Bill Bradley’s story is one of the more fascinating crossovers of sports, politics and life.
No team in NBA history has been as celebrated for its teamwork, its unity and its collective basketball IQ as the New York Knicks of the early 1970s. And no member of those Knicks teams embodied their style more than Bill Bradley.
But what seems in retrospect like a master jeweler’s precision timepiece was, in fact, a collection of parts that had to be assembled, synchronized and tested, again and again, to achieve the perfection with which the basketball world a half-century later regards them.
To see in the mind’s eye the pass that could lead to the pass, that could lead to the basket. Before it happened. And when it happened — say, a perfectly executed back-door play of two passes, three quick cuts [and a basket] — there was a rush of joy. A feeling that everything was in perfect balance right there on the court with your teammates. Before 19,500 people in the new Madison Square Garden — five times more than all the people living in Crystal City [Mo.].
“It was during those years I thought I was part of the greatest team in the greatest sport in the greatest city in the world,” Bradley says now, looking back. “It was the closest I ever came to feeling I belonged.”
Back before Bradley was a Knick, and long before his days as a U.S. Senator from New Jersey, a Rhodes Scholar, an All-American at Princeton, or a member of the 1964 men’s Olympic team, he was an only child and a banker’s son who longed to fit in with the other kids in small-town Missouri.
“All I know for sure is, for a few short years in my life, I felt at one with my world,” Bradley tells his audience, from the stage, working alone and without a net in “Rolling Along: An American Story.” It is a one-man show, a “performative autobiography” unlike anything you’ve seen by a non-performer (cutting Bradley slack on his careers as a jock and a politician). And it is available for streaming on Max on Thursday, Feb. 1.
Hitting that sweet spot in life — dead solid perfect they call it in golf, being “in the zone” in hoops and elsewhere — is something Bradley is striving to feel again. Only not on such a micro level this time, with himself and a cluster of teammates, but something way more macro.
Late in life, Bradley has his eye on America coming into better alignment. Everyone walks around with e pluribus unum in their wallets and pockets every day, but how many live by it?
A story-teller at heart
“We’re so divided in our country today,” Bradley said in the film. “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to remember what made our Knicks teams so successful so many years ago. Take responsibility for yourself. Respect your fellow human being. Disagree with them honestly and civilly. Enjoy their humanity. And never look down on people you don’t understand.”
That last one, straight from his grandmother to young Bill’s ears, is mentioned three times during the performance. It cuts every which way, across race and class, from one generation to the next, and conceivably could stretch across this nation’s political and ideological divides if people would heed it.
For 90 minutes, in a V-neck sweater and with a self-deprecating smile, Bradley shares personal tales, stories from his NBA and Senate days, and some of the concerns and ideas he has for Americans. It’s about as folksy and non-threatening as it could be, worth a watch whether you’ve heard of Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Red Holzman or not.
“I’ve been telling stories my whole life,” Bradley told NBA.com in a phone interview last week. “I feel like we learn about reality – about the past as well as the future – from stories people tell. Through people telling their stories, I think we get to each other more as human beings, and not as political cut-outs.
“This is about love of the game, love of the country. It’s about perseverance, forgiveness, hard work, failure, success. So it’s about my life but also their lives. My idea was that this might have a healing effect in a divided country. For it to have a healing effect, I had to be honest about myself.”
Origins of the autobiography
Bradley’s tales circle and weave, jump forward and back in time and reveal the man in full. He comes with candor, sharing teachable and even awkward moments related to race, such as how he inadvertently got pitted against black teammate Cazzie Russell when they were competing for playing time in the Knicks lineup. It took 40 years to thaw their friendship.
There were his frustrations across three terms in the Senate. The lack of direction he felt after his failed bid to be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2000. The pain and guilt unleashed by the dissolution of his longtime marriage to his wife Ernestine not long after that.
There also are wonderful stories about his Knicks career, the growing up he did at Princeton and Oxford, his insights into what makes New York sports fans tick, and more. His banker father wanted Bill to be a gentleman, his mother wanted him to be a success, he said, but “neither one of them wanted me to be a basketball player or a politician.”
This project sprang serendipitously out of Bradley donating his political papers to Princeton. The school did an oral history in which it interviewed 40-50 people about their associations with him, and at a reception later, Bradley returned the favor, standing up to share memories about each of them.
His longtime friend, legendary Broadway producer Manny Azenberg, told him afterward it reminded him a little bit of Hal Holbrook and his famous “Mark Twain” show. “You ought to work something up,” Azenberg said.
Bradley did just that. In 2017 he took his personal story to about 20 cities. “Fifty people here, 30 there, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Miami,” he said. Feedback from the audience at each stop helped him shape the project even more.
Memorizing his script might have come easier if he’d had former Knicks teammate Jerry Lucas’ fabled photographic memory. Instead, Bradley drilled himself on daily walks in Central Park, then began doing readings each afternoon at 3:30 p.m. as diligently as he worked on his jump shots in gyms every day.
Bill Bradley’s unique experiences on and off the court became the foundation for his autobiography, which premieres on Feb. 1.
At one reading in the commissary on the Warner Bros. lot, director Mike Tollin — best known as executive producer of ESPN’s “The Last Dance” series on Michael Jordan — approached him and suggested he consider a film version.
Bradley rang up his friend Spike Lee for an opinion. “He said, ‘Come over to Brooklyn. What do you need?” Bradley recalled. “I told him, a stool and a glass of water. He had tears in his eyes when it was over.”
‘I was always searching’
Finally, during one of Bradley’s readings in the community room of his Manhattan apartment building, one of the stray visitors who would drop in two, three, five at a time turned out to be Frank Oz, of Jim Henson/Muppets fame. “He said, ‘Let me help you do this,’” the basketball Hall of Famer said.
The plan to take this around the country as a theater performance was undone by the COVID-19 pandemic. So their group rented one stage in New York for four nights, rolling five cameras. That’s what got edited into the final version.
There was one more detail. About two weeks before “Rolling Along” was to debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, Van Morrison’s reps declined to let Bradley use the singer’s “And The Healing Has Begun” as its opening theme. Bradley scrambled for a pretty good Plan B.
“I called my buddy Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band,” Bradley said. “I told him I didn’t have an opening song. He said, ‘Well, Bruce [Springsteen] wrote something for Clarence and me in the ‘80s called “The Summer of Signal Hill.”’ I tried that and it worked!”
One effect of the film is to de-mystify Bradley, revealing more humility than his Wikipedia account of a seemingly charmed life might suggest. “I’m a human being, like everybody else,” he said. “That’s nothing to run away from. That’s something to accept in each of us.”
Bradley has written seven books but none — in content or delivery — has been this personal. How often have you seen someone outside of show biz put themselves before an audience, warts and all, for 90 minutes?
“Billy Crystal did some version of it,” Bradley said. “But I guess people don’t take that chance, even if they’re great speakers. You’re revealing yourself with the writing of it, and then there’s the whole performing of it. You have to really want to do this, and it’s taken me five or six years.”
Now 80, Bradley enjoys a smaller life now (one-man shows aside). Simple interactions mean the most.
“Maybe all those years of me not feeling I belonged anywhere was what made me so curious about other people. About America,” he says deep into the production. “I was always searching. Chasing the horizon. Opening myself up to people who were different. Trying to understand them. Wanting to know the what and the how and the who and why of people’s lives.
“I wanted to know America like I once knew the seams of a basketball.”
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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.
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