Driven Scholar-Athlete Paid a Price to Meet Demands

The Princeton record book today still has Bradley's name down for most career points (2,503), highest average (30.2), the three highest single-season totals (936, 885 and 662) and all 10 of the top 10 scoring games (from 58 down to 41) in the university's history.

But the Bradley phenomenon was not strictly athletic. He knew he was under a microscope, and his life withstood the inspection: Sunday school teacher, poster boy for temperance, midnight grind--of necessity--in Firestone Library's hideaway room 2-8J. Once, teammate Ed Hummer recalled, Bradley woke late for church when electricity failed his alarm clock. That really set him off: "Darn the power company!" Bradley raged.

Bradley's roommates remember, sometimes ruefully, their days as ad hoc retainers. One day a group of Syracuse fraternity pledges turned up, desperate for Bradley's autograph. The next day brought a pastor who wanted him for a guest sermon in Philadelphia. Among their other chores, the roommates found themselves writing letters like this one from Kingston to Charles Hueber, an alumnus he knew slightly: "The last few days at Princeton were so hectic that I was unable to attain his signature. . . . However, if you will bear with me, you should receive the autographed pictures in the mail within a few weeks."

Four dozen letters arrived for Bradley every week, soliciting advice, mementos, endorsements, public appearances, occasionally a more intimate acquaintance. "I've never seen anyone handle premature celebrity so well," said Librarian of Congress James Billington, who was a junior faculty member in the history department where Bradley took his major. Gregory Guroff, then a history graduate student, marveled at the absence of enemies: "Real popular people on campus, there's at least somewhere out there some set of detractors. With Bradley, I never felt that."

Not that Bradley was immune to self-interest. John Trubee, who later advised the young Knick on his investment portfolio, recalls that Bradley wanted only one thing--the hamburger concession--when Trubee's Class of 1954 asked him to be honorary chairman of its reunion party. Near midnight, after much dancing and drinking by the revelers, "Bradley came up to me and said, 'Mr. Trubee, most of your classmates are so well bombed they don't know what they're getting. Do you mind if I take these four-ounce patties and make them into three-ounce patties?' . . . I felt, by God, this guy's going to be all right. He's going to be a capitalist."

As his Knickerbocker teammates would do a few years later, some of his friends at Princeton called him "Mr. President." Bradley's reaction was complicated. Sometimes he laughed, sometimes he frowned. "But he also didn't say, 'Don't call me that,' " said teammate Rick Wright, who is leading fund-raising efforts in Bradley's presidential campaign.

'I Can Best Serve Mankind'

For public consumption and private peace of mind, Bradley was staving off expectations. But he planned for more distant horizons than most people his age.

Going into his senior year at Princeton, Bradley competed for a spot on the 1964 Olympic basketball team. As he stood on the verge of that boyhood dream, Bradley already laid foundations for his next one--a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.

And for another after that. Again the same summer, he began to research his senior thesis, due the following spring. The subject was Harry Truman's 1940 election campaign. For Senate. In Bradley's home state. Truman's last stop on his way to the White House.

"I chose this topic in order to become more intimately acquainted with the political structure of Missouri," Bradley wrote in his preface when he submitted the 150-page paper. "The year 1940 was a year when all elements of the political spectrum were present--principle, law, graft, costly accusations, and a fickle public."

Before boarding a Sept. 30, 1964, flight to the Olympic village, Bradley dispatched a three-page handwritten letter to Arthur S. Link, the Princeton history professor who would supervise his thesis.