Bill Bradley has been either running or in the process of running for president for some time. Much has been made about his penchant for pedantic oration and a vocabulary with all the color and imagination of the tax code. Yet, n Values of the Game, Bradley profoundly and elegantly writes of the lessons to be learned from sports in general, and his game, basketball, in particular.
Part coffee-table book, part catechism, this offering certainly comes at the right time. Values, of course, have lately been much the subject of our public discourse. And, we travel to and from the extremes in this nationalism conversation, from the preachy Edward Bennett to the parsing amorality of our president and his supporters.
But Bradley avoids these parameters. Instead, like the teacher he has recently been (a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Maryland and Notre Dame), Bradley instructs without chiding and brings us back to the center. There are those who believe sport merely reveals character, but Bradley is decidedly in the camp with those who believe sport builds character.
Of course, sports have been under assault lately. And, with players strangling coaches, players taunting and fighting over apparently minor transgressions, and selfishness rampant throughout the athletic arena, it is easy to argue that as a sporting public, we have lost our way.
Bradley attempts to rectify this. First, he distills the “values” to be learned from sports into his own Top Ten list. He culls from childhood memories the lessons that came with his formal education in the sport of basketball. More important, though, are those lessons learned when attending his own class, the discipline learned in the many hours spent shooting alone, the selflessness learned in every game, the resilience that kept him coming back after each defeat, and his passion for the game.
But, this is no screed against the modern game and players, or the saintly remembrances of an old athlete of better days. Bradley’s examples are plucked as much from olden days as from the players of today.
Trash talking, for example, is championed as one way to gain an advantage over an opponent, giving a player an edge by causing the opponent to think before he acts. But, he tempers this by reminding that as important as gaining that mental edge is the fact respect for your opponent and the sport trumps all.
And his lessons are drawn not just from either his playing days, or only from the all-male world of sports. Bradley spends time reflecting on the lives of champions of the emerging women’s game such as Chamique Holdsclaw of the University of Tennessee, and on athletes in track, baseball and his own quick turn at boxing. Bradley’s basketball career is long past, a resident of the attics of our mind. He was an all-America basketball player at Princeton, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and one of the great professional players of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a reputation as a great shooter and the consummate teammate. And, for 18 years, he was a senator from New Jersey.
He is part of a select fraternity that took seriously the Greek ideal that speaks of the pursuit of perfection of mind and body. He is part of a select fraternity of true sports heroes, joining such luminaries as former Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, an All-America football player at Rice, and Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page, once one of the famed Purple People Eaters of the Minnesota Vikings.
But, this is no scholastic dissertation. Bradley’s writing is profound, yet simple. In a mere 160 pages of large print and many pictures, Bradley’s lessons are writ large, but drawn largely from his experiences, which makes them more accessible. I most enjoyed his declaration that he learns more about someone from playing one 10-minute game of 3-on-3 basketball than with a week of conversation.
What comes through here is Bradley’s love of the game; his joy and almost musical appreciation for the beat of the ball against hardwood, the back-and-forth flow of play, the rhythm of a team of five players working in harmony toward the goal of, well, the goal. It is somehow appropriate that Bradley’s book would be published by Artisan, a division of Workman Publishing Co., for as a player, he was a rare commodity – a star with a blue-collar attitude. This book is a gift that in turn should be handed to every son and daughter.
Bradley reminds us that, in a world where the few negative examples often held up as norm, the best and brightest often go unnoticed except by those closest to them. Bradley takes those many shining examples and tries to put them at the center of our national conversation. Now, if only he would stop shooting baskets at every campaign stop.
