An Ivy Leaguer Is The Best

If you look at all of him squarely, Bill Bradley seems too good—and too much—to be true. He is the best college basketball player in the world (he won an Olympic gold medal and was the best on the U.S. team in Tokyo); he is studious, religious, ambitious, popular and respected by his peers; he is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous—he is, in short, Jack Armstrong and might also be Horatio Alger, except for the fact that his father is a bank president and is paying for Bill's room, board and tuition at Princeton.

Fortunately—you have to look hard for a flaw—the quirk of a permanently arched left eyebrow gives him a mischievous, almost Satanic, appearance, but that, too, is quickly disputed by the sober, purposeful eyes, far more accurate gauges of this young man's personality. Bradley is dark, angularly strong, with a few more than 200 pounds on a lithe 6-foot-5 frame. His smile from out of the opposite page truly reflects his warmth, though he can hardly be called the happy-go-lucky type. But it does belie his rigorous determination and self-discipline. Bradley insists that he is not a natural athlete. Without detracting from the immense effort he has put into basketball, few observers would agree with this estimate. It probably is true that his more modest academic success is the result of hard work rather than natural aptitude. Any Princeton student will tell you that a man who studies as much as Bradley does should be better than a B student—even if that would be A at most other schools.

Despite the fact that Bradley and Princeton get along marvelously, there is still mild astonishment that the best player in the country should be matriculating at Old Nassau, an institution which has produced twice as many presidents as basketball All-Americas, i.e. James Madison, Woodrow Wilson and William Warren Bradley. But there are certainly no regrets on Bradley's part about his choice of college. He picked Princeton in the 11th hour, leaving Duke at the very altar and about 60 other schools and their coaches on the road to the church. All had been attracted by a high school career in Crystal City, Mo. that included 3,066 points and two years of prep All-America. One of the losing coaches said sourly that Bradley could have been the greatest college player ever, but performing in the relative obscurity of the Ivy League would deprive him of that chance.

It has worked out, of course, in reverse. The novelty of having such an athlete performing in the shadows of ivy-walled Nassau Hall—without a grant-in-aid, without ersatz courses of study—has only enhanced Bradley's reputation. In the unique setting of the Olympic trials, where all of the best amateur players are thrown against each other in direct competition, without the support of familiar teammates, Bradley was the only undergraduate selected. Further, he had to make the team as a guard, after playing almost exclusively as a forward for Princeton, because the coaches thought he was too small for the forecourt in this competition. When they discovered they were wrong, he went back to forward and became the most valuable player on the winning U.S. team.

At Princeton, Bradley blends in easily though, basketball aside, he is still not a typical undergraduate—he is more serious and less blas� than most. He plays basketball with an air of nonchalance, however, and is treated with roughly that attitude on campus. This delights him. He enjoys contrasting his reception after the Olympics with the full-blown parade that the town of Princeton gave its gold-medal winner, Diver Leslie Bush. "I flew back." he says, "and took a bus from New York and finally got to Princeton about 9 one morning. Thirty straight hours of travel. There was nobody to meet me. I just walked down to my room. A few people said hello or welcome back, but that was about it."

Actually, Princeton does take a prideful interest in its All-America—in its own fashion—and Bradley has had something of a lasting effect on the school. When he arrived, games at snug little Dillon Gym (2,600 roll-out seats) were characterized by the atmosphere of a public hanging. Students showed up mostly to take out their wintertime frustrations on opponents. On one notable weekend the visiting Harvard captain was driven into fighting with some of his tormentors on Friday night, and on Saturday night the Dartmouth players were pelted with rubber-band-propelled paper clips. An appeal by the coach and captain during Bradley's sophomore year helped, but it was more his regal presence on the floor that finally brought an urbane attitude to basketball watching. "It's like—well. I don't think you could chuck garbage at anyone on stage when Caruso's up there too." an undergraduate explains.

Sellouts at Dillon were common enough, but after Bradley started playing, basketball seating had to be restricted on the same basis as football. About 440 extra (and bad) seats will be crammed in this year, but still only students, faculty, a few alumni and opponents will be able to get in. It is no coincidence that Princeton has finally become serious about building a much larger indoor athletic complex. Plans are being speeded for a new arena that will seat upward of 7,000.

But Princeton students hold Bradley's basketball skill less in awe than they do his prodigious purpose. He studies in virtually all of his free time and seldom gets more than six hours' sleep. Before one game last winter, when he was completing an important history department paper on nativism in the U.S. after World War I, he trained with four straight nights of about two hours' sleep each. His teammates say that he plays so well on the road simply because travel keeps him away from Firestone Library and obliges him to sleep more. Two hours before every home game he goes back to his room in Dodge-Osborn Hall and is able to drift right off for a 40-minute nap. "Well, you know, I'm so tired, it's not hard," he says. He is so conscientious that he has been known to ask roommates to wake him up from a nap at, say, 5:27 instead of 5:30. To save other minutes he takes many of his meals at the student union, which is several hundred yards closer to the library than his eating club, Cottage.

Bradley lives—after the library closes at midnight—with five roommates. The only other basketball player among them, Bill Kingston, is perhaps as close to him as anyone. "Getting to know Bill has been worth the four years here," Kingston says. "But always, I just wish he could be more outgoing." Donald Mathews, a young instructor who was Bradley's advisor last year and became a friend as much as a teacher, says: "He comes to generalizations painfully. I think Bill is becoming more mellow, but he will never shoot the breeze, as it were, without having done some studying on the subject."

Bradley is restrained intentionally because of the special pressures upon him—he says things like. "No one has to know my motives." and "I don't have to wear my heart on my sleeve"—but he is also naturally reticent. "Of course." teammate Ed Steube says, "it would be nice to have Bill loosen up, but then, you see. it wouldn't be Bill Bradley."