A Sense of Where Bill Bradley is Now...

And More About Being Four Score

Bill Bradley was born in Crystal City, Missouri, on July 28, 1943. At the age of eighty he has decided to share his illustrious life story. A documentary version of his autobiographical stage production, Rolling Along: An American Story, is streaming now on Max. He plans an active social media presence and has a website at billbradley.com.

Why? For reasons he explains in his play, and I understand.

You may have read that this is a big year for people who are more less in the range of eighty years of age. President Joe Biden is running – the operative term – for re-election, as is that Trump person. At an anniversary dinner for Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute the other night, I was able to say hello at nearby tables to John Kerry and Bob Kerrey, both eighty and -- like Bradley -- successful former politicians who never reached the White House.

I am eighty and I have a number of chronologically old and close personal friends in the same decade, as well as a too-long list of those that didn’t make it or who have gone recently, alas. You can still score mightily at eighty plus. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s memoir is coming this spring. Barbra Streisand has unloaded a blockbuster autobiography. And Martin Scorcese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” is an Oscar finalist for best picture.

If you are eighty… Just an age…not an epithet.

Along with so many others of our generation I have been following Bill Bradley’s trajectory for more than sixty years, since he was a superstar basketball player at Princeton, an Olympic gold medalist, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and a two-time NBA champion with the New York Knicks before winning three terms as a U.S. senator from New Jersey, noted for his work on tax reform and racial justice. In 2000 he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination against Al Gore, a stripling five years younger than Bradley, who also fell short of that final victory, but has since managed to win a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, and an Emmy for his environmental advocacy.

In 1965, the New Yorker writer John McPhee published a profile of Bradley that became the book A Sense of Where You Are , a classic portrait of his basketball skill and some other qualities. Reading the book again, I am reminded of the impact it had on me all those decades ago.

“When Bradley talks about basketball,” McPhee wrote, “he speaks with authority, explaining himself much as a man of fifty might do in discussing a profession or business. When he talks about other things, he shows himself to be a polite, diffident, well-brought-up, extremely amiable and sometimes naïve but generally discerning young man just emerging from adolescence … He is painfully aware of his celebrity. The nature of it and the responsibility it imposes are constantly on his mind. He remembers people’s names and greets them by name when he sees them again. He seems to want to prove that he finds other people interesting. ‘The main thing I have to prevent myself from is becoming disillusioned with transitory success,’ he said recently. ‘It’s dangerous. It’s like a heavy rainstorm. It can do damage or it can do good, permitting something to grow.’”

I have encountered Bradley often enough over the years to say we are acquainted. I have heard him deliver enough speeches to say that emotive rhetoric is not one of his talents. In the contest against Gore, never considered a tub-thumper himself, Bradley was the dull one.

Which is why Rolling Along is so revealing, charming and in its way, inspiring. There Bradley is, is probably an inch or two shorter than the six feet five inches that was his playing height, in a V-neck sweater, on an empty stage, with a high chair to lean against. For ninety minutes he reflects on his life, his family in Missouri, his basketball family, his marriage, and the divorce that happened, he says, as the price of his political commitments and his wife’s dedication to her separate teaching career -- and despite their shared devotion to their daughter.

After losing the presidential race, Bradley says he recognized that he was entering a new era that would encompass his passage into old age. He describes wandering around in physical surroundings and in his mind until settling on a career at Allen and Company, a family-led investment bank, beginning a new and plainly satisfying romantic relationship, and starting to devise the thoughts that have rendered the play and Bradley’s other forays into today’s means of maintaining a public presence.

Reaching what I think of as the “repositioning” phase, following what was for so long your main career and personal preoccupations, the challenge is to make the best use of the time, values, energies, and interests possible. If you happen to be the president of the United States, that is especially hard -- so visible and subject to commentary from all and sundry.

There is one aspect of this period that can come in handy. You have inevitably had a full array of experiences, on a spectrum of positive to terrible. Bill Bradley has chosen to tell us about his “repositioning” and therefore help himself and others deal with theirs. From being a banker’s son in Crystal City to an avuncular sage on a stage, Bradley is working out the sense of who he is, now, and how he got that way.

I imagine that Joe Biden – in a decidedly different place – benefits from knowing that what he has been through makes him better able to deal with what he still wants to do. Unlike Bradley, however, Biden has not yet been ready to share in a way he almost certainly should what he believes about the consequences of his age, and in his case what re-election would demand of him.

Bill Bradley never became president. But what a story he has to tell -- and the way he has chosen to do so is definitely to his advantage and ours.