Driven Scholar-Athlete Paid a Price to Meet Demands

"Dear Prof. Link," he wrote on the stationery of the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. "We leave this evening for Tokyo after a month of practice and conditioning. There is a natural excitement as each member prepares himself for the most rigorous challenge of his athletic life."

Bradley proceeded to report the progress of his thesis research, which was "growing daily." He had interviewed Truman's primary election opponent and ex-Missouri governor Lloyd C. Stark, and still hoped to see the former president. (He never did.) The letter served to reassure a professor who did not yet know Bradley well but whom Bradley had just asked to recommend him for a Rhodes.

In Bradley's application essay, he described his aspirations this way: "I can best serve mankind as a politician." Link agreed, and wrote the Rhodes committee on Nov. 4, saying he had never taught a student of finer character.

"Academically, Mr. Bradley is, in my opinion, somewhat better than his record would indicate," Link wrote. "I hasten to add that this record is by no means a poor one. Mr. Bradley now stands twenty-eighth among some 130 seniors now majoring in the Department of History, and I suspect that his record would be better if he had not spent quite so much time in sports. . . . He is not brilliant in the way that a few students are, but he has plenty of intelligence and is extremely well disciplined and a steady and reliable worker."

Bradley went on to captain the Olympic team, lead the United States to a gold medal, and win the Rhodes. The price he paid was less apparent at the time.

'The Show Must Go On'

As early as his 15th year, Bradley picked up the high school newspaper one day to find a popular cheerleader a year ahead of him, Penny Pouliezos, declaring her interest in print. "They had a thing in the paper, 'What would you like for Christmas?' and I put in there that I wanted the tallest basketball player in the high school," she recalled. Bradley dated her briefly, but soon told her he was spoken for--by a basketball.

In early manhood Bradley turned more and more inward, particularly in rebuffing would-be girlfriends who approached him as a prize. In his first book, "Life on the Run," he said celebrity had taught him what beautiful women learn early on, "the unnaturalness of being a sex object." But there was another factor, too: his father's dinner table aphorism that "he who travels alone, travels fastest." Bradley sometimes repeated that line in college. He had a long way yet to travel.

Even in real relationships, Bradley maintained a distance. Susan Fortney, his high school girlfriend, said she stayed true to him in his freshman year at college. Bradley spent the summer afterward back home in Crystal City and in St. Louis, where he scrimmaged with off-season pros and took a French course to clear himself of academic probation. Fortney, long promoted by Bradley's mother as a singer--and, most everyone in town says now, as daughter-in-law--had landed a summer job in the chorus of the St. Louis Opera.

"Have you managed to see Chris more than once or twice a week?" Bradley asked Kingston in a July 22, 1962, letter, referring to his roommate's California girlfriend. "If you have you're way ahead of me. I'm lucky if I see Susan that often but remember THE SHOW MUST GO ON (or so they say). Actually it's probably best this way because she is enjoying tremendously what she is doing and I hope that I'm making some kind of substantial progress on these 'so-called' summer objectives."

Later at Princeton, Bradley dated a young woman from Wellesley College. Diane Sawyer, already showing the star quality that took her to ABC television, was serious enough about her boyfriend to bring her parents to spend Christmas with the Bradley family in 1966.

Marty Glickman, for years the broadcast voice of the Knicks and Bradley's future business agent, saw the two of them together on that trip, though he did not know Sawyer at the time. "I visited him in St. Louis. I was there to do a game," Glickman said. "I met him at the hotel I was staying at, and he says, 'Just a second, I've got to meet this friend of mine,' and the most beautiful girl I ever saw came down to talk to him."