Word: bradleys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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 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...
...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...