Bill Bradley’s Garden Party

So how does candidate Bradley, with his political toolbelt fastened, come back to fix a political system broken by money? In characteristically humble manner: a $ 1.5 million fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden, with 20 basketball legends assembled at half court to extol his virtues.

On the morning of November 14, the buzz is in the air hours before the event begins. The Sunday shows are larded with such NBA stars of yore as Bob Cousy and Dr. J. They explain how Bradley’s first act as president will be to heal the sick and raise the dead. Bradley’s partisans seem to be everywhere, as I discover when taking a seat on the shuttle to New York next to former Maryland congressman and NBA journeyman Tom McMillen — also on his way to the Bradley event.

McMillen licks the newsprint from his fingers while guffawing over a column making fun of the new Al Gore. With Bradley clipping Gore’s lead to single digits in New Hampshire, a supreme irony is taking shape. Bradley is rallying in the personality primary without actually having any. Both he and Gore are classic stiffs, but Gore aspires to be more than a stiff and is failing. Bradley, on the other hand, remains an unregenerate stiff, thus convincing reporters that he is not a mere dullard but “authentic.”

While McMillen is a Bradley loyalist, one detects a bit of envy. McMillen lost his congressional seat in 1992; Bradley gets to run against Gore. When they played together during Bradley’s final NBA season, Bradley roomed with future coaching great Phil Jackson; McMillen got stuck with Luther “Ticky” Burden, who later found himself incarcerated for robbing a bank.

As a competitor, McMillen says, Bradley is a little more complex than his gentleman/sportsman image suggests. When McMillen was a rookie with the Buffalo Braves, he passed Bradley under the basket. “I was guarding my man, he was guarding his, and Bradley gave me an elbow right to my stomach,” winces McMillen. “It was gratuitous. It was purposeful. It was gratuitous.” He repeats this several more times, then goes silent. A few minutes later, McMillen adds: “I say this with all due respect, you kind of have to be dirty to survive — it’s really sort of a jungle.” It is unclear if we are talking basketball or politics.

At the Garden, reporters congregate in an upper room to inhale a cold-cuts buffet. The press has been instructed to dress casually and “wear sneakers.” The instructions are overkill, as most journalists don’t require formal notice to look shabby. We are brimming with important questions for Bradley’s handlers. Will Bradley be pronouncing “Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk,” the name of the scheduled dance troupe? Where’s the Dijon mustard for our sandwiches? If the unintelligible Moses Malone speaks, will there be a translator?

Press secretary Eric Hauser arrives to lay down the rules. We are not to leave the room until the appointed time. We are not to speak to Bradley. We must stay together in the “great seats” that have been provided for us (behind the basket, below the nose-bleeds). Some bone-weary beat reporter, under the impression he’s covering a presidential campaign, asks if any politicians will be speaking on political topics. “No,” Hauser says dismissively, “But Bradley will be discussing Third World debt.” (It’s not clear if he’s joking.)

Before the event starts, three of us make like Latrell Sprewell and break the rules. We descend the aisles, push past Bradley supporters on the Garden floor, and infiltrate the players’ tunnel, where 20 or so bona fide giants of the game are gathered. You can’t turn around without making the acquaintance of Willis Reed’s navel, Bill Walton’s belt buckle, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s zipper. Interspersed among the legends are celebrities such as teen-sensation Usher, singer Bruce Hornsby, and actors Harvey Keitel and Ethan Hawke. They are trying not to look goofy, as they unconsciously emulate the pimp-roll struts of Walt “Clyde” Frazier and Earl “Black Jesus” Monroe, who perfected their gaits as Bradley’s team-mates in the Superfly era.

I set about the place to find a Bradley friend who can articulate why he should be president. It’s instructive to remember that next to politics, there is no vocation whose members use more words to say less than athletes. As an athlete/politician, Bradley is doubly expert at the use of cliches. In fact, he deliberately perfected this as a player who hated talking to the press, once writing that he “tried to utter a few standard comments so often that they lose interest in me.” His friends are no less accomplished. Take former Celtic Bill Russell, a strong Bradley booster who, when asked if he finds any particular Bradley issue animating, replies, “No. It’s not an issue thing. He’s a good guy — a man with immense leadership qualities.” Moving on to Oscar Robertson, I ask him what Bradley stands for. “He stands for America,” Robertson replies. “Anyone who stands for America is going to be good for everybody.”

I have no better luck after moving down the food chain. Suited-up in a European-cut suit and gaudy cross-trainers, actor Ethan Hawke hails from Bradley’s senatorial turf in New Jersey. But though he’s campaigning for Bradley, Hawke doesn’t exactly know if he’s voting for him: “Let’s see if he gets the nomination,” he says. Singer/actor Usher (such a sensation that he requires no last name) opines that “what Bradley offers the world is an opportunity to become more responsible for ourselves and our future. What he allows us is our rights, that we’re already given. You know?”

I look for someone more provocative and spot director Spike Lee standing alone in a hallway. One of Bradley’s mandates is to “start an honest conversation about race.” (Dialogues such as Clinton’s “Initiative on Race” and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ “Conversation On American Pluralism and Identity” have already been started, finished, and forgotten. But Bradley must have missed them while he was “thinking through the next chapter of the American story.”) Lee doesn’t praise white politicians often. But he has fanny-patted Bradley for drawing attention to matters racial. Bradley’s fetishism of the subject ranks up there with Rep. John Lewis’s of Georgia. Of course, Lewis, who is black and was once clubbed on the head by Alabama state troopers, has good reason to dwell on the subject. But Bradley’s race fixation seems to spring from the fact that two decades ago he regularly showered with Clyde Frazier and “Black Jesus.”

Lee is standing against a wall holding a camcorder, and I realize I have gotten between him and the former Knicks greats. Will he be shooting any Bradley campaign ads? Lee brushes by in icy silence. I make another pass. Lee says hello, shakes my hand, then calls security. Former coaching great Jack Ramsay totters up, mistaking me for someone else, and asks, “Where do you want me to go?” “I need you right over there,” I say, pointing at a line of retired players, “and would you please fall in behind Kareem?” As the security force escorts me and the other reporters to our obstructed-view seats, the players and celebrities strut across the court. There’s Pearl and Hondo, the Big O and Kareem. After Kareem, trails an obedient Jack Ramsay.

Not much basketball gets played during the two-hour festivities, except when Bradley and former teammates reenact the most storied moment in Knicks history. It was the seventh game of the 1970 championship against the Lakers. The Knicks’ injured captain, Willis Reed, wasn’t expected to play. But during warmups, he hobbled out of the tunnel, shocking the Lakers’ Wilt Chamberlain and inspiring his teammates to victory. With Reed’s knee now better, and Chamberlain now deceased, Reed takes a slow-motion pass from Bradley to make an easy layup.

It’s a beautiful moment, which not only reconnects Bradley to his basketball past in the service of his political future, but reminds us of his rich tradition of high self-regard. As team-mate Jerry Lucas later puts it, “We have assembled here, along with Bill Bradley, probably the most intelligent team that ever played basketball.” (Lucas is the memorization fanatic who can recite the entire Manhattan phone book, but he’s forgotten about the Celtics and Lakers of the mid- ’80s.) So deep are Bradley’s tendencies toward pomposity that in his mid-’70s basketball memoir, he wrote of his sporadic bouts of casual sex: “The percentages are that if a man spends enough nights in hotels, he will meet a woman with whom for that night he will share a bed, giving each a brief escape from boredom and loneliness.” Mortals might call this “getting laid” and note that the “percentages” are especially favorable for professional basketball players. But the former Rhodes Scholar from Princeton terms it the “loneliness of the road oppress[ing] two strangers equally at the same time.”

Emcee Robin Roberts, of ESPN, keeps imploring the crowd — some 7,500 fans who have paid $ 50 to $ 1,000 apiece — to “raise the roof” (the hand-pumping motion frequently practiced by Ferry Springer audiences). It looks foolish but, along with interruptions by a Gore protester in a chicken suit, helps keep people awake during Bradley’s narcoleptic stump speech.

Extra Power Bars are also in order during the campaign film, which features grainy footage, piano swells, and Bradley’s inspirational riffs: “When I was in high school, I never dreamed of being a pro. I always dreamed of winning the state championship. When I was in college, I dreamed of winning the NCAA championship. And when I got to the pros, I dreamed of only one thing, that’s winning the NBA championship.” (Possible campaign slogan: Bill Bradley — He Never Gets Ahead of Himself.)

The legends’ testimonials aren’t much better, as nearly everyone suffers from sports metaphoria. Oscar Robertson asserts that our leaders are always picked for us, “now we can do the pickin‘ with Bill Bradley.” John Havlicek, celebrating Bradley as “one of the great handcheckers of all time,” says that the handprint on “my back-side” is a reminder that “we are going to back him to the hilt.”

Even worse are the extrapolations from Bradley’s sports career that are fast becoming this campaign season’s greatest fiction: that for the good of the team, Bradley became a spectacular passer instead of an NBA scoring machine; that this self-sacrifice is a reflection not just of the player, but of the politician and the man. (New Jersey’s Democratic congressional delegation disagrees; most are supporting Gore after years of benign neglect from their senior senator.) In truth, Bradley was not a major scoring threat in the NBA, but not for lack of trying. He attempted an average of 12 shots per game, only 3 less than Walt Frazier, who led the Knicks in scoring during 5 of Bradley’s 10 seasons.

Of course statistics don’t measure intangibles, such as leadership. But cull his former teammates’ period memoirs, instead of listening to their Garden paeans, and a picture emerges of a man frigid and withdrawn, remote and unkempt. Bradley, who as a rookie was paid four times as much as Walt Frazier, often wore the same shirt until he replaced its lost buttons with paper clips. His teammates once stole his ratty raincoat and bought him a new one just to protect the team’s image. Dave DeBusschere, in his entertaining memoir The Open Man, says former roommate Bradley found his Volkswagen’s radio so distracting that he had it removed. “I didn’t want to upset him by telling him you can turn off a radio,” DeBusschere wrote. Women, too, were distractions, which is why Bradley preferred curling up with the Congressional Record to dating. When Bradley finally did get married, all but one teammate found out about it from the newspapers. Bradley wasn’t so much a leader as he was a honking dork.

Back in the Garden, we’re on metaphor alert. The non-athlete celebrities are asked to report to the court for a dribbling slalom around Bradley-for-President pylons. Everyone shows but Harvey Keitel, who has gone mysteriously AWOL. A week later, Bradley people still aren’t sure why he left. They say Keitel also pulled his pro-Bradley video testimonial, which was supposed to run during the fund-raiser.

It is reminiscent of another episode involving the persnickety actor — when he was cast in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. After conflicts with the director, Keitel fled the set without explanation. Hollywood types thought him foolhardy to abandon a Kubrick/Tom Cruise vehicle that inspired several years’ worth of media panting. But the film was released, and Keitel was vindicated. Despite the newsweekly covers and predictions of greatness, it turned out to be an overhyped mediocrity, ultimately rejected by the public.

Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.