Dollar Bill

In 1962 the young writer John McPhee went to watch Bill Bradley play a freshman basketball game at Princeton. It was love at first sight. McPhee wrote a long profile of Bradley for the New Yorker and then went to work on a book about the boy. The result, A Sense of Where You Are, has been continuously in print since 1965 and has now been reprinted with a 1999 addendum. It’s as embarrassing today as it was thirty-five years ago.

Hagiographies are dangerous to everyone involved — but especially the subject. His real virtues can get lost in his attempt to live up to the ones the writer ascribed to him. And think how especially dangerous that is when the subject is only twenty years old. McPhee begins by talking about his own father, a man hard to impress. In fact, McPhee says, “I had never heard him actually make a direct statement of praise about any athlete.” McPhee himself has no such problem. After watching Bradley play for five minutes, the author calls him “the most graceful and classical basketball player who had ever been near Princeton.” “It seemed to me that I had been watching all the possibilities of the game that I had ever imagined, and then some,” he continues. Then McPhee says Bradley is “among the better players, amateur or professional, in the history of the sport.” And that’s all before page thirteen.

Later McPhee calls Bradley “good-looking” and says he “is more interesting to watch before a game than most players are in play.” As a matter of basketball, of course, McPhee is wrong. Bradley was an excellent college player who became an above-average professional. Since the 1950s, there has been a curious and unspoken inversion of affirmative action in basketball, not unmixed with racism. White players are often overrated and overpaid. Bradley was the highest paid player in the NBA his rookie year, making four times what his New York Knicks teammate Walt Frazier was paid. He went on to average eight points per game.

But on the other hand, as a white kid with a Rhodes scholarship, he sold tickets. Fans felt they could identify with white players, and it is this same impulse — the need to see oneself in an athlete — that tied McPhee to Bradley. After all, McPhee was a smart Princeton grad too, and seeing Bradley out on the floor must have made him feel it was all right to be an intelligent white guy. When they first met, McPhee was thirty-two and Bradley twenty. McPhee promptly moved to Princeton. To read his book is to be profoundly unsettled by the picture of a grown man panting after a boy, wanting so to be his friend.

If McPhee had merely overpraised Bradley’s athletic abilities, his book would be unremarkable. The pernicious part of A Sense of Where You Are is McPhee’s thesis that Bradley is a great athlete because he is a superior person. He writes that Bradley “is easily the most widely admired student on the campus and probably the best liked.” “One effect that Bradley has had on Princeton,” he adds, “has been to widen noticeably the undergraduate body’s tolerance for people with high ethical standards.”

It gets worse: “I have asked all sorts of people who know Bradley, or know about him, what they think he will be doing when he is forty. A really startling number of them, including teachers, coaches, college boys, and even journalists, give the same answer: ‘He will be the governor of Missouri.’ The chief dissent comes from people who look beyond the stepping stone of the Missouri State House and calmly tell you that Bradley is going to be president.” It wasn’t just McPhee, either. In a New York Post column, Leonard Shecter wrote, “In twenty-five years or so our presidents are going to have to be better than ever. It’s nice to know that Bill Bradley will be available.” The only criticism McPhee ever offers is that Bradley has a “mania for throwing the ball to his teammates” — that he is just too unselfish as a player.

Bradley may have been the most famous college student in American history — profiles in magazines, speaking engagements all over the world, a book written about him, a general sense that he was the second coming of Pericles. And here’s the curious thing the reader comes to realize after reading the 1999 edition of A Sense of Where You Are: All that relentless adoration of Bill Bradley all those years ago finally rendered him incapable of doing anything. His favorite issue as a politician has been race, and for twenty years now he has talked about how dear racial issues are to him. On the surface it seems genuine: Unlike most white men in public life, he has a lot of black friends. But while Bradley always talks about leading Americans out of racial darkness, he has never really had anything to say — he has never been able to push himself to articulate things that might make some people dislike him.

Today, Bradley is a paragon of self-proclaimed virtue. He left the Senate in 1996, claiming that “politics was broken,” though, of course, he’s now running for president. He says, “I believe that justice is what the Democratic party stands for,” while he staunchly opposed Clinton’s impeachment. Asked why he should be president, what vision he has for America, he responds, “I think my leadership would improve the quality of life.” In the nineteenth century, it was famously said of Henry Adams that he didn’t want to be president so much as he wanted everyone else to want him to be president. And when he found out that politics is dirty, he withdrew in disgust. The same was said in the 1950s of Adlai Stevenson, who soldiered on through the muck, driven by an ever more perfect moral vanity. And if truth be told, there’s more than a little Adlai Stevenson in Bill Bradley. He wants so badly for us to admire him for his stand on something that he has never quite been able to make up his mind what it is he’s going to stand for.

In college, Bradley’s team never won the big game. In the 1964-1965 season, his Princeton squad played the number-one team in the country, the University of Michigan, led by Cazzie Russell. Bradley fouled out and Michigan won. The two teams would meet again in the Final Four. Bradley fouled out, again. Princeton lost, again. In basketball, as in politics, reality trumps myth. As metaphors go, it’s a compelling one.

Jonathan V. Last is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.