Bill Bradley ’65 has been elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, Massachusetts. The senior U.S. Senator from New Jersey will be one of six people inducted at this year’s ceremony on May 2. He is the first Princetonian chosen for the hall.
The best basketball player ever to come out of the Ivy League, Bradley was a first-team all-American for three years and the college Player of the Year as a senior. He holds Princeton and Ivy records for points scored in a game, season, and career. His single-season point totals are still the three best in the Princeton record book, and he also has the 13 highest one-game totals. He scored 58 points against Wichita State in 1965, an NCAA tournament record.
Bradley is one of only two basketball players to have earned the Sullivan Award, presented by the AAU each year to the nation’s outstanding amateur athlete. He also won an Olympic gold medal as a member of the U.S. team in 1964. Drafted upon graduation by the New York Knicks, Bradley chose to spend the next two years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Following his return to the U.S., he joined the Knicks and began an association that would last 10 years and produce two NBA championships.
This was originally published in the March 9, 1983 issue of PAW.