who in the early fifties won the Heisman Trophy as the outstanding college football player in the United States. Today, Bradley wears on his basketball uniform at Princeton the number 42, which is the number that Kazmaier used in football.

  Bradley first played basketball, in the Crystal City YMCA, when he was nine years old. “It was just for something to do,” he recalls. When his mother saw that he was interested in the game, she put a basket on the side of the garage so that he could play with his fellow Cub Scouts, to whom she was den mother. Each year, however, the seasonal fever for basketball had just begun to rise when it was time to go to Palm Beach. This was a recurrent frustration, for at the Palm Beach Private School, which he attended, soccer, fencing, and boxing were the major sports. When the school day ended at two, Bradley would hurry out past the limousines that were picking up his classmates, run back to the hotel where his parents stayed, go to his room, and reach under his bed for his basketball—an odd item to take along on a trip to Florida. With a series of tympanic thumps, he would dribble out of the room, across the lobby and the street, and along the sidewalks, under the columnar palms. There was a public schoolyard several blocks away with a basket in it, and he played there every day. Now and then, a few tatterdemalions from West Palm Beach came to the playground, and he befriended them eagerly. “Basketball was a way to get to know guys,” he says. But usually he was alone. This, as much as any place, was where the fundamental narcotic of basketball entered his system. He can remember quite vividly how he felt about the game and about himself as he played it, and once, when I asked him about it, he closed his eyes and said, “What attracted me was the sound of the swish, the sound of the dribble, the feel of going up in the air. You don’t need eight others, like in baseball. You don’t need any brothers or sisters. Just you. I wonder what the guys are doing back home. I’d like to be there, but it’s as much fun here, because I’m playing. It’s getting dark. I have to go back for dinner. I’ll shoot a couple more. Feels good. A couple more.”

  Toward the end of seventh grade, Bill told his father he wanted to stay in Crystal City in future winters, and his father consented. The Bradley house then became the community center, for Bill had things that the other boys didn’t have—television in his bedroom, for example, and a pinball machine in the basement. On the inside of his bedroom door he had a basketball net, and when the weather was bad outdoors he would get down on his knees—he was six feet three when he was in the eighth grade—and play against boys his own age, two at a time. Conditions outside had to be pretty unsavory before that happened, though; he and his friends played around the outdoor basket in gloves, if necessary, and at night, under floodlights. Gradually, Bradley’s backyard evolved into a basketball court nearly as good as Princeton’s. “Our yard wasn’t for the purpose of raising grass,” his father recalls. “There was no grass in it at all.” This was because they had a macadam surface put over it, flat and smooth, around the steel pole supporting a fan-shaped backboard, whose hoop was exactly ten feet above the ground. There must be at least five million backyard baskets in the United States, yet it is possible to search through a whole community without finding more than half a dozen at the regulation height.

  Bradley’s high school basketball coach, Arvel Popp (pronounced “Pope”), says that he began cultivating Bradley when the boy was still in grade school. What Popp was mainly cultivating, however, was a football player, because at that time, at least, he was a football coach first and a basketball coach second. Before Bradley reached high school age, Popp told him, “I’m going to make you into the finest end who ever played for the University of Missouri.” Bradley therefore incurred double jeopardy when, entering high school, he showed no interest in football. He had to do what he could to dispel gossip that he was chicken, and he had to prove himself as a basketball player to Coach Popp, for Popp was not interested in having boys on his basketball team who didn’t play football.

  If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker’s son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother’s championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym and set a schedule for himself that he adhered to for four full years—in the school year, three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day. He put ten pounds of lead slivers in his sneakers, set up chairs as opponents and dribbled in slalom fashion around them, and wore eyeglass frames that had a piece of cardboard taped to them so that he could not see the floor, for a good dribbler never looks at the ball. Aboard the Queen Elizabeth on a trip to Europe one summer, he found that the two longitudinal corridors on C Deck, Tourist Class, were each about 450 feet long, making nine hundred feet in all, or ten times the length of a basketball floor. This submarine palaestra became the world’s finest training area in two respects. It was not only the longest gym on earth, it was also the narrowest, measuring forty-eight inches across. The width was ideal for the practice of dribbling, since it tended to bunch the opposition, or fellow passengers, who got used to hearing the approaching thump-thump of the basketball, and to seeing what appeared to be a six-foot-five-inch lunatic come bearing down upon them with a device on his face that cut off much of his vision.

  Coach Popp, as it turned out, was less inflexible than his reputation suggested. After his varsity basketball team lost its first four games, he decided to put a freshman—Bradley—in his lineup, for the second time ever, and after that the Crystal City Hornets won sixteen out of twenty-one. The older boys on the team resented Bradley’s presence a little, and were also suspicious of him, because he would sometimes use the waiting time in the locker room before a game to bring out a textbook and study. They passed to him fairly infrequently in that first year, but, largely as a result of vacuuming rebounds, he averaged twenty points a game. The resentment arose from the natural tendency of high school boys to give a great deal of importance to seniority, and by his third year it was gone. Once an anomaly, he was now a model. One of his teammates of those years, Sam La Presta, has recalled, “Bill did what he did by hard work. Everyone looked up to him. He was sort of inspirational. Basketball was one-millionth of what he had to offer.”

  At Princeton, Bradley has become such an excellent basketball player that it is necessary to look beyond college basketball to find a standard that will put him in perspective. The standard’s name is Oscar Robertson, of the Cincinnati Royals, who is the finest basketball player yet developed. He is five years older than Bradley, and now that Bradley is leaving basketball, the question of who would ultimately have been the better player will not be answered. Robertson, who is known in basketball as the O, stands out among all professionals for the same reason that Bradley stands out among all amateurs. Other players have certain individual skills that are sharper, but Bradley and Robertson are brilliant in every aspect of the game. To make a detailed comparison between Bradley and Robertson as they are now, Robertson is a better rebounder and a better defensive player, notwithstanding the defensive performance that Bradley gave in an exhibition game last fa
ll between the Olympic team and the Royals, when he held Robertson to eleven points. Bradley is as good a passer as Robertson, and they are about even in dribbling, too. Going hard for the basket, Robertson is a better driver. “When I watch Robertson,” Bradley says, “I just stand with my mouth wide open. There are so many things he does that I could never do in a hundred years. I could never feel confident, the way he can, that I could shoot jump shots against anybody at all. He’s the best basketball player alive.” Bradley adds that one of the big differences between his abilities and Robertson’s is that the O has better body control and is more deceptive when he moves. Bradley, for his part, has a greater variety of shots than Robertson, and is, in general, a more accurate shooter. As Bradley notes, however, he doesn’t have the same jump shot. Bradley is merely outstanding with his jumper. But no one has a jump shot like Robertson’s—frozen in the air, with his back arched and his hands behind his head, where the ball is totally protected until he sends it into the basket. Bradley’s jump shot is released, more conventionally, from just above his head. The O’s jump shot is literally “unstoppable”—the most intoxicating adjective in basketball. If Bradley does enough shooting this year, he may become the second-highest scorer in the records of college basketball, but he will still be nearly five hundred points under the final count that Robertson left behind him at the University of Cincinnati. Robertson and his Royals teammate Jerry Lucas, who played for Ohio State, are the only two basketball players who have been included on the Sporting News All-American team, which is picked by the professional scouts, in all three of their college basketball seasons. This year, barring the unforeseen, Bradley will become the third. Among Bradley’s Olympic teammates was UCLA’s Walt Hazzard, now a Los Angeles Laker, who, like Robertson, is a Negro, and he passed along to Bradley a compliment of unforgettable magnitude. “Where I come from,” Hazzard told Bradley, “you are known as the White O.”