Life on the Run by Bill Bradley Read Free Book Online

mother who spent a lot of time at church, and a banker father who suffered from severe arthritis. We lived in comfortable circumstances. As early as I can remember I was programmed to become a successful gentleman. My father insisted on manners and my mother on success. I took lessons in practically everything: dancing, trumpet, french horn, piano, boxing, tennis, golf, swimming, canoeing, typing, French, and horseback riding. Our home served as a meeting place for my friends, and my mother arranged excursions to museums, baseball games, swimming holes. By the time I was fourteen I had become self-motivated. Whatever raced inside me was more demanding than any pressure applied by parents or teachers.
    At about that time I began in earnest to play basketball, spending four hours a day, alone, in the high school gymnasium, choreographing the smallest detail of particular moves I had learned at Easy Ed Macauley’s basketball camp. Gone were the leisurely hikes with my grandfather along the banks of the Mississippi listening to stories of his youth in Germany. The river road became only a track along which I ran for miles, training for my sophomore season. Basketball was my preoccupation about which I never talked with my parents and about which they manifested little interest. At fifteen, when a girl called me up one night in a playful mood, I told her I was already dating someone—a basketball.
    The high school coach, the only man who would ever be “the coach” to me, was like a monk, withdrawn personally and unsociable in town circles; unreachable by the power of the company, the church, the bank, or the mayor; rigid with discipline and sparse with compliments; inspiring to boys like me, cruel to those unprepared or unwilling. Never did he confuse his roles. He was not the college counselor, family advisor, tutor, athletic businessman, or budding politician. He aspired only to be the coach. It was a calling. If in the years as a New York Knick there would be thousands of words written about passing and teamwork and hitting the open man, it would all be true but it would not be new. It would be “the coach’s” game, which by age seventeen was second-nature to me.
    An education at Princeton placed a layer between adolescence and manhood and pressed me toward a traditionally acceptable career. But it was my two years of study at Oxford that proved the more rewarding experience. I was determined when I left the United States in 1965 that I was finished with basketball, or more appropriately I was finished with the public acclaim that surrounded the game. My last year in college I had received fifty letters a day and had become something of a symbol as the Christian scholar-athlete. Although it was true that I studied, practiced, and went to church, the media exaggerated each facet of my life until expectations were generated in the public that I could never fulfill. When I told reporters I was interested in politics they wrote that I wanted to be President or Secretary of State. When I told ministers that I could not speak at their church they accused me of being un-Christian. When I told coaches that I could not play in post-season all-star games they said I was ungrateful to the sport which had given me so much. The greater the acclaim became, the more certain it was that the public appetite could never be satisfied. The only way out, I thought, was to reject basketball and become a lawyer or a businessman.
    At Oxford I had time to experiment with every aspect of my life. For the first time since I was fourteen I took chances with my body—hiking, racing cars, and playing contact sports—without fear of injury. Eating five meals a day I even gained 30 pounds. I questioned my religious faith and sought workable moral values instead of simply rules. I became more playful and rebellious, responding to events in a way that discipline and obligation had outlawed before. I began to enjoy people more, at first only if they