Driven Scholar-Athlete Paid a Price to Meet Demands

Bradley was years away from any interest in marriage, and perhaps Sawyer was too. Neither of them today wants to discuss their romance or its demise.

Bradley's remoteness then, even from love, seemed to friends a corollary of his struggle to maintain some autonomy in an endlessly demanding world. Singer, one of Bradley's best friends and a psychiatrist in California, said Bradley is "exquisitely tuned to when he's doing things for other people. He knows a lot about that. He's acutely aware of the dangers of doing things simply to fulfill other people's high expectations for him, as opposed to following his real vision."

Speaking with a magazine called Police Gazette in 1968, Bradley replied this way to a question about all the public expectations: "I'm flattered in a way. And I'm burdened. No, burdened is the wrong word. What I mean to say is that it places a great responsibility on me."

Burdened was closer. That year, his rookie season as a Knick, Bradley was failing. Dick McGuire, his coach, blamed himself for matching Bradley against smaller, more agile guards instead of forwards. "It's tough playing against guys that are quicker than you," McGuire said. "They're in your jock and you can't get free of them." Daniel Okimoto, a Princeton roommate and among Bradley's closest friends, remembers Bradley telling him: " 'Basketball is the one thing in my life I could always fall back on and excel at. . . . Now a key element of my identity has been shaken and I'll see how I deal with it.' "

A Sense of What He Lost

During a road trip in his third season as a Knick, Bradley, by now a valued starter, let down his guard with columnist Robert Lipsyte. The path he had chosen for himself at Princeton, he said, left "no room" for personal development--only study and basketball. "By my junior year I was very aware of my own loss, and those last two years were a matter of playing out my hand," he said. He felt "channelized by society, perhaps considered a smart athlete, or an athlete with character, but still a particular kind of object instead of a particular human being."

The next year, on May 17, Bradley flew to St. Louis to honor Missouri high school scholar-athletes at the Sheraton Jefferson Hotel. Bradley, putting it mildly, warned 113 younger versions of himself who had gathered for plaudits in the hotel's Gold Room that he would "not follow the usual procedure" on such an occasion. "Some of the things I'll say, I wish had been said to me a few years ago when I was a senior in high school," he began.

Long and dark, Bradley's keynote speech silenced the room. He quoted from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and gave voice to broad discontent with the social and political ills of the day. Most of all he urged introspection. "The necessary identity crisis that most people go through in late adolescence occurs less often in the life of the scholar-athlete," he said, "for his milieu gives him a role at age 18, with tempting rewards to play it."

"As you succeed, more and more people will take sustenance from you, while simultaneously they grow further from you personally," Bradley told the boys. "America is a vicarious society. . . . Thousands of people who do not know me use my participation on a Sunday afternoon as an excuse for non-action, as a fix to help them escape their own everyday problems, and society's problems. The toll of providing that experience is beginning to register on me."

To close his speech, Bradley urged his listeners to ask and answer a question: "Are you being subtly programmed into being a certain kind of person with a narrow range of traditional career alternatives?"

"If so," he advised them, "rebel."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

About This Series

Sunday: Great Expectations

A childhood of discipline and achievement.

Today:"Best in the Nation"

Basketball and fame at Princeton.

Tuesday: Rebellion and Return

Oxford and the Knicks.

Wednesday: Moral Foundations

A Christian athlete and his faith.

Thursday: Picking His Shots

Big issues and near-defeat in the Senate.

Friday: A Sense of Where He Was

Leaving the Senate and aiming for the White House.

Best or Bust: Bradley led Princeton to third place in the NCAA tournament, then scolded fans for cheering on the team's return because "We didn't produce." Admiration: Bradley, above left, and college teammate Bill Kingston, who also was his roommate and helped with fan mail. Sports Illustrated accolades in 1964, below left. Commencement: Bradley and cousin Steven Trautwein at Princeton graduation.