A Religious Journey With Twists and Turns

The teenage friends met in Bryant's basement on Thursday nights for 2 1/2 years to master the badge's syllabus of civics and theology. "Our church has two catechisms, the short catechism and the long catechism," Bryant said. "They did the long one." Bradley memorized 107 refrains. Reciting the requirements to escape God's "wrath and curse," for example, Bradley had to furnish citations to Mark 1:15, Acts 20:21, Acts 2:38, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25 and Colossians 3:16.

John Schwent, another competitor for the badge, recalled recently that "we were finding God in our own way, and rediscovering him."

Bradley's way followed the head, not the heart, a path of will and self-control. Susie Bradley aimed to amend that. When her son finished his junior year at Crystal City High in 1960, she placed a call to Kansas City.

She reached associate secretary Gary Demerest of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and asked for information about sending her son to an FCA conference. At a six-day program that August in Lake Geneva, Wis., Bradley, 17, found a program of "inspiration and perspiration" that set him on a new spiritual course.

The conference featured athletic heroes the likes of Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller and West Point coach Paul Dietzel. The men sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "Rise Up, O Men of God." Football pros Fran Tarkenton and Don Moomaw gave testimonies of their intimate encounters with Jesus.

"I was not prepared for the flow of emotion that hit me," Bradley wrote in 1996. " . . . I knew I was yielding to the moment in a way that I never had before. I felt that I would never be the same."

In a 1967 interview recorded for a documentary film, Susie Bradley urged filmmaker Michael Ahnemann to include that transformation in his portrait of her son. She described a scene in his high school senior year in which he said bedtime prayers ("He doesn't know I watched him, but I did") even on the day his Hornets lost the state basketball championship by a point.

At Lake Geneva, Bradley learned the fellowship's central aim--to launch "a conquering Christian offensive" against "atheistic materialism and world revolution," as Demerest put it.

"I first met Jesus Christ at an FCA conference when I was a junior in high school," Bradley told 800 assembled athletes at his third conference in 1964, according to the minutes. "I went away saying I want to believe, but I thought I had to have a bolt of lightning or something to really know Christ."

One place he looked, in his senior year of high school, was the Book of Revelation.

"We grew up knowing the atom bomb would drop on us one day," Schwent said, recalling that Bradley sketched a design for his own backyard fallout shelter--a mound of earth, a vault below, a basketball and a stack of National Geographics to pass the time. Bradley's discussion of the Bomb referred to Revelations, Schwent said, "and he could quote verses."

The Bear found in that book, young Bradley told friends, represented the Soviet Union. The Eagle--crying "woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth"--referred to the United States. As for "the Lion of the tribe of Judah," who pried loose the seven seals and opened the scroll on Judgment Day, Schwent said: "The lion was Israel. That was going to be where the war would be, like Armageddon."