Values of the Game

One day in 1996, I was completing my regular physical workout on the StairMaster and treadmill at our local YMCA in Montclair, New Jersey, before returning to work in Washington. After the aerobics, I took a look into the small gym. It was empty—only a runner circling the old-fashioned running track around the ceiling—so I checked out a basketball and went in. It bounced well and the leather felt good. I began to shoot at ten feet, then fifteen, then eighteen.
Swish!
went the ball as it ripped through the net. Within minutes I was in another world, alone with my body movements and my memories. Years had passed since I’d done this, and yet in several minutes I was back. “I love this game!” I thought. The old inner voice began urging me to “hit all the shots.” These were different times and such aspiration was foolhardy, but still a surprising number went cleanly through the hoop. After about fifteen minutes, an elderly gentleman poked his head into the gym. I was shooting from the top of the key, then I was driving with a right hook off the boards, followed by a scoop shot. Then I was back at the top of the key. Slowly the man made his way into the gym and out onto the court. He approached me. I pretended to be unaware of him and kept shooting. He leaned in and said, “Bradley?”

“Yes,” I said, launching another eighteen-footer.

“Senator Bradley?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

There was a pause, and then, piercing my idyllic reverie, he blurted out, “Why didn’t you answer my letter?”

In a world full of unrealized dreams and baffling entanglements, basketball seems pure. We know, of course, that it isn’t. It has its own share of greed, violence, and obsession with the culture of entertainment. Yet even in the midst of these distractions, there is still the game. Each time a father takes his son or daughter to the playground to shoot baskets for the first time, a new world opens—one full of values that can shape a lifetime. In my experience, the feeling of getting better came with hard work, and getting better made victory easier. Winning was fun, but so was the struggle to improve. That was one of the lessons you learned from the game: Basketball was a clear example of virtue rewarded.

I was very lucky to play a game I loved for twenty years, as a high school, college, and pro player. It gave me a unique window on the world, and it filled me with moments of insight and years of tremendous pleasure. Some of the most enjoyable times in my life were spent playing ball. It is that part of the game that this book celebrates—the good times playing basketball. In the course of writing it, I got to know the coach and players on the team at Stanford University, where I was a visiting professor. Watching them in games and talking about basketball with some of them reawakened memories in me of my life as a player. It was like meeting an old friend after twenty years—someone whose stories I remembered, and whose values I understood and wanted to share. Two decades ago I wrote in
Life on the Run
about my experiences as a New York Knick in the 1960s and 1970s, and there are a few excerpts from that book in this one. But what I try to do here is show how, after all the years, the game is still full of joy and the lessons learned from it stay with you—that even though the game has changed, the old values still flow through it.

I hope parents will share this book with their children and basketball fans will find that it rings true. I believe that it applies to the whole of our passage through life.

You begin by bouncing a ball—in the house, on the driveway, along the sidewalk, at the playground. Then you start shooting: legs bent, eyes on the rim, elbow under the ball. You shoot and follow through. Let it fly, up, up and in. No equipment is needed beyond a ball, a rim, and imagination. How simple the basic act is. I’m not sure exactly when my interest turned to passion, but I was very young, and it has never diminished.

When I was a teenager, alone in the high school gym for hours, the repetition of shooting, shot after shot, became a kind of ritual for me. The seams and the grain of the leather ball had to feel a certain way. My fingertips went right to the grooves and told me if it felt right. The key to the fingertips was keeping them clean. I would rub my right hand to my sweaty brow, then against my T-shirt at chest level, and then I would cradle the ball. By the end of shooting practice, the grime had made its way from the floor to the ball to my fingertips to my shirt. After thousands of shots, my shirts were permanently stained.

The gymnasium itself was a part of my solitary joy. I took in every nuance of the place. It was a state-of-the-art facility, with retractable fan-shaped glass backboards. The floor was polished and shining; when I moved, it glistened as if I were playing on a mirror. The only daylight streamed in from windows high along the sloping ceiling. The smell was not of locker room mildew but of pungent varnish and slightly oiled mops, the guarantors of floor quality throughout the years. The gym’s janitor insisted on one absolute rule: no street shoes allowed on the floor. It was sacred terrain, traversable only by the soft soles of Converse or Keds.

Then there were the sounds.
Thwat, thwat!
The ball hit the floor and the popping sound echoed from the steel beams of the ceiling and the collapsed wooden stands that stacked up twenty feet high.
Thwat, thwat, squeak
—the squeal of your sneakers against the floor, followed by the jump and then the shot. The
swish
of the ball through the net, a sound sweeter than the roar of the crowd.
Swish. Thwat, thwat, squeak, swish!

I couldn’t get enough. If I hit ten in a row, I wanted fifteen. If I hit fifteen, I wanted twenty-five. Driven to excel by some deep, unsurveyed urge, I stayed out on that floor hour after hour, day after day, year after year. I played until my muscles stiffened and my arms ached. I persevered through blisters, contusions, and strained joints. When I got home I had to take a nap before I could muster the energy to eat the dinner that sat in the oven. After one Friday night high school game, which we lost to our arch rival, I was back in the gym at nine on Saturday morning, with the bleachers still deployed and the popcorn boxes scattered beneath them, soaking my defeat by shooting. Others had been in this place last night, I thought, but now I was here by myself, and I was home.

When I practiced alone, I often conjured up the wider world of basketball. Maybe I had just seen the Los Angeles Lakers play on TV the day before; I’d try to remember a particular move that Laker forward Elgin Baylor had made, then imitate it. I would simulate the whole game in my mind, including the spiel of the announcer. “Five seconds left, four seconds, three, Bradley dribbles right in heavy traffic, jumps, shoots—good at the buzzer!” I dreamed that someday I’d experience that moment for real, maybe even take the clutch shot in the state finals. In my dream, of course, I’d hit it and we’d be state champions.

The passion of solitary practice was matched by the joy of playing team ball. The constant kaleidoscope of team play was infinitely interesting to me. For every challenge thrown up by the defense, there was an offensive counter. Having the court sense to recognize this in the flow of the game produced a real high. The notion that someday I could be paid to play a game I loved never occurred to me.

You could always tell that Magic Johnson loved to play. He smiled, grimaced, and pushed himself and his teammates. His gusto honored the game. Some players these days seem more angry than joyful, yet the great ones still have a zest. Grant Hill’s pleasure comes from his game’s completeness and his own unflappable composure. Hakeem Olajuwon exudes a delighted confidence when the ball goes into him at the low post. Clyde Drexler, like Dr. J in earlier years, conveys an effortless joy when he has the ball in open court and heads for the basket.

Even the controversial Dennis Rodman evinces a love of the game despite his antics. His game within the game is rebounding. He studies films to see which way a shooter’s shot usually bounces. He keeps his body in top shape. He uses his body only after he uses his brain and his eyes, and then he makes a second, third, and fourth effort. When he gets the ball, he smiles the smile of someone dedicated to something well beyond himself.

The women’s game in particular is full of a kind of beautiful enthusiasm. On many teams each player seems deeply involved in her teammates’ spirits as well as their play. I used to love to watch Kate Starbird spark her Stanford team with her tenacity, intensity, and 3-point-shooting skill, but the epitome, for me, is Chamique Holdsclaw of Tennessee, the female Michael Jordan. She has a winning combination of zeal and ability that allows her to generate excitement in the crowd, dedication among her teammates, and fear in the minds of her opponents. Her sheer love of the game becomes infectious.

Imagine what happens when you’ve got an entire team of players who are passionate about the game. In my Knicks days, there was no feeling comparable to the one I got when the team’s game came together—those nights when five guys moved as one. The moment was one of beautiful isolation, the result of the correct blending of human forces at the proper time and to the exact degree. With my team, before the crowd, against our opponents, it was almost as if this were my private world and no one else could sense the inexorable rightness of the moment.

The Knicks 1973 championship was more fun for me than the initial one in 1970. We weren’t under the pressure of trying to achieve a first championship. The team itself was more congenial; the variety of plays was greater. I had a secure position as a starter. The obstacles that had once blocked my pure enjoyment of the game had all been removed. The only thing I had to do was allow the kid in me to feel the pure pleasure in just playing. In plenty of games, I played simply for the joy of it, shooting and passing without thinking about points. I forgot the score, and sometimes I would go through a whole quarter without looking at the scoreboard.

I felt about the court, the ball, the basket, the way people feel about friends, so playing for money seemed to me to be compromising enough. I never made any endorsements or commercials during my NBA career. To take money for hawking basketball shoes or shaving lotion would have demeaned my experience of the game, or so I felt. Besides, I sensed that the deals were being offered because I was a “white hope” and not because of my playing ability. More than the money, the travel, the lure of the championships, it was the game itself that rewarded me.

I’ve told the story a thousand times about the night in the 1970s at a postgame reception in Chicago when a man approached me and asked, “Do you really like to play basketball?”

“Yeah, more than anything else I could be doing now,” I replied.

“That’s great. You know, I once played the trumpet,” he said. “I think I know what you feel. I played in a little band. We were good. We’d play on weekends at colleges. In my last year, we had an offer to tour and make records. Everyone wanted to except me.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“My father thought it wasn’t secure enough.”

“What about you?”

“Well, I didn’t know,” he said. “I guess I agreed. The life is so transient. You’re always on the road. No sureness that you’ll get your next job. It just doesn’t fit into a life plan. So I went to law school and I quit playing the trumpet, except every once in a while. Now I don’t have time.”