Life on the Run by Bill Bradley
I’ve been wanting to do this thing where after I read a book I write about it and include some of the passages I highlighted while reading. And there’s no time like now to start.
I finished Life on the Run by Bill Bradley yesterday. I am not a sports fan. I played soccer and ran track and cross country in high school. For a while I liked playing a “cover the spread” football league with friends, which caused me to watch games. The only sports videos game I ever played a lot of was NBA 2k2 on Dreamcast.
Why did I choose a book by then New York Knick and future New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley? Because I read about the book in On Writing Well by William Zinsser and Zinsser held it up as a solid example of both memoir and sports writing—and it is.
Unlike other books by athletes, this was not ghost written or written “with” anyone but Bill Bradley himself, a Princeton graduate and Rhodes Scholar. He has a straightforward and clear style that drew me in.
But, I wasn’t completely engaged with the book throughout, probably because despite playing plenty of NBA 2k2 twenty years ago I really don’t know basketball. In sections where he goes into detail about games and plays my eyes glazed over. This may be my own cognitive limitation, but I easily lost track of who each of his teammates were and what they were into off the court (in Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern says to have character names be distinct enough so readers can keep them straight in their minds—obviously something you can’t do with real people in a memoir, but also part of my problem).
The most interesting parts of the book were the peeks of life off the court as a professional sports player in the 1970s (in the hotel, on the plane, in the locker room, or elsewhere). He talks about how much money they make, what they have to pay for and do versus what the team pays for and provides, having a meal with random fans. I imagine all of this is very different for professional athletes today.
I also enjoyed looking up the people he mentions in the book on Wikipedia to see where their life went in the past nearly fifty years since it was written. He talks about people I am familiar with, like Kareem, Wilt Chamberlain, or Phil Jackson, but also a whole host of fascinating teammates and coaches I’d never heard of (I’m sure any basketball fan would shake their head in disgust if I listed the names I didn’t know).
Bradley wrote the book about the 1973–74 season: a year after winning the Championship, two years before the NBA-ABA merger, and three years before he retired (to then become a United States Senator). You can see foreshadowing of his future career and inclinations in the book. His teammates even call him Senator sometimes. He discusses the details of the NBA players’ union and the court case against the merger (Robertson v. National Basketball Association) with the passion of someone who really cares about labor issues and politics.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes well-written and focused memoirs, or who wants a look at life (albeit life of a “celebrity”) in the early 1970s, or who is a basketball fan.
Highlights
But when there are no more Septembers with basketball, what happens then? Will it be over “just like that?”
I like the rough impersonality of New York, where human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions—all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again.
I wanted no part of an advertising industry which created socially useless personal needs and then sold a product to meet those needs.
Many avoid the embarrassment of public failure by never placing themselves in positions where they might fail. Therefore, they never grow.
Behind all the years of practice and all the hours of glory waits that inexorable terror of living without the game.
A team championship exposes the limits of self-reliance, selfishness, and irresponsibility. One man alone can't make at happen; in fact, the contrary is true: a single man can prevent it from happening. The success of the group assures the success of the individual, but not the other way around.
Being on a championship team is like being on that raft, floating down the Mississippi. Neither one can last forever.