For seven years in the nineteen-seventies, my family spent July at a house beside a lake in northern New Hampshire. But he was somewhat impressed by his competence as a swimmer. Tennis lessons produced neither an overhead nor a backhand down the line. She was an athlete, a golf-club champion. When Bill Bradley was young, his mother signed him up for enough swimming lessons to improve a bluefin tuna. I wore a white lace dress for my mother’s ordination, a gray satin dress for her sanctioning, and a green dress for my father’s inauguration into the Swimming Hall of Fame. I hid our guests’ keys when I wanted them to stay, and rode home from preschool on my father’s shoulders. I ate crepes for Easter, latkes for Channukah, and chocolate almost every day. I played in the snow, cut tulips from our neighbors’ yard, and stole cookies year round. Wearing shoes with sharp leather heels, as nervous as a professional writer, he fidgeted with his feet, scuffing as he wrote, and destroyed the rug, leaving behind a bundle of Persian shreds. There was a rug of great value beneath the table. Writing day and night about Harry Truman, he sat at my typing table. Bill, alone, spooked in the night, heard ghosts. My wife and I had gone to Florida to begin the research for a piece on oranges, and our children went off with grandparents. He hid for a couple of weeks in my house. Back in Princeton from the Final Four, where he had scored fifty-eight points in his last college game, he was getting so much press attention that he needed a place to hide, a place to write. He was a history major, and his subject-for which he had completed all interviews and other research-was Harry Truman’s second senatorial campaign. Princeton went to the Final Four that season, an extracurricular distraction that left Bradley with an intensified deadline for his senior thesis. I described these optical scenes in a New Yorker Profile in January, 1965. Bill could practically see out the back of his head, let alone a bit of plastic on a floor. In early December of his senior year at Princeton, I persuaded him to go with me to an ophthalmologist, who plotted his peripheral vision within circles on a graph, and we found that Bill could see as much as twenty-three degrees more than most people. When Bill was in high school, in Crystal City, Missouri, he would walk down the streets with blinders on his eyes to see if he could read the signs in shopwindows on either side. Leaving the sideline, he walked to mid-court, stopped, bent forward, and pointed at the lens.įocus like that is an obvious asset in the central vision of a basketball player, and so is peripheral vision, which adds so much to court sense. People in the stands were clapping in unison. Princeton’s Bill Bradley, who happened to be on the sideline talking to his coach, watched with a curiosity that evolved toward impatience as five minutes went by. Some went completely prone and squinted down along the floorboards. They got down on their hands and knees and grovelled, crawled like bugs. Teammates stopped their drills and came to help. He bent over to pick it up but couldn’t see it. As the two teams were warming up, a contact lens fell to the court from the eye of a Princeton player. On March 8, 1965, I went to Philadelphia to watch Princeton play Penn State in the opening round of the N.C.A.A.
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