By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
It’s been 52 years since Bill Bradley ran up and down Dillon Gym in shorts and sneakers and nearly 40 years since he campaigned up and down New Jersey to join the U.S. Senate.
Now 74, he was back Monday morning in the community where the Missouri native found celebrity as a basketball player for Princeton University, in the same state where he launched a political career that he envisioned ending with him at the White House.
"Are you carrying the burden for all press today?" Bradley asks as he is being interviewed on Nassau Street, before he announces he is endorsing fellow Democrat Phil Murphy for governor.
Bradley, dressed in a sports coat and, in a nod to the colors of his alma mater, a black tie with orange dots, is making small talk on the sidewalk before he goes inside for a press conference. He and Murphy chat beforehand, with Bradley lamenting some of the traffic in the part of New Jersey, Monmouth County, where Murphy lives.
“Eighteen is tough,” Bradley tells him in reference to Route 18.
Bradley is no longer the politician, but rather an investment banker for Allen & Company traveling the world and living in New York.
“He likes what he does,” said John McPhee, the author and Princeton professor who wrote a book about Bradley, “A Sense of Where You Are.” “He has really settled into this job. When he first went there, I think he was testing it out, but it has really worked.”
Bradley also is the host of a talk show on satellite radio, something he has been doing for the past 13 years, on his program called "American Voices."
"I interview people about their lives across the country," he said.
His guests are either with people with unusual jobs – think a man who washes skyscrapers in New York City or the groundskeeper at Fenway Park – or someone who has done something "selfless in their community." A recent guest had spent 17 years in prison, started working as a plumber when he got out, and donates part of his salary to a scholarship fund for children of people in prison.
“I think that Bill’s at a time in his life where he’s happy in what he’s doing,” said former Princeton teammate and ex-university athletic director Gary Walters. “He’s calling all his own shots as it relates to what he wants to do.”
Bradley, a Democrat, was a U.S. Senator for three terms, from 1979 to 1997, but he left office rather than seek re-election. Asked where the time has gone, Bradley replies: "Ask my body, it’ll tell you."
“He spent eighteen years in the Senate and decided that, for him, that was enough, that he had served as long as he felt like it and he wanted to get on to something else,” McPhee said.
In 2000, Bradley ran for president but lost in the primary to Vice President Al Gore. The defeat was a disappointment, for someone who had reached the top as an athlete and never lost a political campaign before that.
He says he does not miss politics, even though he has stepped into this year’s race for governor.
"I think Phil’s a great candidate, I think he’ll be a good governor and I think that he’s, from my perspective, got the experience and the range of experience," Bradley said with Murphy nearby. "And I think he understands what the problems are here that are affecting families."
Outside the building where the press conference will take place, some members of the extended family of Princeton University basketball, including current men’s head coach Mitch Henderson, were waiting on the sidewalk. Later, during the event, Mayor Liz Lempert called Bradley "our Princeton hero."
Bradley graduated from the university in 1965, the year he led the team to the Final Four in the NCAA basketball tournament. The year before, in 1964, he won a gold medal playing for the USA basketball team in the Olympics. He and other Olympic athletes got invited to the White House to meet President Lyndon Johnson, Bradley said in sharing the story.
Then only 19, he was on the receiving line, behind a swimmer and a wrestler, as he recalled it during the press conference. The next thing he knows, he shakes the president’s hand and hears, in a Texas drawl, "Move on."
"Lyndon Johnson did not want his picture taken with another person who was taller than he was," Bradley recalled.
Bradley toured the Tigerlabs office, where the press conference was held, and shook hands with people working inside. Scott Fisher recalled meeting the then-senator 25 years ago.
"I just remember him being really nice, we took pictures," Fisher said. "It’s great to see that he’s still active."
In his career, Bradley was never known as an electrifying speaker or a backslapping politician. For someone who lived in the public eye as a college athlete, then as a professional basketball player with the New York Knicks and then finally as a politician, he had a social awkwardness about him.
"He’s gotten much better," said Princeton resident Ross Wishnick who attended the press conference, "but in the beginning when he was running, he was really very shy."
"In person, one on one, he’s the most engaging person and brilliant," Wishnick said. "But he didn’t have this stage charisma until he got older."
After the press conference ended, Bradley left to help two Democrats running for the state Legislature in Princeton, just across the street from the university where it all had started for him. Walters said he believes Bradley’s Princeton experience was “transformative.”
“I would say for those of us who played with him, have known him for fifty years,” Walters said, “all I can say is that I think that while we were disappointed that he didn’t win the presidency, I think all of us are happy that he’s happy.”
