A Religious Journey With Twists and Turns

Bradley set quietly about finding more converts. To Princeton teammates or friends who lacked interest, he showed no more than a positive example--generosity, humility, discipline. To those who seemed receptive, he spoke more directly.

"He gets dozens of letters a week, from all over the country," roommate Coleman Hicks said during their senior year. "For example, he showed me one a while ago from a high school boy who asked Bill to decide for him whether it was right to go steady and still play basketball."

In his sophomore year, Bradley walked into the spare stone First Presbyterian Church on Nassau Street and expressed an interest in teaching Sunday school. A telephone call to the Rev. Otis L. Graham in Crystal City proved reassuring, and William S. Sword Sr., a church elder, gave the young man a try.

When a snow-delayed away game at Dartmouth kept Bradley past midnight one Saturday in Hanover, N.H., Sword made arrangements to cover Bradley's class the next morning. "Next morning . . . frozen snow, and the team bus pulled in," Sword said. "It stopped at the church, and one guy got out. There was Bill Bradley, and he had his Sunday school books under his arm."

At Bradley's third visit to the Christian fellowship conference, he came as a featured speaker, just after weightlifting champion Paul Anderson demonstrated how faith (and 22-inch biceps) enabled him to drive a nail through a one-inch board with his fist. Every man had to make a choice, Bradley said, between a "materialistic, egocentric life or a godly life." The first built a pyramid "doomed to crumble." The second, a lasting role "in the battlefield for Jesus."

To teenagers gathered back home, Bradley preached an unflinching hierarchy of values.

"It's not the places you go, or the people you know, or the clothes you wear, or the school you attend, or the money you make that is the important thing in life," Bradley told one church audience in Princeton Township, according to notes made there by Christian writer James R. Adair. "Are you serving Jesus Christ? Are you living a life that's for Him and making this your aim, your goal, your whole life?"

An essay for the FCA magazine Christian Athlete offered readers this scenario: "Suppose you are on the bus, or in the locker room discussing plans for the weekend with a group of your buddies. They suggest doing this or that which is wrong in your thinking, and you say so. They ask you 'Why?' You say, 'Because I don't think that Jesus Christ would want us to do that and that's why I'm not going to do it.'"

Though Bradley did not dwell on fire and brimstone, he alluded to it in terms that were plain enough. In an evangelist tract titled "The Big Victory," he returned to the Book of Revelation: "Jesus told us what he thought about tepid followers when He said, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. I find wide application in this verse."

The effects on Bradley's audience could be powerful. One testament to that came by letter from Princeton's First Presbyterian Church to Susie Bradley on April 22, 1965.

"Dear Mrs. Bradley," wrote Eleanor Meisel. "Please let me introduce myself--I am the wife of the minister of the church that Bill Bradley has made famous. My husband has received calls from ministers from all over, asking about Bill, and Tuesday evening he was invited to introduce Bill, who was to speak at the YMCA in Westfield, N.J., where a thousand people had gathered."

"It is so overwhelming and almost frightening to see a boy of 21 project the image he does," Meisel wrote.

'A Christian Sage'

On Career Day, in Bradley's last winter at Princeton, he spent an hour in a classroom session on becoming a minister. Armstrong, who had not seen him since their long talk in Colorado, smiled when Bradley walked in. "He was asking me questions. He was thinking about it," Armstrong said.

The late Arthur S. Link, the historian who was Bradley's thesis supervisor, shared that view. That winter Link wrote a reference in support of Bradley's candidacy for a one-year scholarship to seminary.

"I believe very firmly that Bill Bradley ought to give serious thought to vocation in the Church, and I have urged this point of view on him several times," Link wrote. "I know that he is genuinely undecided and I am sure that he will find his true vocation, whatever that might be, only if he does try a year in seminary."

Bradley, in an interview, said he had no memory of making the application or considering a career in the clergy.

Bradley pursued his mission without abandoning the fierce competitiveness he exhibited on the basketball court.

At the Tokyo Olympic Games, where he captained the U.S. team, he badly wanted to defeat the Soviet Union and expected--correctly--a very rough game. He also knew the Soviets liked to call out their plays in Russian, expecting no one to understand them. Bradley asked Princeton's Slavic Languages department to give him a warning phrase in street Russian to use while throwing back an elbow or a knee. Early in the bruising battle for the gold, Bradley hissed, "Bud'te ostorozhno"--roughly, "Watch it, be careful." Flustered, the Russians stopped calling out plays and lost some of their harmony on the court.

After he helped beat them, Bradley struck up a friendship with guard Uris Kalninish. He gave him "the Russian translation of a book which is the most important thing in the world to me: the Bible," Bradley wrote a few months later. "If he reads and studies this Book I think he may come to understand why I feel so strongly about it."

Bradley testified on the grandest scale in London on Jan. 21, 1966, where evangelist Billy Graham had brought a four-week campaign he termed a crusade. Promoters described it as "the largest evangelical gathering in the history of England." The rally where Bradley spoke, as one of several warm-up speakers for Graham, drew a crowd of 21,000. He gave a rendition of his familiar conversion story, but his heart no longer was in the tale.

Bradley had been struggling with his conscience, he wrote in his memoir 30 years later, as he came to see a downside to "my Christian fundamentalism." It did not tolerate debate, and many of its adherents did not sympathize with the civil rights movement that Bradley had come to see as the primary moral question of the day.

"As I stood on the platform . . . I did not respect myself," Bradley wrote. "I was speaking as if religious fervor continued to dominate my life."

Disillusionment

In the clash between church and social justice, as Bradley saw them, church lost. The passions he withdrew from one he transferred, in large measure, to the other.

While at Oxford, Bradley, at the suggestion of Link, who knew the pastor John Thornton had worshiped mainly at St. Columba Presbyterian Church. While he did not mention the church by name, Bradley writes in his memoir that the minister of his regular church preached a sermon one Sunday "that blatantly defended white Rhodesian power. I walked out, never to return."

What he felt in those days, his wife, Ernestine Schlant, said in an interview, is that "all of us are better" for the civil rights laws that were enacted in response to the violence that met the struggle for equality waged by American blacks in the South. "That's maybe a positive way of phrasing the anger: We are all a better country, meaning we really need to be a better country--badly."

This line of thinking started earlier. At Princeton, Bradley told the writer John L. Phillips, he had taken an American politics course "taught by H.H. Wilson, who had been attacked by McCarthy in the witch hunts of the '50s. A lot of stuff I read under him--'The Politics of Oil,' Eisenhower's speech on the military-industrial complex--outraged me. The American people were getting screwed. I'd leave class and wander around campus in a fog."

Between academic years at Oxford, Bradley took a 2,300-mile drive through the western Soviet Union. Two of the three men who went with him spoke Russian, and they camped with Russian tourists for a more natural encounter with the society. "The pride they held for their country and their system was obvious," Bradley wrote to Link in the fall of 1966. "If I get started now I might write too much. Suffice it to say that the trip gave me a truer picture of Soviet life, challenged my spirit of patriotism, exposed some previously unnoticed ills in our own society."

Bradley's return to New York to play for the Knicks coincided with the struggles over civil rights, Vietnam and the environment. He began to speak out, most often in jarring counterpoint to the occasion.

In 1971, the sponsors of a banquet for St. Louis scholar-athletes invited Bradley to help celebrate. He gave a long exposition of the maladies, personal and public, that the new high school graduates would face.

After quoting song lyrics from Bob Dylan--"the curse, it is cast" and "the order is rapidly fading"--he gave the students this tour of the horizon:

"We live in a world where survival becomes more precarious every day. The basic racial antagonism of our American history remains festering without sufficient attention; 18-year-old Americans are sent--unconstitutionally--to die in the civil war of an underdeveloped country on the other side of the world for the espoused purpose of protecting America; political fugitives compose one-half of the FBI's most-wanted list; hollow men in windowless skyscrapers make private investment decisions without concern for man or nature; mass education programs students to fit into categories of mediocrity where imagination falls before the sword of efficiency.

"We learn our myths early and see the world through them--the myth of America's moral superiority, our manifest destiny, the melting pot, and the deceptive belief in progress; and hovering behind the myths lie the frightful possibilities of nuclear war where man can return himself to ashes."

He added: "I fear for the future of our country."

Two years later, in 1973, Bradley gave the commencement speech at St. Peter's College, a Jesuit institution with 871 graduates. The Knicks had just won their second championship, and the students broke into the season's signature cheer: "Deee-fense, deee-fense." Bradley, by contemporary accounts, did not crack a smile.

What he did was to note that the nation's $ 2 billion annual bill for jewelry exceeded its anti-poverty budget; $ 3 billion spent on pleasure boating surpassed foreign aid; $ 2 billion for golf--his mother's athletic passion--doubled expenditures on municipal water supplies.

Then he added language drawn directly from his missionary sermons: "If you want no more Vietnams and Watergates, you must commit yourself to something larger than yourself. . . . We must escape the materialistic habit of defining ourselves by our possessions, titles and honors."

So it went for Bradley--at a Boy Scouts of America fund-raiser at the Waldorf Astoria, even at a 1976 Jaycees award dinner in which he spoke as one of the honorees. There he took as his text Leo Tolstoy's novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," a radical critique, with religious overtones, of Russia's 19th century establishment.

In an interview last month, Bradley summarized what he was trying to say in the speech. "What if the right things, considered by the highest people as the things to do, were really false, and all the other impulses one had that were scarcely perceptible, that were immediately repressed--whatever the language is--were true?" he said. "At that moment of great public being honored I was saying, 'Now, wait a minute now, there is a whole different dimension to this. You can't just take the values that are placed before us.' "

Today Bradley's verdict is that his 1970s commentaries "were all fairly simplistic," the efforts of a young man "to struggle through who we were, facing the dark chapters, the bright chapters of our history." He cited as motivations "the ordeal of the war, maybe the diminishment of the zeal and optimism of the civil rights movement. And the continuing inequities that one saw--apartheid and other things."

"I don't think that there was ever a time when I was in despair," he added.

Politics as Calling

Running for Senate in 1978, Bradley traced his political impulse directly to the religious traditions of his youth. "I was raised a Presbyterian and became much more evangelical," he said then. "I've always believed it's one's job to serve one's calling. My view of politics derives from that."

Politics as calling gave Sen. Bradley an aura of moral certainty that annoyed some of his colleagues. He became known, among other things, for offering hopeless amendments just to make a point.

On the stump, Bradley often conveys a sense of mission with a parable. Three stonecutters in medieval times are working side by side. The first says he is cutting identical blocks, one after the other, in back-breaking tedium. The second says he is earning a living to feed his family.

"Third stonecutter: What are you doing? 'Oh, I'm building a holy lighthouse that will last one thousand years,' " Bradley said in one rendition of the story last summer.

Then he turned to his audience in Chicago: "And the question is, which of those stonecutters are you? If more of us could realize that, multiracial coalitions could come together to serve people who are underserved in this country. To provide them with health care, to reduce child poverty, to increase participation in politics."

But that was not all. His campaign, he said in closing, "is also about building that holy lighthouse that will last for a thousand years."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling and special correspondent Christine B. Whelan in Oxford contributed to this report.

In the Pulpit: Two months ago, Bradley spoke to worshipers at Third Missionary Baptist Church in Davenport, Iowa. Courting Colleagues: Active in the group for several years, Bradley addresses Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting in 1970. Words for Christ: Above, Fellowship of Christian Athletes literature that was given to Bradley. Below, in 1965 he exhorted readers of Guideposts that "being Christian is an 'all or nothing' proposition."