The Books: The Only Game In Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker; edited by David Remnick; ‘A Sense of Where You Are’, by John McPhee

Next up on the essays shelf:

The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

The Only Game in Town is a collection of sports writing from The New Yorker. So far, I have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories (profiles), The Fun of It (Talk of the Town pieces), and The New Gilded Age (financial writing), and Secret Ingredients (food writing).

This piece, by John McPhee (whom we have discussed before – he’s included in every one of these collections) came out in 1965 and is a profile of the college basketball player Bill Bradley. Bradley played for Princeton, and at the time of McPhee’s piece, had just been granted a Rhodes Scholarship. So he was an anomaly in college sports stars, not to mention his uncanny ability to do just about everything right on the court. John McPhee’s piece is glowing, in terms of Bradley’s game. He calls him a “natural”. Bradley is just a kid, but he doesn’t just have raw talent. He also has an analytical mind, and the patience to practice for long hours. McPhee describes how members on the opposing teams, who did something that impressed Bradley, are often pulled aside after the games by Bradley, who grills them on how they made that shot, can they re-trace their steps, how did they pull it off? And then Bradley, in his private practice, would work on that shot that had so impressed him. McPhee talks to Bradley’s coaches and teammates, who all seem a little awed by him. His coach thinks he’s great but is frustrated that Bradley has a penchant for passing the ball to his teammates. Haha. The guy could score a point with his eyes closed, so why is he … passing to a guy who might NOT be able to make the shot? Well, because that guy was open, and Bradley played the game the way it was supposed to be played, and tried to avoid self-aggrandizing shots.

Of course now we know Bill Bradley for politics, and there’s sort of a funny ongoing joke throughout McPhee’s piece. McPhee asks his coaches, his fellow players, what they think Bradley will end up doing. They all think a bit and say, “Probably governor of Missouri.” So even then, even with his star rising as a basketball player, the Politics Thing was in the foreground.

McPhee is interested in all aspects of Bradley’s game. He sits on the sidelines in the empty gym at Princeton, watching how Bradley practices by himself. Every shot in his arsenal, and he runs through each one over and over and over and over again. Like a robot. The other Princeton players say stuff like, “It’s inspiring to play with him” or “He makes me play better.” Choosing to go to Princeton was already an interesting choice, for someone so gifted in basketball, and McPhee talks to other students and professors about Bradley as a student. He was dedicated, smart, and involved in lots of campus activities. He was already doing charity work. You wonder when he slept. He kept his grades up. A friend of his referred to Bradley as the “martyr”, because he was most comfortable when he was avoiding pleasure. It’s hard to remember, as you read this piece, that Bradley is only 21 years old.

Bradley grew up in a St. Louis suburb. McPhee goes and hangs out there, talking to Bradley’s parents, high school friends, high school coaches. Bradley’s mother was a devoted energetic go-get-em type of person, and Bradley inherited that from her. He found that basketball was a good way to make friends, but he was also so damn gifted at it. And he worked at it. While McPhee clearly admires Bradley’s gifts on the court, I think he admires his devotion to working at that gift the most.

Bradley was an oddball. Already a star in high school he was offered scholarships from a CRAZY amount of baseball-heavy colleges. He turned down all of the scholarships. He went to Princeton. He could afford it. He didn’t think it was right to accept scholarship help when he didn’t need it, also he was interested in things other than basketball and Princeton was an Ivy League school. He was recruited by the NBA while in college, of course, and he also played in the 1964 Olympics while still in college, but then he got the Rhodes Scholarship so he went to Oxford for more study instead of going into the NBA. The guy was an individual. But duty eventually called, and he signed with the New York Knicks.

But all of that was in the future at the time of McPhee’s piece. At the time of McPhee’s piece, Bradley was still a star player at Princeton, and had just found out about the Rhodes Scholarship. I love the sections on Bradley’s understanding of space and movement, so essential in team sports, but especially crucial in basketball. He would throw a ball toward a blank space on the court, knowing that his teammate would be there by the time the ball came down. McPhee goes with Bradley to a New York opthalmologist who studied Bradley’s eyeballs and vision, and while Bradley obviously doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, his range of vision far exceeds that of normal people. His peripheral vision is otherworldly. He was practicing at a court he was not familiar with, and he missed what should have been an easy shot. Bradley was confused. He said, “I think that basket is an inch lower than it should be.” Later, McPhee came back and measured the basket height and indeed it was an inch lower than the standard. You know. Crazy stuff like that.

Side note: McPhee’s pieces in these collections include a road trip through Georgia, examining road kill, and a profile of wild-food prophet Euell Gibbons. I love the diversity of his topics and interests.

Here’s an excerpt.

The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘A Sense of Where You Are’, by John McPhee

Most coaches, on the reasonable supposition that Bradley cannot beat their teams alone, concentrate on choking off the four other Princeton players, but Bradley is good enough to rise to such occasions as he did when he scored forty-six against Texas, making every known shot, including an eighteen-foot running hook. Some coaches, trying a standard method of restricting a star, set up four of their players in either a box-shaped or a diamond-shaped zone defensive formations and put their fifth player on Bradley, man-to-man. Wherever Bradley goes under these circumstances, he has at least two men guarding him, the man-to-man player and the fellow whose zone he happens to be passing through. This is a dangerous defense, however, because it concedes an imbalance of forces, and also because Bradley is so experienced at being guarded by two men at once that he can generally fake them both out with a single move; also, such overguarding often provides Bradley with enough free throws to give his team the margin of victory. Most coaches have played Princeton straight, assigning their best defensive men to Bradley and letting it go at that. This is what St. Joseph’s College did in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament in 1963. St. Joseph’s had a strong, well-balanced team, which had lost only four games of a twenty-five game schedule and was heavily favored to rout Princeton. The St. Joseph’s player who was to guard Bradley promised his teammates that he would hold Bradley below twenty points. Bradley made twenty points in the first half. He made another twenty points in the first sixteen minutes of the second half. In the group battles for rebounds, he won time after time. He made nearly 60 percent of his shots, and he made sixteen out of sixteen from the foul line. The experienced St. John’s men could not handle him, and the whole team began to go after him in frenzied clusters. He would dribble through them, disappearing in the ruck and emerging a moment later, still dribbling, to float up toward the basket and score. If St. Joseph’s forced him over toward the sideline, he would crouch, turn his head to look for the distant basket, kick his leg, and follow through with his arms, sending a long, high hook shot – all five parts intact – into the net. When he went up for a jump shot, St. Joseph’s players would knock him off balance, but he would make the shot anyway, crash to the floor, get up, and sink the dividend foul shot, scoring three points instead of two on the play. On defense, he guarded St. Joseph’s highest-scoring player, Tom Wynne, and held him to nine points. The defense was expensive, though. An aggressive defensive player has to take the risk of committing personal fouls, after which a player is obliged by the rules to leave the game. With just under four minutes to go, and Princeton comfortably ahead by five points, Bradley committed his fifth foul and left the court. For several minutes, the game was interrupted as the crowd stood and applauded him; the game was being played in Philadelphia, where hostility toward Princeton is ordinarily great but where the people know a folk hero when they see one. After the cheering ended, the blood drained slowly out of Princeton, whose other players could not hold the lead. Princeton lost by one point. Dr. Jack Ramsey, the St. Joseph’s coach, says that Bradley’s effort that night was the best game of basketball he has ever seen a college boy play.

Some people, hearing all the stories of Bradley’s great moments, go to see him play and are disappointed when he does not do something memorable at least once a minute. Actually, basketball is a hunting game. It lasts for forty minutes, and there are ten men on the court, so the likelihood is that any one player, even a superstar, will actually have the ball in his hands for only four of those minutes, or perhaps a little more. The rest of the team, a player on offense either is standing around recovering his breath or is on the move, foxlike, looking for openings, sizing up chances, attempting to screen off a defensive man – by “coming off guys”, as van Breda Kolff puts it – and thus upset the balance of power. The depth of Bradley’s game is most discernible when he doesn’t have the ball. He goes in and swims around in the vicinity of the basket, back and forth, moving for motion’s sake, making plans and abandoning them, and always watching the distant movement of the ball out of the corner of his eye. He stops and studies his man, who is full of alertness, because of the sudden break in the rhythm. The man is trying to watch both Bradley and the ball. Bradley watches the man’s head. If it turns too much to the right, he moves quickly to the left. If it turns too much to the left, he goes to the right. If, ignoring the ball, the man focuses his full attention on Bradley, Bradley stands still and looks at the floor. A high-lobbed pass floats in, and just before it arrives Bradley jumps high, takes the ball, turns, and scores. If Princeton has an out-of-bounds play under the basket, Bradley takes a position just inside the baseline, almost touching the teammate who is going to throw the ball into play. The defensive man crowds in to try to stop whatever Bradley is planning. Bradley whirls around the defensive man, blocking him out with one leg, and takes a bounce pass and lays up the score. This works only against naive opposition, but when it does work it is a marvel to watch. To receive a pass from a backcourt man, Bradley moves away from the basket and toward one side of the court. He gets the ball, gives it up, goes into the center, and hovers there awhile. Nothing happens. He goes back to the corner. He starts toward the backcourt again to receive a pass like the first one. His man, who is eager and has been through this before, moves out toward the backcourt a step ahead of Bradley. This is a defensive error. Bradley isn’t going that way, he was only faking. He heads straight for the basket, takes a bounce pass, and scores. This maneuver is known in basketball as going backdoor. Bradley is able to go backdoor successfully and often, because of his practiced footwork. Many players, once their man has made himself vulnerable, rely on surprise alone to complete a backdoor play, and that isn’t always enough. Bradley’s fake looks for all the world like the beginning of a trip to the outside; then, when he goes for the basket, he has all the freedom he needs. When he gets the ball after breaking free, other defensive players naturally leave their own men and try to stop him. In these three-on-two or two-on-one situations, the obvious move is to pass to a teammate who has moved into a position to score. Sometimes, however, no teammate has moved and Bradley sees neither a pass nor a shot, so he veers around and goes back and picks up his own man. “I take him on into the court for a one-on-one,” he says, imagining what he might do. “I have moved toward the free-throw line on a dribble. If the man is overplaying me on my right, I reverse pivot and go in for a left-handed lay-up. If the man is playing even with me, but off me a few feet, I take a jump shot. If the man is playing me good defense – honest – and he’s on me tight, I keep going. I give him a head-and-shoulder fake, keep going all the time, and drive to the basket, or I give him a head-and-shoulder fake and take a jump shot. Those are all the things you need – the fundamentals.”