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A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton

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John McPhee's profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton is classic McPhee: the careful, meticulous observer;the passionate but objective reporter; the master wordsmith. For anyone who hasn't read McPhee, this is a great introduction to his work (it's also McPhee's first book, and has been in print every year since it was written in the mid-'60s).

What do you call this book? Sports writing? A detailed profile? Both, I guess, and it really provides insight into Bradley's character, intelligence, and ethic of hard work and determination. McPhee has a great way of reporting the archetypical anecdotes to illustrate specific points--in this case, what a careful student of the game (and of life) Bill Bradley is. There's a great climax here, too, as we follow Bradley's career to his final game, in many ways the perfect ending to a stellar college career. Other nice touches are the photographs and the printing of an updated essay McPhee wrote about Bradley when he was campaigning for senate reelection. If enough people read this, Bradley will be a shoo-in for president.

Curious about Bill Bradley, the man? Sometimes a sense of the man can be had by looking at the youth. This book was written in 1965 after Bradley had finished his Princeton career and was on his way to Oxford. John McPhee's books pack powerful character studies into deceptively simple language. On the surface this is a book about basketball (it's a good book about basketball!), and about excellence through dedication and discipline . The ironic title refers to Bradley's always being aware of where he was on the court in relation to the basket, and to his deep sense of social responsibility for his gifts of privilege, intellect and ability. The portrayal is of a decent, conscientious young man, undistracted or affected by intense celebrity-- whose success in athletics and academics was as much a function of attitude and determination as any innate talent

Written when Bill Bradley was still a student at Princeton, the book is a synthesis of McPhee's interviews with and observations of the three-time All American. It creates a picture of Bradley as a person of character who brings his personal integrity to whatever he does and who succeeds as a result of hard work applied in accord with his personal principles. We learn, for example, that as a youngster Bradley apparently had no special basketball ability, but he decided he wanted to play and literally taught himself the game piece-by-piece, constructing his jump shot, for example, from five separate pieces and being so aware of his movements that when he missed a shot he knew which of the five pieces he had not performed correctly. And this same dedication shows through in Bradley's pursuit of his education and in his private conduct: while a student at Princeton he taught a Sunday school class for some of the town's children, and even after a Saturday night away game (followed by a six hour bus ride, reaching campus after 4 a.m.) there was never any thought of not teaching the class the next morning. This inspirational book, A Sense of Where You Are: a profile of William Warren Bradley, gives us a very clear sense of who he is, a man of honor.

John McPhee starting out as a writer profiles Bill Bradley and his Princeton Tigers basketball team, through the Ivy League and into the NCAA Tournament, leading up to Princeton making it to the Final Four Bradley's senior season. In the background and unmentioned is John Wooden, whose UCLA team wins the tournament, Wooden's second of ten NCAA championships. Wooden praised Bradley, who along with Jerry Lucas and Wooden himself was the ideal student-athlete. All three were consummate team players.

Included is Bradley's famous "creed," "When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win." (p. 65) Like Wooden, his success came from being far ahead of most of the competition on the crucial element of practice. Bradley, deeply analytical, is right out of The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. He did have, as Lucas did, superior eyesight, but one meaning of the title of the book comes from his learning to make a shot without looking at the basket, which he frequently did--a shot for which there is no name.

One of the greatest if not the greatest sports books I've read.

This was John McPhee's first book, so it obviously holds a lot of interest as a glimpse at the man's later style. I'm happy to say that while this is obviously McPhee -- you can tell it's him within a page or so -- it's one of the weaker McPhees. Which is praising by faint damns: McPhee's style seems to have emerged fully-formed from his forehead at The New Yorker, and moved continuously upward in small, methodical steps. By the time we get to Uncommon Carriers, which I'll review soon, the McPhee style has been honed to a keen edge.

A Sense Of Where You Are is also notable as a first glimpse at Bill Bradley: future Rhodes Scholar, future New York Knicks basketball player, future senator, future presidential candidate. One wants to say "All of the future Bradleys were there when McPhee wrote A Sense of Where You Are," and that may be true: not only a great athlete, Bradley was the most admired man on the Princeton campus. And this isn't just retrospective I-knew-him-whenism: A Sense of Where You Are came out in 1965, before anyone could know what Bradley would become.

If I tell you that this is a McPhee book, and if you've read McPhee, I can basically stop there. A McPhee book is characterized by a gentle forward motion propelled atop sentences that have no right to work as they do. The sentences are largely staccato, and in books other than this one they tend to feel like a sequence of random observations. In The Curve of Binding Energy, for instance, you feel like you're reading a mere litany of facts about nuclear fusion which seemed interesting to John McPhee, yet by the end you really have learned a lot about the construction of a nuclear weapon, and the sentences more than merely hang together; they flow. It's the strangest thing; McPheee routinely pulls off a nonfiction magic trick.

McPhee studies men at work. He quickly falls into their lingo, which is both one of the greatest irritants of his books and one of their key charms. It's irritating because McPhee will often use a long string of disciplinary buzzwords before defining them; this reaches its nauseating pinnacle in Annals of the Former World, where we've absorbed a couple hundred pages of dense geological concepts before McPhee gets around to telling you what those concepts mean. It's charming because you feel like you're right in the thick of the action with citrus pickers in McPhee's Oranges; with truckers, ship captains, and UPS employees in Uncommon Carriers; and with basketball players in A Sense of Where You Are.

McPhee follows Bradley on and off the court; when not watching Bradley -- the greatest basketball player, apparently, at the time McPhee wrote, and by some measure the fourth-best athlete on earth -- he's asking Bradley to walk, step by step, through how he negotiates difficult problems on the court. Standing in McPhee's kitchen, one imagines, Bradley pivots, feints, dodges and leaps to show McPhee exactly how his mind works. It's absolutely captivating.

It's also a lot of hero-worship. It's a beautiful work, but a bit adulatory for my tastes. Orangemen, truckers, pilots, and nuclear engineers surely fascinate McPhee, and he respects them for the difficult tasks that they get done, and moreover he writes about them from the thick of the action, but somehow he manages in those later works to stay above the fray. By contrast, John McPhee is godfather to Bill Bradley's daughter.

Don't let that dissuade you, though. If you love McPhee -- and if you don't, you must not have read him -- dive into A Sense of Where You Are and observe two great men at work.

I'm writing this review because the fact that it didn't have a 5-star rating irritated me. I first saw the McPhee/Bill Bradley piece in the New Yorker Magazine about 30 years ago. After reading it I xeroxed the entire article and sent copies of it to every member of the University of South Carolina basketball team (which for those of you who are as old as I am was coached by the legendary Frank McGuire (the assistant coach was Donnie Walsh, now President and General Manager of the Indiana Pacers) and featured a cast of great college players like John Roche, Tommy Owens, Billy Walsh, Bobby Cremins, etc. All of the players (an unusually intelligent group) loved the article. We had many conversations about Bradley's approach to the game in the months to come. This is definitely a 5-star book for any lover of the true game of basketball. It's great and can't possibly be outdated. Highest recommendation.

Bill Bradley was born in a small Missouri town, the son of the town's banker, who taught him discipline, hard work, and a love of learning, and his wife, a fiercely competitive but loving former athlete. Their son was one of the most celebrated schoolboy athletes in Missouri history, and was offered scholarships to over 70 colleges to play basketball. However, he chose to attend Princeton University, which did not provide athletic scholarships and was not known for its basketball team, as he had higher aspirations beyond sports.

He began to play with the varsity team as a sophomore, as freshmen were not allowed to participate in varsity athletics at that time, and immediately became the star player of the team. Princeton quickly became an Eastern basketball powerhouse, culminated by the 1964-65 team in Bradley's senior year, which reached the NCAA Final Four before losing in the national semifinal to Michigan. Bradley's last collegiate game was against Wichita State in the third place game, and Bradley, normally a pass first, shoot second player despite his immense talent, was given free rein by his coach to shoot and score at will. He finished the game with 58 points, which is still the record for the most points scored by an individual player in a Final Four game.

After his collegiate career he attended Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and then became an NBA star with the New York Knicks, helping them win two championships, in 1970 and 1973. After his retirement he entered politics, and served as the junior U.S. Senator from New Jersey for three terms. He retired from the Senate in 1997, and ran an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. presidency in 2000, losing to Al Gore. After that defeat he left politics, but he maintains an active public life, as he has written six nonfiction books and hosts a weekly radio program.

John McPhee grew up in Princeton, as his father served as the physician for the university's athletic department. He attended Princeton, and while working as a writer in New York his father called him to come see a kid on the freshman basketball team, who his father described as possibly the best basketball player, bar none. McPhee attended a game with his father, followed Bradley over his career at Princeton, and wrote his first book about him, in 1965.

"A Sense of Where You Are" describes Bradley's upbringing in Missouri, and his basketball career at Princeton, including his work ethic and approach to the game, which was far beyond even the best players at his level and allowed him to surpass his modest physical abilities. McPhee also portrays Bradley as a well rounded student athlete who participated fully in campus life and maintained a sense of modesty and humbleness that seems archaic, yet refreshing. The latest edition of the book contains numerous photos of Bradley in action, along with addenda written in 1978 and 1999.

I would highly recommend "A Sense of Where You Are" for any sports fan, but this would be of interest for anyone who appreciates good journalism or wants to learn about an inspiring and influential man, who has been one of my heroes since I was a child.

Whether you like sports or not, McPhee's book is so well written that it carries you along. Bradley at Princeton seems so ancient compared with the sports scene today, but the story reveals unknowingly how much we have lost in the culture when it comes to heroes.

"A sense of where you" are, offers a fascinating look at a true scholar athlete. Author John McPhee`s debut is well written and gives the reader a look at how a student athlete should approach life and grasp the opportunity ahead. Bill Bradley is the consumate teamplayer who pays tribute to the small and important details of the game of basketball. A hoop junkie growing up, but also a reflective mind,perhaps too reflective to become President of the United States.
An inspiring book that should be read by people of any age, who seek to become successfull at whetever they do.

Bill Bradley, a three-time basketball all-American at Princeton, Olympic gold medalist, Rhodes scholar, member of the New York Knicks and two time NBA champion definitely has a passion for basketball. This books helps show what goes into the making of a champion. Discipline, selflessness, respect, courage, imagination and passion are elements that made him a success on and off the court. I knew nothing at all about Bill Bradley before reading this book, but I have great respect for his personal code and his shining example.