With all his analyses of its mechanics, Bradley may have broken his game down into its components, but he has reassembled it so seamlessly that all the parts, and also his thousands of hours of practice, are concealed. He is as fluidly graceful as any basketball player I have ever seen. Quite apart from the excitement produced by the scoreboard, a spectator cannot help feeling a considerable elation as he watches Bradley accomplish his fakes and moves and shots. He does it all with a floating economy of motion and a beguiling offhandedness that appeal to the imagination. Many basketball players, outstanding ones included, have a tendency to be rather tastelessly rococo in their style, and Bradley stands out in contrast to them because he adorns nothing that he does. When a game is won beyond doubt, and Bradley leaves the court with three or four minutes to go, the coach of the opposing team has sometimes halted play to walk down to the Princeton bench and shake his hand. The coach doesn’t do this just because Bradley has scored thirty-five or forty points but because he has done it so uncompromisingly well.
This season, in the course of a tournament held during the week after Christmas, Bradley took part in a game that followed extraordinarily the pattern of his game against St. Joseph’s. Because the stakes were higher, it was a sort of St. Joseph’s game to the third power. Whereas St. Joseph’s had been the best team in the East, Princeton’s opponent this time was Michigan, the team that the Associated Press and the United Press International had rated as the best college team of all. The chance to face Michigan represented to Bradley the supreme test of his capability as a basketball player. As he saw it, any outstanding player naturally hopes to be a member of the country’s No. 1 team, but if that never happens, the next-best thing is to be tested against the No. 1 team. And the Michigan situation seemed even more important to him because, tending as he sometimes does to question his own worth, he was uncomfortably conscious that a committee had picked him for the Olympic team, various committees had awarded him his status as an All-American, and, for that matter, committees had elected him a Rhodes Scholar. Michigan, he felt, would provide an exact measurement of him as an athlete. The height of the Michigan players averages six feet five, and nearly every one of them weighs over two hundred pounds. Smoothly experienced, both as individuals and as a coordinated group, they have the appearance, the manner, and the assurance of a professional team. One of them, moreover, is Cazzie Russell, who, like Bradley, was a consensus All-American last year. For a couple of days before the game, the sports pages of the New York newspapers were crammed with headlines, articles, and even cartoons comparing Bradley and Russell, asking which was the better player, and looking toward what one paper called the most momentous individual confrontation in ten years of basketball. One additional factor—something that meant relatively little to Bradley—was that the game was to be played in Madison Square Garden. Bradley had never played in the Garden, but, because he mistrusts metropolitan standards, he refused to concede that the mere location of the coming test meant anything at all. When a reporter asked him how he felt about appearing there, he replied, “It’s just like any other place. The baskets are ten feet high.”
Bradley now says that he prepared for the Michigan game as he had prepared for no other. He slept for twelve hours, getting up at noon. Then, deliberately, he read the New York newspapers and absorbed the excited prose which might have been announcing a prizefight: FESTIVAL DUEL: BILL BRADLEY VS. CAZZIE RUSSELL…CAZZIE—BRADLEY: KEY TEST…BRADLEY OR CAZZIE? SHOWDOWN AT HAND…BILL BRADLEY OF PRINCETON MEETS CAZZIE RUSSELL OF MICHIGAN TONIGHT AT THE GARDEN!! This exposure to the newspapers had the effect he wanted; he developed chills, signifying a growing stimulation within him. During most of the afternoon, when any other player in his situation would probably have been watching television, shooting pool, or playing Ping-Pong or poker—anything to divert the mind—Bradley sat alone and concentrated on the coming game, on the components of his own play, and on the importance to him and his team of what would occur. As much as anything, he wanted to prove that an Ivy League team could be as good as any other team. Although no newspaper gave Princeton even the slightest chance of winning, Bradley did not just hope to do well himself—he intended that Princeton should win.
Just before he went onto the court, Bradley scrubbed his hands with soap and water, as he always does before a game, to remove any accumulated skin oil and thus increase the friction between his fingers and the ball. When the game was forty-two seconds old, he hit a jump shot and instantly decided, with a rush of complete assurance of a kind that sometimes comes over an athlete in action, that a victory was not only possible but probable. Michigan played him straight, and he played Michigan into the floor. The performance he delivered had all the depth and variation of theoretical basketball, each move being perfectly executed against able opposition. He stole the ball, he went backdoor, he threw unbelievable passes. He reversed away from the best defenders in the Big Ten. He held his own man to one point. He played in the backcourt, in the post, and in the corners. He made long set shots, and hit jump shots from points so far behind the basket that he had to start them from arm’s length in order to clear the backboard. He tried a hook shot on the dead run and hit that, too. Once, he found himself in a corner of the court with two Michigan players, both taller than he, pressing in on him shoulder to shoulder. He parted them with two rapid fakes—a move of the ball and a move of his head—and leaped up between them to sink a twenty-two-foot jumper. The same two players soon cornered him again. The fakes were different the second time, but the result was the same. He took a long stride between them and went up into the air, drifting forward, as they collided behind him, and he hit a clean shot despite the drift. Bradley, playing at the top of his game, drew his teammates up to the best performances they could give, too, and the Princeton team as a whole outplayed Michigan. The game, as it had developed, wasn’t going to be just a close and miraculous Princeton victory, it was going to be a rout. But, with Princeton twelve points ahead, Bradley, in the exuberance of sensing victory, made the mistake of playing close defense when he did not need to, and when he was too tired to do it well. He committed his fifth personal foul with four minutes and thirty-seven seconds to go, and had to watch the end of the game from the bench. As he sat down, the twenty thousand spectators stood up and applauded him for some three minutes. It was, as the sportswriters and the Garden management subsequently agreed, the most clamorous ovation ever given a basketball player, amateur or professional, in Madison Square Garden. Bradley’s duel with Russell had long since become incidental. Russell scored twenty-seven points and showed his All-American caliber but during the long applause the announcer on the Garden loudspeakers impulsively turned up the volume and said, “Bill Bradley, one of the greatest players ever to play in Madison Square Garden, scored forty-one points.” Bradley had ratified his reputation—not through his point total nearly so much as through his total play. After he left the court—joining two of his teammates who had also fouled out—Michigan overran Princeton, and won the game by one basket. Bradley ultimately was given the trophy awarded to the most valuable player in the tournament, but his individual recognition meant next to nothing to him at the time, because of Princeton’s defeat. It had become fully apparent, however, that Bradley would be remembered as one of basketball’s preeminent stars. And like Hank Luisetti, of Stanford, who never played professional basketball, he will have the almost unique distinction of taking only the name of his college with him into the chronicles of the sport.
1965
EL ÚNICO MATADOR
LILLIAN ROSS
The best bullfighters in the world have come, traditionally, from Spain or Mexico. The old Spanish province of Andalusia has contributed more bulls and more bullfighters to the bull ring than all the rest of Spain. Manolete, probably history’s top-ranking matador, who, at the age of thirty, was fatally gored in the summer of 1947, was an Andalusian. Carlos Arruza, who retired last year, at twenty-eight, with a two-million-dollar fortune and th
e reputation of fighting closer to the bull than any other matador had ever done, was born in Mexico, of Spanish-born parents. Belmonte, an Andalusian, and Joselito, a Spanish gypsy, were the leading figures in what is known in bullfight countries as the Golden Age of Bullfighting, which ended with Belmonte’s retirement to breed bulls, in 1921, a year after Joselito’s death in the arena. The only Mexican who ranked close to Belmonte and Joselito in their time was Rodolfo Gaona, an Indian, who, in 1925, retired a millionaire with large real-estate interests in Mexico City. Some years ago a Chinese bullfighter named Wong, who wore a natural pigtail, turned up in Mexico as El Torero Chino, and a Peruvian lady bullfighter, Conchita Cintrón, is active today. Only one citizen of the United States has ever been recognized as a full-fledged matador. He is Sidney Franklin, who was born and raised in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.
Franklin, who is now forty-five, estimates that he has killed two thousand bulls so far. Last winter, in Mexico, he killed thirteen. He is planning to go to Spain this summer to kill as many bulls as he can get contracts to fight, although he is much older than the usual bullfighter is at his peak. “Age has nothing to do with art,” he says. “It’s all a matter of what’s in your mind.” He hopes someday to introduce bullfighting to this country, and, if he succeeds, expects it to become more popular than baseball. Ernest Hemingway, who became an authority on bullfighting, as well as on Franklin, while preparing to write Death in the Afternoon, maintains that to take to bullfighting a country must have an interest in the breeding of fighting bulls and an interest in death, both of which Hemingway feels are lacking in the United States. “Death, shmeath, so long as I keep healthy,” Franklin says. When aficionados, or bullfight fans, charge that Americans born north of the border are incapable of the passion necessary for bullfighting, Franklin replies passionately that coldness in the presence of danger is the loftiest aspect of his art. “If you’ve got guts, you can do anything,” he says. “Anglo-Saxons can become the greatest bullfighters, the greatest ballet dancers, the greatest anything.” When, in 1929, Franklin made his Spanish début, in Seville, the aficionados were impressed by the coldness of his art. “Franklin is neither an improviser nor an accident nor a joker,” wrote the bullfight critic for La Unión, a Seville newspaper. “He is a born bullfighter, with plenty of ambition, which he has had since birth, and for the bulls he has an ultimate quality—serene valor. Coldness, borrowed from the English, if you please…. He parries and holds back with a serene magnificence that grandly masks the danger, and he doesn’t lose his head before the fierce onslaughts of the enemy.” “Franklin fought as though born in Spain; the others fought as though born in Chicago,” another critic observed a year later, in comparing Franklin’s manner of dispatching two bulls with the work of the Spanish matadors who appeared on the same bill in a Madrid bull ring. One day early in his career, Franklin killed the two bulls that had been allotted to him, then, taking the place of two other matadors, who had been gored, killed four more. This set off such an emotional chain reaction in the ring that another bullfighter dropped dead of excitement. Today, many aficionados, both Spanish and Mexican, disparage Franklin’s artistry. “Manolete made you feel inside like crying, but Franklin does not engrave anything on your soul,” a Spanish aficionado of thirty years’ standing complained not long ago. “Franklin has no class,” another Spaniard has said. “He is to a matador of Spanish blood what a Mexican baseball player is to Ba-bee Ruth.” “I am A Number One,” Franklin says. “I am the best in the business, bar none.”
Franklin was nineteen when he saw his first bullfight. He was in Mexico, having recently run away from home after a quarrel with his father. As he recalls this particular bullfight, he was bored. In Brooklyn, he had belonged, as a charter member, to the Eagle’s Aunt Jean’s Humane Club and to the old New York Globe’s Bedtime Stories Club, which devoted itself to the glorification of Peter Rabbit. “At that time, the life to me of both man and beast was the most precious thing on this planet,” he says. “I failed to grasp the point.” The following year, he fought his first bull—a twelve-hundred-pound, four-year-old beast with horns a foot and a half long—and was on his way to becoming a professional. In the quarter of a century since then, Franklin has come to feel that the act of dominating and killing a bull is the most important and satisfying act a human being can perform. “It gives me a feeling of sensual well-being,” he has said. “It’s so deep it catches my breath. It fills me so completely I tingle all over. It’s something I want to do morning, noon, and night. It’s something food can’t give me. It’s something rest can’t give me. It’s something money can’t buy.” He is certain that bullfighting is the noblest and most rewarding of all pursuits. He often delivers eloquent discourses on his art to men who are more interested in power, money, love, sex, marriage, dollar diplomacy, atomic energy, animal breeding, religion, Marxism, capitalism, or the Marshall Plan. When his listener has been reduced to acquiescence, or at least bewilderment, Franklin will smile tolerantly and give him a pat on the back. “It’s all a matter of first things first,” he will say. “I was destined to taste the first, and the best, on the list of walks of life.” The triumph of man over bull is not just the first walk on Franklin’s own list; it is the only one. There are no other walks to clutter him up. “I was destined to shine,” he adds. “It was a matter of noblesse oblige.”
The expression “noblesse oblige” is one Franklin is fond of using to describe his attitude toward most of his activities in and out of the bull ring, including the giving of advice to people. He is an unbridled advice-giver. He likes to counsel friends, acquaintances, and even strangers to live in a sensible, homespun, conventional, well-tested manner, in line with the principles of saving nine by a stitch in time, of finding life great if one does not weaken, of gathering moss by not rolling, of trying and trying again if success is slow in arriving, and of distinguishing between what is gold and what merely glitters. He is convinced that he thought up all these adages himself. In order to show how seriously he takes them, he often pitches in and helps a friend follow them. He takes credit for having helped at least a half-dozen other bullfighters make hay while the sun shone; for having proved to habitués of saloons and night clubs that there is no place like home; for having taught a number of ladies how to drive automobiles, after telling them emphatically that anything a man can do a woman can do; for having encouraged young lovers to get married, because the longer they waited, the more difficult their adjustment to each other would be; and for having persuaded couples to have babies while they were still young, so that they might be pals with their children while they were growing up. “I was destined to lead,” Franklin states. “It was always noblesse oblige with me.” Some Americans who have watched Franklin dispose of bulls on hot Sunday afternoons in Spain believe that he is right. “Sidney is part of a race of strange, fated men,” says Gerald Murphy, head of Mark Cross and a lover of the arts. Franklin has a special category of advice for himself. “I never let myself get obese or slow,” he says. “I make it a point never to imbibe before a fight. I never take more than a snifter, even when socializing with the select of all the professions. I am always able to explain to myself the whys and wherefores. I believe in earning a penny by saving it. By following the straight and narrow path, I became the toast of two continents. My horizon is my own creation.”
Franklin, who has never married, is tall—five feet eleven and a half inches—thin, fair-skinned, and bald except for a few wavy bits of sandy-colored hair at the base of his skull. The backs of his hands and the top of his head are spotted with large tan freckles. His eyebrows are heavy and the color of straw. His ears are long. His eyes are brown, narrow, and lacking in depth, and there are a good many lines around them. There is a small scar at the tip of his nose. His build is considered good for bullfighting, because a tall bullfighter can more easily reach over a bull’s horns with his sword for the kill. Franklin’s only physical handicap is his posterior, which sticks out. “Sidne
y has no grace because he has a terrific behind,” Hemingway says. “I used to make him do special exercises to reduce his behind.” When Franklin walks down a street, he seems to dance along on his toes, and he has a harsh, fast way of talking. He sounds like a boxing promoter or a cop, but he has many of the gestures and mannerisms of the Spanish bullfighter. “Americans are taught to speak with their mouths,” he likes to say. “We speak with our bodies.” When the parade preceding the bullfight comes to a halt, he stands, as do the Mexicans and Spaniards, with the waist pushed forward and the shoulders back. When he becomes angry, he rages, but he can transform himself in a moment into a jolly companion again. In the company of other bullfighters or of aficionados, he glows and bubbles. Last winter, at a hotel in Acapulco, he discovered that the headwaiter, D’Amaso Lopez, had been a matador in Seville between 1905 and 1910. “Ah, Maestro!” cried Franklin, embracing Lopez, who grabbed a tablecloth and started doing verónicas. “He is overjoyed to see me,” Franklin told his host at dinner. “I’m a kindred spirit.” At parties, he likes to replace small talk or other pastimes with parlor bullfighting, using a guest as the bull. (Rita Hayworth is considered by some experts to make his best bull.) Claude Bowers, former United States Ambassador to Spain, used to invite Franklin to his soirées in Madrid. “Sidney loved to perform,” an Embassy man who was usually Franklin’s onrushing bull has said. “He’d give the most fascinating running commentary as he demonstrated with the cape, and then he’d spend hours answering the silliest questions, as long as they were about bullfighting. He was like a preacher spreading the gospel.”
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