by Bill Bradley
“Let me tell you. My friend, he’s from down on Wall Street you know, and me, we want to start a health club. I know him personally. You see, he set me up in this and said it was mine all alone and he only wanted 50 percent of my shares. I trust him. He’s smart. He knows finance. I know the clientele—the Jewish men from the garment district. I know their mentality. I know what they like and that’s why this place is decorated like it is.
“But how to get ’em here is another question. That’s where you come in. If we called up one or two places over there and told ’em that Bill Bradley of the Knicks was getting his hair cut here or just hung around here for a few hours in the afternoon, they’d be over here in a minute. That’s just the way they are. We’d give you 20 percent of the business for doing that.
“We expect to make most of our money with the line of clothes in the boutique. You know, we’d have Bill Bradley ties and shirts. We expect to franchise this all over the country after we get going, so there could be some big money in it for you; $20,000 a year minimum.”
“I’ll think about it and let you know,” I said as I rang the elevator bell. The button I pressed was nestled carefully in the crotch of a carved wooden nymph nailed to the wall.
“Yeah, fucking A,” said the ad man, “I know what you mean. You want somethin’ that will make money and yet not compromise your values as a person. I see. Yeah, we’ll think about it.”
Two weeks later at a window table in the Four Seasons around 3 P.M. after a long lunch he said, “You want somethin’ that’s class, and sports, and still you. Here it is.” His partner unveiled a 3′ by 4′ placard on which were written the words: BILL BRADLEY BRAINSTORMS INC. “You can put anything under that. It can be a holding company for operations like a computer school for ghetto kids, an education film company, or anything else. We would provide the advertising and some of the business management.
“We’ll want 80 percent. See, we have to have 80 percent for our own conglomerate reasons.”
“You will appear three times in a national magazine and all you will say is that you drink milk. How can milk be bad? It’s as American as apple pie,” said the man from Campbell Ewall in Detroit.
“Who pays me to say that?” I asked.
“The Associated Milk Producers of America and The American Dairy Association.”
“Hi, Bill. Stan here. Let me explain a little about us. I came over from Random House to manage this operation here for Playboy. The magazine is called Oui and it has sold 200,000 copies in three months. It is so good it’s frightening, but this market has been hurt by the recent surprise court ruling on pornography. During the last month we’ve cut deliveries to a couple of places in the South. Overall, though, there’s enormous demand for our product. We’ve conducted an in-depth survey on American sexual mores, an update of Kinsey. We want Oui to aim at the sophisticated college student, cosmopolitan and young. There’s a gap between the Playboy audience and the Oui audience. Europe will be a real part of Oui, both in style and stories. We have correspondents in the big European capitals.”
“What do you want from me?”
“We need image help. We want you to speak at selected luncheons in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Our key advertisers will attend. You won’t have to push the magazine or have pictures of you in it. We want to keep it subtle; low profile, you know. Just talk about sports or politics and answer questions. It will be good exposure for you. We’ll pay $2,500 a speech and guarantee you ten speeches a year, at least. Let me assure you that even if some people in Canton, Ohio, or Springfield, Missouri, don’t like Oui, the fact remains we sell a lot of copies there.”
Every good Celtic team has run a fast break, which means moving the ball downcourt before the defense gets ready. Rebound, outlet pass, pass, lay-up. The Knicks and Chicago use defensive pressures, but Boston generates offensive pressure, creating situations in which one defensive man must cover two offensive players converging on him at full speed from different directions. Every time you shoot against the Celtics your team must worry about retreating to counter the stampede which will ensue if the shot misses. If you get into a running game with them, you’re finished: An opponent will work eighteen seconds for two points and the Celtics will match that in five. That’s Celtic basketball.
When we force Boston to slow down the tempo of the game, they resort to the same seven plays that Red Auerbach instituted during his tenure as coach. They have maintained a style and approach to the game, even though there has been a generational change of personnel. Their system requires the following kinds of players: an offensive forward who runs well, a defensive (power) forward who rebounds well, a good-shooting forward ready on the bench, an offensive guard who shoots well, a defensive guard who is strong, a swing-man who can play either forward or guard, and an aggressive center who plays defense well and directs the flow of action.
Tonight, Boston is hitting. Havlicek, who gets two quick baskets, does not usually assert himself this much in the first six or seven minutes. The Celtics run three plays in to Cowens, clearing a side of the floor and allowing him to work at the low post on Lucas. Jo Jo White, the offensive guard with great quickness, hits two jumpers and beats Monroe to the basket on a drive. Havlicek then scores two more jumpers and two foul shots. The Celtics blow us out and win by thirty points. We say to ourselves afterwards that we lost because Lucas was feeling sick and Monroe was injured. But being candid, I wonder if the Celtics are not better than we are this year. The locker room is quiet.
The press files in.
“What happened to the offense?”
“Will you be able to beat the Celtics in the play-offs without Willis?”
“Where would you say they beat you? Rebounding or defense?”
“Have you ever seen Havlicek play better?”
I shower and dress quickly, saying very little to the reporters. Because we are in second place with only 15 games remaining in the season (and because Willis has made little improvement), they expect us to provide a witty observation about our own funeral. The only alternative is to parrot comments on the game as if our sputtering efforts are of no concern to defending champions. On my way out of the Garden, near the big automatic aluminum door on 33rd Street, I sign twelve autographs for young fans. There are fifty asking. I keep walking and signing, until I’m at a cab in front of the Garden. One little kid starts screaming, “Come on, Bradley, I waited. Don’t be like Monroe. Come on, Bradley, come on.” His voice has the tone of petulance. I’ve heard it before, too many times. Suddenly, I turn on him and say, “Why don’t you learn some manners? If you would have asked politely I might have signed it.” (And I would have.) As I get into the cab a teenager says, “Why don’t you learn somethin’?” and another yells, “What’s the matter, we only want your autograph, not your money, you bum.” As the cab pulls away and moves through the New York streets to a restaurant where I’m meeting some friends for dinner even my conscience turns on me. I begin to feel sorry for the little kid. He looked surprised when I scolded him. Maybe I was too abrupt.
The game depressed me. I keep saying to myself that we’ll be ready when the play-offs come, that these games only qualify us for the post-season competition. Yet, I can’t convince myself to take this evening’s defeat so cavalierly. Injuries affect our play but they are not our main worries. Timing and teamwork can’t be turned on and off as if they were spigots, and we didn’t have much of either tonight.
The cab pulls up in front of the restaurant, and as I pay the driver, he says, “You’re Bradley, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You guys better get on the ball. The play-offs start soon. Shit, what am I sayin’, forget the play-offs, I lost fifty dollars tonight. How’s Reed? Gonna play next week?”
The talk at dinner turns to things other than basketball. Good friends always bring up other things. I begin to forget the worries of the cab ride. We make plans for a summer trip. The conversation rooted in years of close association i
s about family and friends. The economy is damned, briefly. Money worries. Political anecdotes. Music. A long story about the training of quarter horses. Laughter. A few sarcastic puns. Communal eating.
In the middle of dinner a woman walks up and asks for my autograph. I tell her I’d be glad to do it later, after dinner. She walks away. Two minutes later, a man about 5′11″ with husky shoulders and a flat nose walks up to me at the table. “Hey, Bradley, you Bradley,” he says. He’s had too much to drink. I smile, thinking of the time a drunk reporter walked with his coat to the front of a plane on a transcontinental flight and told everyone he was getting off. We were over Kansas.
“What’s the matter, think you’re too good?” the drunk blurts. “The lady just asked for an autograph. I was pro fighter. I ought to knock you out, you son-of-a-bitch. You’re all alike. Lady has a kid….” He can’t stand still. He sways back and forth as he talks. I take a piece of paper without even nodding at him, scribble my name on it, and thrust it in his pocket.
“Okay, champ, you have it now,” I say with a wink.
“Who knows,” one of my friends says as our visitor staggers around tables heading for the reassuring darkness of the bar, “if he was a boxer maybe you got off easy.”
When we leave the restaurant a man on the street recognizes me. He approaches and says simply as if he were an ordered antidote to the boxer, “Thank you for all the wonderful evenings you have given me. I think the Knicks are class.” I say thanks for the words and we walk our separate ways.
There is no question about it. Being a member of a successful New York basketball team is a mixed blessing. The notoriety forces one to look at the world differently from other people. It provides money and access. At the same time, it sets one apart from the rest of society and denies one the privilege of being an equal member of a crowd. There is little chance, for example, for a public figure to fail without people knowing it, and no one grows without failing. Many avoid the embarrassment of public failure by never placing themselves in positions where they might fail. Therefore, they never grow. My constant problem is to find places where I am allowed to fail in private. Everyone does not thirst for fame. For me, fame holds as much danger as it does benefit.
If you are famous you get special service at banks, passport offices, and airline ticket counters, and come to expect that service while not respecting yourself for wanting it. Fame is being paid a lot of money for what people think about you as well as for what you do… having strange women approach you and say they want to meet you, know you in every way, right now… misassessing the amount of interest other people have in you… trying to find yourself while under the scrutiny of thousands of eyes… reacting instead of acting, being passive instead of active… having people tell you what they want you to do with your life… learning to understand what others want from you… sensing people in a restaurant whispering and pointing toward your party… forgetting how hot the subways are in August… having someone write that if you visit this kid who is dying in a hospital he will get better… having strangers constantly test you and probe for the dimension of your “real” personality… coming into contact with ten times more people in a year than most people do in a lifetime… remaining unable to escape those few minutes or several years when what you did made you famous….
The American historian Daniel Boorstin in his book The Image has observed:
The very agency which first makes the celebrity in the long run inevitably destroys him…. The newspapers make him and they unmake him—not by murder but by suffocation or starvation…. There is not even any tragedy in the celebrity’s fall, for he is a man returned to his proper anonymous station. The tragic hero, in Aristotle’s familiar definition, was man fallen from great estate, a great man with a tragic flaw. He had somehow become the victim of his own greatness. Yesterday’s celebrity, however, is a commonplace man who has been fitted back into his proper commonplaceness not by any fault of his own, but by time itself.
The hero was born of time: his gestation required at least a generation. As the saying went, he had “stood the test of time.” He grew over generations…. Receding into the misty past, he became more and not less heroic…. Men of the last century were more heroic than those of today; men of antiquity were still more heroic….
The celebrity, on the contrary, is always contemporary. The hero is made by folk-lore, sacred texts and history books, and the celebrity is the creature of gossip, of public opinion, of newspapers, magazines and the ephemeral images of movie and television screens. The passage of time which creates and establishes the hero, destroys the celebrity. One is made, the other unmade, by repetition. The celebrity is born in the daily papers, and never loses the mark of his fleeting origin.
The other Knicks and I got to our present positions of celebrity through similar routes. There are many encouragements for a boy to be an athlete while in high school. The good athlete is popular among his classmates, but the star athlete develops a reputation outside high school. Townspeople, adults, single him out for attention and interest. Teachers might favor him even if unconsciously. Growing up, when most young people struggle to define their tastes and develop their own sense of right and wrong, the star athlete lies protected in his momentary nest of fame. The community tells him that he is a basketball star. For the townspeople his future is as clearly outlined as his record-book past. They expect him to become an even greater athlete and to do those things which will bring about the fulfillment of what is wholly their fantasy. The adolescent who receives such attention rarely develops personal doubts. There is a smug cockiness about achievements, or a sincere determination to continue along a course that has brought success and praise. The athlete continues to devote his energies to sport. Compared with the natural fears and insecurities of his classmates, he has it easy. His self-assurance is constantly reinforced by public approval.
The athletes who succeed in making college teams have the high school experience duplicated on a grander scale. The few who excel on university teams find that admiration comes then, not from high school friends and adult family friends, but from the national press and from adults they have never met. They begin to see that they can make a good living simply by playing the sport. Self-definition again comes from external sources, not from within. While their physical skill lasts, professional athletes are celebrities—fondled and excused, praised and believed. Only toward the end of their careers do the stars realize that their sense of identity is insufficient.
PART TWO
“I need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in an open boat. I remember nights and days of calm, when we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still, as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept us bailing for dear life (but filled our water cask), and I remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a cinder and a steering oar over the stern to keep my first command head on to the breaking sea. I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”
(From Youth, by Joseph Conrad)
ONE
THE TRAFFIC TO JFK AIRPORT SLOWS TO A CRAWL FOR THE LAST five miles of the journey. Two cars have crashed at the intersection of the Van Wyck Expressway and the Southern State Parkway. Normally non-rush hour driving time from Manhattan is thirty-five minutes. Today I will be lucky to make it in fifty. I make most flights with little time to spare, and this delay could prove costly. The Knick’s rule is that if a player misses a flight he must pay a hundred dollar fin
e plus his own fare. Since we fly to Los Angeles today that could mean a four hundred dollar mistake.
Arriving at the American Airlines terminal ten minutes before departure, I throw my bags to the ticket agent and run for the gate, only to find a line at the security checkpoint. After waiting another five minutes I go through the metal detector and make the plane just as the gate attendant is closing down the flight. The whole group is assembled as I walk into the fuselage. My arrival draws applause. “Too bad, I was hoping you’d miss, Bill,” Holzman says good-naturedly. “You’d have to dig deep for four hundred bucks. Maybe you’d have to go to that stone house where you keep the money from your first paycheck, right Danny?”
“Riiight,” Danny says, stretching the single syllable word to an exclamation which falls somewhere between a battle cry and the sound made during a throat examination.
“Red,” Danny continues, “Bill says it’s twenty minutes to La-Guardia and thirty-five to JFK. Now Red, Bill knows. You got it perfect don’t you, Bill. No mistakes, just right down to the minute. Bill probably got his doughnut and coffee at that greasy spoon on 8th Avenue, read The New York Times, then cabbed it to meet the fellows. Almost missed though, didn’t you, Senator?”
“Take it easy on him, Danny,” Red says. “Remember the job. It’s not too long now.”
“Oh, yeah, the job. Remember Bill, Red and I get the first two jobs when you make it big in politics. You know, the high-paying no-show at the beach. The one you promised. I’ll call you and say, ‘Hello Bill, Danny here. Yeah Bill, the water’s still in the ocean and it’s still wet. How about the Atlantic? Bill, have you checked with Red today? and, Bill, don’t forget to mail the check.’”