Bill Bradley

Basketball, however, did not eclipse Bradley's interest in his studies, or his parents' determination that he would succeed in other areas. A straight A student, he put academics first when choosing a college. Having received more than seventy-five scholarship offers, Bradley turned them all down to enroll at Princeton, where he majored in history and wrote a senior thesis on Harry Truman's Senate re-election campaign of 1940.

Bradley's priorities were not evident on the basketball court, where he had an enormous influence on the Princeton team. During his three years as a varsity player, the Tigers claimed the Ivy League championship. As a sophomore he averaged 27.3 points per game and hit 89.9 percent of his freethrows. During his senior year, he helped the team reach the No. 3 spot among 551 NCAA teams, overcoming the fact that Princeton had not been ranked during the season. Nor had any Ivy League team made it past regional competition during the previous twenty-one years. When the Tigers played No. 1-ranked Michigan, a spectacular drama developed. With just under five minutes left in the game, Bradley fouled out with the Tigers leading, 75-63. Forty-one of those points had been made by Bradley. Michigan went on to win by two points, but Bradley was named Most Valuable Player of the tournament. In a consolation game against Wichita the next day, a disconsolate Bradley had to be pressed into shooting the ball. The result was his breaking the NCAA record for most shots scored in a single game, with fifty-eight points.

Off the court, Bradley earned a reputation for gentlemanly, modest behavior. In a 1965 feature story for Life, Paul O'Neil noted that the young man's intensity, self-pos-session, and strictly model behavior had initially inspired a few sneers from his classmates, but that "a certain baffled pride" had since developed at Princeton. After graduating with honors in 1965, Bradley turned down an offer to play for the Knicks in order to get his masters degree at Oxford. When he returned to the United States, Bradley was on active duty with the U.S. Air Force Reserve for six months before he joined the Knicks mid-season in 1967.