A Private Journey Comes Full Circle

Edging Toward Home

With all the experimenting, Bradley might have discovered "that he's an altogether different person," Smith said. "Of course it doesn't exactly turn out that way."

One door left ajar led to the gymnasium. Bradley had walked away from his first-round draft selection by the New York Knicks, in favor of the Rhodes, and he told friends as well as reporters that he did not expect to play pro ball when he returned. But Bradley left himself an opening.

Before he had been in England a month, he allowed himself to be talked into flying to Milan. The basketball team there--sponsored by the Italian meatpacker Simmenthal--recruited him to make a run at the European Cup, one weekend a month. When Simmenthal reached the championship, the Milanese crowds mobbed him and screamed "Super-Uomo." Italy, unlike England, had fallen for basketball.

By the fall of 1966, as he began his second Oxford year, Bradley began to think more about the Knicks. He made contact with Larry Fleischer, a New York sports agent, and had dinner with Marty Glickman, Fleischer's partner, at a riverside pub in Oxford.

In January 1967, the ball player-turned-politician Rep. Morris Udall (D-Ariz.) passed through Oxford. He looked up the 23-year-old Bradley, and told a local audience in Tucson about their conversation when he returned. "He said the professional basketball people are after him to sign and he wondered how pro basketball and politics might mix," Udall said then. "I thought it might help him if he talked with [Supreme Court Justice Byron] 'Whizzer' White."

Two months later, in Washington, Udall introduced Bradley to White, a college football star who played in the NFL. "I went over and talked to him and he said he thought I ought to play, and I said, 'You know, I don't want to be just an athlete,' " Bradley told tennis great Arthur Ashe in a conversation televised by the ESPN cable network in 1987. "And he said . . . 'If you play basketball and use your time in the off-season, you can have the double benefit of doing something you love and at the same time develop other aspects of your life.' "

First, Bradley had to face a decision on the draft. He had applications to Harvard and Yale law schools, and he had solicited information about a possible teaching post at West Point. But law school might not shield him from conscription, Bradley wrote, because "my board has told me that another deferment after Oxford would be difficult." Bradley turned to the Air Force Reserve.

Not long after meeting Udall in Oxford, Bradley flew home for a visit to New Jersey's McGuire Air Force Base. He found a regulation enabling him to secure a reserve commission without prior military service. Introduced by an Air Force friend, he met Col. Campbell Y. Jackson on Jan. 12, 1967, and soon had a weekend reserve job in the 514th Troop Carrier Wing--commuting distance from Madison Square Garden, and a long way from Southeast Asia.

His two-year fling was over. Bradley picked up his career where he had left it--in basketball, with a view to politics after that.

Rebellion's End

Just before he left Oxford, Bradley had a visit from William S. Sword Sr., an investment banker and Princeton alumnus. He offered a variation on the advice Bradley had heard in White's Supreme Court chamber, this time with a reading list.