Word: dreaming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...rallies, fund raisers, press conferences, and town-hall meetings. He has quite a repertory of mother-in-law jokes, folk tales in an Irish brogue, farm stories involving cows and milk buckets, and by now I know them so well that I've even started to dream his opening jokes in my dreams-when I've had a chance to sleep, that is. My only casualty from this constant traveling, though, was the winding stem on my wristwatch, which I broke by resetting the watch so often for changes in time zones...