Worse for the Wear

TEN YEARS AGO, Bill Bradley's book, A Sense of Where You Are, spoke well for his position as the model white suburban youth with aspirations to play in professional sports. He had methodized and refined basketball so that fat, second-rate coaches would quote his book glowingly at basketball camps, boys would imitate over-the-shoulder and slow, funny-looking foul shots, and--Bradley now realizes--fathers would allow a fifty cent paperback with pictures to replace them. His hook shot, as he diagrammed it, evolved in nine parts; he exercised his peripheral vision by identifying trees across the street while walking along looking straight ahead; he went through the five phases of his foul shot a thousand times a day. Behind all this lay the key, the three D's; Determination, Dedication, and Defense, because success is 1 per cent innpiration and 99 per cent perspiration. One can imagine streetball players bent double, clapping their Chuck Taylors in laughter if they ever heard of or read it, but of course they never did.

Here was the old success story, notwithstanding a good measure of social irony: Horatio Alger reincarnated in a tall but otherwise physically mediocre, white boy from Crystal City, Missouri, triumphs in a black, city game played by the likes of Wilt Chamberlain. The religio-scientific devotion of the American athletic dream dug in and hurled the banker's son into collegiate, international, and eventually professional stardom. Bill Bradley knew where he was, and his stature was reaffirmed by approving nods from righteous heads across the country.

The title of his new book, Life on the Run, indicates where nine seasons of professional basketball have taken him--from certainty about the future to a shaky, impermanent sense of disillusionment not only with the crasser aspects of professional sports, but with the dream that led him to precisely where he thought he wanted to be. The epigraph is taken from an essay by a fellow Princeton man, F. Scott Fitzgerald:

During those years, when most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of a few dozen men ... playing a boy's game. A boy's game, with no more possibility in it than a boy could master, a game bounded by walls which kept out novelty or danger, change or adventure ... It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer. Imagine life conceived as a business of beautiful muscular organization--an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep--imagine it achieved; then imagine trying to apply this standard to the horribly complicated mess of living, where nothing, even the greatest conceptions and workings and achievements, is else but messy, spotty, tortuous--and then one can imagine the confusion that Ring faced on coming out of the park.

At 32, Bradley says he, like all athletes, is discovering the terrors of a fading life and is beginning to view the "Faustian bargain" of his professional career from the sardonic distance that a nagging vision of the end gives him. He defines fatalistically the repayment of the debt:

To live all one's days never able to recapture the feeling of those few years of intensified youth. In a way it is the fate of a warrior class to receive rewards, plaudits, and exhilaration simultaneously with the means of self-destruction ... For the athlete who reaches thirty-five, something in him dies; not a peripheral activity but a fundamental passion. It necessarily dies. The athlete rarely recuperates. He approaches the end of his playing days the way old people approach death. He puts his finances in order. He reminisces easily. He offers advice to the young.

THE BITTER FRUIT of this presentiment of life's decline proliferates throughout the book, which is a chronological narration of a road trip in the 1974-75 season, and expresses itself in many less conscious descriptions. In his digressions, Bradley dwells on the sick and aged members of the very veteran Knicks, especially his roommate Dave DeBusschere, who is playing his last year--he pays no attention to rookies. The book begins with a short dream vignette in which the author's past presides over a timeless game with unrecognizable opponents. After feeling the guilt of a poor first three quarters, Bradley enters the game with 45 seconds left, gets a steal, a rebound, an assist, six points, and has two free throws with one second left; the team is down only by one. He misses the first, then concentrates with tongue-tip precision on the tying point. "I take a deep breath, draw back my arm and in one quick motion I hurl the ball twenty feet over the backboard into the crowd. And I laugh and laugh and laugh ..."

As Bradley travels with the Knicks, he reminisces and analyses about almost every aspect (some more hopeful than profound) that basketball and society bring to bear on each other. Especially early in the book, his attempts at insight proceed by a kind of historical method. He sifts through the histories of players, arenas, and American culture, with no particular emphasis on his own life. Of his better-known teammates he provides biographical accounts, which are almost always ironic reversals of the Chip Hilton hero-makes-good stories. He traces the life of Willis Reed from cotton-picking in Mississippi to knee operations in the NBA; Jerry Lucas from Phi Beta Kappa and stardom to bankruptcy; Earl Monroe from street fighting in Philadelphia to racial harrassment in New York; and Walt Frazier from a defunct pimp father to a Rolls Royce and the clothes his father would envy. Like Bradley, they are all past their peaks: not necessarily their peaks of efficiency for a pro team, but for their individual dreams of fulfillment. The pervading note is failure. It carries into the more impersonal analyses of figures like Wilt Chamberlain and Bob Cousy. Chamberlain, he says, is the paradigmatic loser; his individual achievement was more secure on a losing team, so his true wish was fulfilled. He portrays Cousy, his childhood hero heroically entering a game in 1969 to replace Oscar Robertson--and then throwing the ball away and losing his man to blow the game for the team he should have stayed on the bench coaching.

ALTHOUGH BRADLEY'S realization that conceiving of life as "a business of muscular organization" is inadequate seems to have inspired him to write this book, he is incapable of viewing it in any other terms. He writes best of failure and disillusionment--when his expression and insight has the strength of bitterness. Then he conveys poignantly a sense of his lonely impermanence and racial insecurity. But when he analyses race relations, commercialism, political organization, the American dream, or sex, he lapses into the weakest idiom of his other book--a sportswriter's mire of expressions like "real pro," "top condition," and "the key."

Bradley has a certain talent for descriptive lists and characterization, but his experience hasn't supplied the vocabulary for his mature vision. Two distinct styles of writing fall out in this loose weave of narrative and analytic musing; one of sardonic realism and another of patriotic camp. On one page, he describes Willis Reed pondering "how a rabbit does it," and on the following, he sums up the 1973 championship with the old saw, "Vicariously experiencing the victory can't compare to being Number One." The maudlin cliches of the sports world are not geared toward the cynicism implicit in Bradley's off-beat anecdotes. There is a contradiction between his seasoned insight into professional basketball and the adolescent spirit of his language. With this parrot squawking denials on his shoulder, Bradley's Life on the Run seems not as desperate as he tries to make it.