Bill Bradley was as far from a typical college and NBA superstar as can possibly be imagined. He was 6’5” but could barely dunk. In a race between the tortoise and the hare, he would be the tortoise. Yet, with an uncanny set of shooting, passing, and rebounding skills, he became the nation’s top high school prospect, with more than 70 colleges, including every powerhouse in the sport, offering him a scholarship. Instead, he chose to play at lowly Princeton, in one of the game’s weakest conferences—the Ivy League—where he averaged more than 30 points a game over the course of his career, becoming a two-time first-team All-American and, in his senior season, national player of the year, leading the Tigers to the 1965 NCAA tournament’s Final Four, in which he scored an unheard of 58 points against Wichita State and was named the tournament’s MVP—the only player to this day to win that award for a team that did not win the event (The Tigers finished third). He was just as successful in the NBA, becoming an All-Pro with the New York Knicks, whom he led to two world championships during his ten-year career, and upon retirement, had his jersey number retired by the Knicks.
Off the court, he was even more impressive, earning a Rhodes Scholarship after graduating from Princeton, then, following his NBA career, became a three-term U.S. Senator from New Jersey before running for the 2000 Democratic nomination for the presidency, which he lost to Al Gore. He played the political game much as he played the game of basketball—with understated grace, elegance, efficiency, and unselfishness, all of which are superbly captured in this early (1965) biography, written by one of the finest craftsmen ever in the field of narrative nonfiction, the incomparable New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee.