A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton

Whether you like sports or not, McPhee's book is so well written that it carries you along. Bradley at Princeton seems so ancient compared with the sports scene today, but the story reveals unknowingly how much we have lost in the culture when it comes to heroes.

I'm writing this review because the fact that it didn't have a 5-star rating irritated me. I first saw the McPhee/Bill Bradley piece in the New Yorker Magazine about 30 years ago. After reading it I xeroxed the entire article and sent copies of it to every member of the University of South Carolina basketball team (which for those of you who are as old as I am was coached by the legendary Frank McGuire (the assistant coach was Donnie Walsh, now President and General Manager of the Indiana Pacers) and featured a cast of great college players like John Roche, Tommy Owens, Billy Walsh, Bobby Cremins, etc. All of the players (an unusually intelligent group) loved the article. We had many conversations about Bradley's approach to the game in the months to come. This is definitely a 5-star book for any lover of the true game of basketball. It's great and can't possibly be outdated. Highest recommendation.

Curious about Bill Bradley, the man? Sometimes a sense of the man can be had by looking at the youth. This book was written in 1965 after Bradley had finished his Princeton career and was on his way to Oxford. John McPhee's books pack powerful character studies into deceptively simple language. On the surface this is a book about basketball (it's a good book about basketball!), and about excellence through dedication and discipline . The ironic title refers to Bradley's always being aware of where he was on the court in relation to the basket, and to his deep sense of social responsibility for his gifts of privilege, intellect and ability. The portrayal is of a decent, conscientious young man, undistracted or affected by intense celebrity-- whose success in athletics and academics was as much a function of attitude and determination as any innate talent

John McPhee's profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton is classic McPhee: the careful, meticulous observer;the passionate but objective reporter; the master wordsmith. For anyone who hasn't read McPhee, this is a great introduction to his work (it's also McPhee's first book, and has been in print every year since it was written in the mid-'60s).What do you call this book? Sports writing? A detailed profile? Both, I guess, and it really provides insight into Bradley's character, intelligence, and ethic of hard work and determination. McPhee has a great way of reporting the archetypical anecdotes to illustrate specific points--in this case, what a careful student of the game (and of life) Bill Bradley is. There's a great climax here, too, as we follow Bradley's career to his final game, in many ways the perfect ending to a stellar college career. Other nice touches are the photographs and the printing of an updated essay McPhee wrote about Bradley when he was campaigning for senate reelection. If enough people read this, Bradley will be a shoo-in for president.

Written when Bill Bradley was still a student at Princeton, the book is a synthesis of McPhee's interviews with and observations of the three-time All American. It creates a picture of Bradley as a person of character who brings his personal integrity to whatever he does and who succeeds as a result of hard work applied in accord with his personal principles. We learn, for example, that as a youngster Bradley apparently had no special basketball ability, but he decided he wanted to play and literally taught himself the game piece-by-piece, constructing his jump shot, for example, from five separate pieces and being so aware of his movements that when he missed a shot he knew which of the five pieces he had not performed correctly. And this same dedication shows through in Bradley's pursuit of his education and in his private conduct: while a student at Princeton he taught a Sunday school class for some of the town's children, and even after a Saturday night away game (followed by a six hour bus ride, reaching campus after 4 a.m.) there was never any thought of not teaching the class the next morning. This inspirational book, A Sense of Where You Are: a profile of William Warren Bradley, gives us a very clear sense of who he is, a man of honor.