Athletes - Bill Bradley

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	Athletes - Bill Bradley

William (Bill) Warren Bradley (born July 28, 1943 in Crystal City, Missouri) is an American former star basketball player who later became a well-known U.S. Senator and presidential candidate.

College basketball

The son of Warren Bradley and Susie Crowe, Bill Bradley began playing basketball in fourth grade. He was a basketball star at Crystal City High School, scoring 3,068 points in his scholastic career and twice being named an All-American. With stellar academic credentials as well, he received 75 scholarship offers.

The 6' 5" (1.96 m) Bradley chose Princeton University, even though Ivy League colleges could not offer athletic scholarships. The Ivy League has never seen a more dominating player. At Princeton, Bradley was a three-time All-America and the 1965 Player of the Year. With Bradley in tow, the Tigers captured the Ivy League championship in each of his three varsity seasons. During his sophomore campaign, Bradley averaged 27.3 points and 12.2 rebounds a game while hitting 89.3 percent of his free throws. Among his greatest games was a 41-point effort in an 80-78 loss to heavily favored Michigan in the 1964 Holiday Festival (Bradley fouled out with his team leading 75-63), and a 58-point outburst against Wichita State in the 1965 NCAA tournament, which was a single game record. In total, Bradley scored 2,503 points at Princeton, averaging 30.2 points per game. In 1965, Bradley became the first basketball player chosen as winner of the prestigious James E. Sullivan Award, presented to the United States' top amateur athlete in the country.

As a freshman, Bradley sank 57 successive free throws, a record unmatched by any other player, college or professional. As a sophomore, he led the league in rebounds, field goals, free throws, and total points, and, when he fouled out after scoring a record-breaking 40 points in an NCAA tournament game with St. Joseph's in Philadelphia, was given an unprecedented ovation. In his junior year, he made 51 points against Harvard, more than the entire opposing team had scored before he was taken out, and his 33.1 points-per-game average that season set an Ivy League record.

In his senior year, when he was captain, he led Princeton to the highest national ranking it had ever had in basketball. It placed third behind UCLA and Michigan in the NCAA tournament, as a result of an 118-82 victory over the University of Wichita in the consolation game of the semi-finals. In the Wichita game, Bradley scored 58 points, an NCAA tournament record.

Bradley graduated with honors and was awarded a Rhodes Scholar at Worcester College, Oxford University. Bradley also served as captain of the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic basketball team in 1964.

Oxford University

After graduating from Princeton, Bradley went to England to take up his Rhodes Scholarsip.

Bradley found himself departing from the timetable he had drawn up for his career. In the high school yearbooks of friends he admired, the highest praise he bestowed was to forecast, as he did to classmate Janet Biehle, that "you'll succeed because you have that one intangible quality which many people lack – desire." Bradley still had plenty of desire, but he found himself uncertain of its object.

Bradley got in food fights in Worcester College's vaulted dining room, heaving buttered rolls at Britons garbed for supper in the required black ties and academic gowns. He played contact sports with abandon, for the first time since breaking a leg in football at age 9. He bought a used Volkswagen and raced it, in blatant affront to local ordinance, along the quiet roads outside town. He and Smith squeezed onto a Vespa motorbike, large men both, ridiculous figures with knees bent to their chests. Gown flapping behind him, Bradley clowned and waved to passersby. Bradley did not only revel in escaping the limelight. He studied it. He discussed with Oxford dons, as former Worcester dean of men Harry Pitt recalls, the distorting effects of young celebrity. He assigned himself Daniel J. Boorstin's book "The Image," in which Boorstin described the transforming effects of high-speed printing, photography, radio and motion pictures. Combined, Boorstin wrote, they gave rise to "the means of fabricating well-knownness" and to the celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness." Boorstin noted: "Of course we do not like to believe that our admiration is focused on a largely synthetic product."

"In that first year at Oxford," Bradley said, "I remember reading Boorstin's book, and that spoke directly to what I was trying to puzzle through in my life, which was one of the reasons I chose to go to Oxford as opposed to playing professional basketball: to get out of the environment of well-knownness and to puzzle through what it meant. How do you survive in such an environment and be true to yourself?"

Bradley packed a six-foot shelf of novels and read more of them than the philosophy, politics and economics he had signed up for, plunging into new worlds of imagination. (Eventually, he sat for exams and got "third-class honors" in his own subjects, a barely passing degree.) He read Albert Camus' "The Fall," then traveled to Amsterdam to examine its setting; Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," then Italy. Joseph Conrad, with his themes of darkness beneath civilization's veneer, made an impression on Bradley he talked about for years. One of Bradley's favorite activities at Oxford was a game Smith called "Let's pretend." He would strike up conversations with strangers, affecting to be someone he was not or to hold opinions that were not his own.

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Athletes - Bill Bradley

College basketball

Oxford University

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