Driven Scholar-Athlete Paid a Price to Meet Demands

Gary Walters, now Princeton's athletic director, frowned at Marin's choice of adjective, preferring "Darwinistic." "Basketball is a contact sport," Walters said. "He was never a goody-two-shoes. If Bill had been a pitcher, he would have thrown brushback pitches. That's the game within the game."

Willis Reed, who won two NBA titles with Bradley, said he "was always the guy who wanted to do things that got guys pissed off." In the deciding seventh game against Boston for the Eastern Conference title of 1973, Bradley came out to half-court at the coin toss and stiff-armed Celtic Don Nelson in the chest.

"Bill starts pushing and shoving," Reed recalled, laughing. "Now Don Nelson is bigger than him, stronger than him, and they're acting like they have to fight. After the game I said to Bill, 'What the hell was going on?' He said, 'I was just playing games with Nellie, trying to break his concentration a little.' He did a good job. I actually thought he was getting ready to fight."

The Knicks won the game. That year, for the second time, they were champions of the world.

God and Man at Princeton

If expectations of Bradley had been high in Crystal City, they defied all reason in college. They also flew in the face of Bradley's own doubts that he could thrive in Ivy League classrooms.

"I went to Princeton, nearly didn't make it my freshman year, right?" Bradley said. "I had spring semester grades where I must have been close to failing in two subjects. French and biology, I think. So then I just lived in the library."

Save to roommates and teammates--and even they did not suspect its depth--Bradley disclosed little sign of his insecurity. He improved as a student each year, but never felt safe from failure. Robert Tignor, who supervised his junior paper and a small discussion group on modern European history, said Bradley hung back in seminars as more confident students took the lead. "He would wait until we were 25 minutes or so in the conversation" and then comment on someone else's point, Tignor said. "He just didn't strike you as having that intellectual dexterity."

All this accompanied a public persona who spent his days bathed in admiration and awe--declared "best in the nation" on the cover of Sports Illustrated, a model of Christian rectitude by Norman Vincent Peale and a future president so often it became cliche.

Teammate Walters said, "It's very tough to communicate to you how deified he was." That Almighty image is endemic in the memories and press clippings of the era. Classmate Larry Lucchino, who owns the San Diego Padres baseball franchise, described it as an "aura . . . of near-idolatry."

During Bicker, the equivalent of fraternity rush at Princeton's upper-class eating clubs, all 15 clubs offered places to Bradley. Tom Singer, the senior who delivered Cottage Club's bid to the younger man, said, "It was like a god coming into your presence. I was in awe that I met him. He was already so larger than life."

A religion professor taught a point of philosophy in Bradley's senior year by posing this question to his class: Is Bill Bradley "a basketball player greater than whom none can be conceived?" (Answer: No, but strictly on epistemological grounds.) Princeton fans screamed, "Don't touch God!" when an opposing player roughed him up on court. The Latin salutation at closing exercises cited "Guilliamum Bradley," whose uncanny play brought "lauros antehac a Tigribus numquam exspectatas ceperit"--roughly translated as honors not hitherto hoped for by the Tigers. For those rusty on their ancient languages, the university handed out helpful advice on when to applaud.