Bill Bradley ’65’s Travels

Bill Bradley ’65 in 1964.

Thomas H. Miner ’64

By Peter Carry ’64

Published April 21, 1964

3 min read

Since PAW last showed its glossy orange and black face before its annual month-long spring respite, Bill Bradley ’65 has been doing some traveling to places where Princeton basketball players have never been seen before.

Thomas H. Miner ’64

After leading the Tigers in a first round win in the NCAA tournament (over VMI, 86-60) and two losses in the second round, the 6-foot-5 All-American abandoned the Howards and the Haarlows to play awhile with the Hazzards (Walt of National Champion UCLA) and Hetzels (Fred, a top center from Davidson) in the Olympic basketball tryouts. As it turned out, the Hazzards and the Hetzels ended playing along with Bradley who, although he only averaged about five points per game, was almost everybody’s choice for the outstanding player (on the basis of great passing and all-around play) in a series of games played at St. John’s University in New York. Before his unanimous selection as a member of the 12-man Olympic team, Bradley went to Los Angeles and Lexington, Ky., to play in exhibition games with other Olympic hopefuls. At the Lexington game, which was a kind of East-West All-Star contest, Bradley was named the captain of the East team despite the fact he was the only junior on the squad.

Bill’s longest journey of all will come next fall when he’ll travel to Tokyo and win his gold medal, which is almost a sure thing since a U.S. Olympic team has never lost a game, much less the gold medal, in the international competition. The only problem, which Nassau Hall most graciously and rightfully solved, was that Bradley will have to miss five weeks of class next fall, something which a young man with Bradley’s dedication and self-discipline should do without suffering a great deal academically.

More even than Pete Carry’s sports column (above), the cover photograph and this spread epitomize the peculiar quality of Princeton’s late basketball season: All-American All-Olympic, all-everything Bill Bradley as a one-many army confounding whole platoons of defenders.

One of the most unusual things about this modest 20-year-old Chapel Deacon is the way he happened to come to Princeton. He had already received an athletic scholarship at one of the big basketball schools when at the last minute he decided, with thoughts of a career in the foreign service, to attend the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, even though at Princeton he would receive no aid because of the affluence of his father, a bank president in Crystal City, Missouri. Actually now he is enthusiastically majoring in the History Department with a 2nd group average, having just completed his junior departmental paper on “The Red Scare of 1919-20” and intending to write a senior thesis on “Nativism in American History.”

There is a curious parallel between his case and that of another distinguished athlete and captain-elect, fullback Cosmo Iacavazzi. He too had an All-American rating in high school and had decided on another university—when at the last minute he heard of the eminence of our Department of Aeronautical Engineering, his chosen profession. Now he similarly maintains an honors average among the wind tunnels and computers of the Forrestal Research Center.

“Tut, tut, child,” said the Duchess to Alice. “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.” In the old days the faculty, with its power of “ineligibility,” was looked upon as the natural enemy or virtuous athletes, as summed up in President James McCosh’s acid remark to a group of sport enthusiasts: “I am more interested in the gymnastics of the mind.” (We once taught at one of the great football factories of the Midwest, where “spring” practice started on February 15, and football players—known as “the apes”—were carefully shielded from the rigors of the regular faculty by a physical education major which awarded them academic credit for courses like “Recreational Leadership” and such.) Now by a wonderful irony Princeton recruiters use the faculty not as threat but as bait!—ED.