A Sense of Where You Are Excerpt

Excerpt from:

A Sense of Where You Are
A Profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton

Incentive

My father, for fourteen years or so, has served as physician to United States Olympic teams. And for more than forty years, before his retirement in June of 1964, he was a physician to college athletes, almost all of that time at Princeton. I know that he greatly admires excellence in athletes, and that he would regularly become quite caught up in the evolution of a Princeton team's season, its hopes for a championship, and the kind of performance an individual might be sustaining; but these things were discernible only in highly indirect ways. He has a taciturnity celebrated in his circle, and he can watch, say, a Princeton halfback go ninety-eight yards for a touchdown without even faintly showing on the surface the excitement he feels within him. In fact, from the late thirties, which is as far back as I can remember, until the winter of 1962, I had never heard him actually make a direct statement of praise about any athlete, let alone make high claims, proud or otherwise, for an athlete's abilities. Then the phone rang one day in my apartment in New York, where I had been living for some years, and my father was on the other end, saying, "There's a freshman basketball player down here who is the best basketball player who has ever been near here and may be one of the best ever. You ought to come down and see him."

I remember being so surprised that I felt more worried about my father than interested in the basketball player. Finally, I said, "What's his name?"

"What difference does that make? They're playing Penn tomorrow night at six-thirty."

Freshman basketball, in my own time, a dozen years earlier, had not been a spectator sport at Princeton. A player's roommates might turn up, or his parents, if they lived nearby, but the grandstands were empty and the sound of the dribbling used to echo while the freshmen played. On the night of the game with Pennsylvania, I showed up at about six-twenty-five. There was a large crowd outside the gym and, inside, the stands were already filled. My father was holding a seat for me, and by the time I got to it the game had already begun. I sat down and purposely didn't ask which player I was supposed to watch, because that would have diminished the pleasure of discovery, and it was, in fact, something like this that my father had in mind when he had cut me off so abruptly on the phone. I watched the general flow on the court for a while, and it was soon clear enough who had drawn the crowd, and that he was the most graceful and classical basketball player who had ever been near Princeton, to say the very least. Every motion developed in its simplest form. Every motion repeated itself precisely when he used it again. He was remarkably fast, but he ran easily. His passes were so good that they were difficult to follow. Every so often, and not often enough, I thought, he stopped and went high into the air with the ball, his arms rising until his hands were at right angles to one another and high above him, and a long jump shot would go into the net. My father, once a college basketball player himself, was so moved by this that he nudged me with his elbow. It was not the two points, obviously enough--it was the form and the manner with which they had been scored. I looked from the boy's number down to the mimeographed sheet in my hand. His name was Bill Bradley. He was six feet, five inches tall. And he came from Crystal City, Missouri.