Values of the Game by Bill Bradley

INTRODUCTION
    One day in 1996, I was completing my regular physical workout on the StairMaster and treadmill at our local YMCA in Montclair, New Jersey, before returning to work in Washington. After the aerobics, I took a look into the small gym. It was empty—only a runner circling the old-fashioned running track around the ceiling—so I checked out a basketball and went in. It bounced well and the leather felt good. I began to shoot at ten feet, then fifteen, then eighteen.
Swish!
went the ball as it ripped through the net. Within minutes I was in another world, alone with my body movements and my memories. Years had passed since I’d done this, and yet in several minutes I was back. “I love this game!” I thought. The old inner voice began urging me to “hit all the shots.” These were different times and such aspiration was foolhardy, but still a surprising number went cleanly through the hoop. After about fifteen minutes, an elderly gentleman poked his head into the gym. I was shooting from the top of the key, then I was driving with a right hook off the boards, followed by a scoop shot. Then I was back at the top of the key. Slowly the man made his way into the gym and out onto the court. He approached me. I pretended to be unaware of him and kept shooting. He leaned in and said, “Bradley?”
    “Yes,” I said, launching another eighteen-footer.
    “Senator Bradley?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said.
    There was a pause, and then, piercing my idyllic reverie, he blurted out, “Why didn’t you answer my letter?”
    In a world full of unrealized dreams and baffling entanglements, basketball seems pure. We know, of course, that it isn’t. It has its own share of greed, violence, and obsession with the culture of entertainment. Yet even in the midst of these distractions, there is still the game. Each time a father takes his son or daughter to the playground to shoot baskets for the first time, a new world opens—one full of values that can shape a lifetime. In my experience, the feeling of getting better came with hard work, and getting better made victory easier. Winning was fun, but so was the struggle to improve. That was one of the lessons you learned from the game: Basketball was a clear example of virtue rewarded.
    I was very lucky to play a game I loved for twenty years, as a high school, college, and pro player. It gave me a unique window on the world, and it filled me with moments of insight and years of tremendous pleasure. Some of the most enjoyable times in my life were spent playing ball. It is that part of the game that this book celebrates—the good times playing basketball. In the course of writing it, I got to know the coach and players on the team at Stanford University, where I was a visiting professor. Watching them in games and talking about basketball with some of them reawakened memories in me of my life as a player. It was like meeting an old friend after twenty years—someone whose stories I remembered, and whose values I understood and wanted to share. Two decades ago I wrote in
Life on the Run
about my experiences as a New York Knick in the 1960s and 1970s, and there are a few excerpts from that book in this one. But what I try to do here is show how, after all the years, the game is still full of joy and the lessons learned from it stay with you—that even though the game has changed, the old values still flow through it.
    I hope parents will share this book with their children and basketball fans will find that it rings true. I believe that it applies to the whole of our passage through life.

PURE PLEASURE, PURE JOY
PASSION
    You begin by bouncing a ball—in the house, on the driveway, along the sidewalk, at the playground. Then you start shooting: legs bent, eyes on the rim, elbow under the ball. You shoot and follow through. Let it fly, up, up and in. No equipment is needed beyond a ball, a rim, and imagination. How simple the basic act is. I’m not sure exactly when my