Former Knicks forward and two-time NBA champ Bill Bradley, who later spent nearly two decades as a New Jersey Senator, takes a timeout for some Q&A with Post columnist Steve Serby. Bradley’s “Rolling Along: An American Story” is a performative autobiographical documentary now available on Max.
Q: Compare what it was like being a rookie with the Knicks and the youngest U.S. Senator in 1979.
A: (Laugh) I was in the Senate, I don’t know, six months or so, and there is a room off the Senate floor, two rooms actually — one Democrat, one Republican. They’re called cloak rooms, 19th century guys used to have to store their cloaks there. But now it’s got some sofas and a few phones. The Senate was in late one night about 10 o’clock and I went to the cloak room. There was one senator who was sitting quietly, another senator telling a joke, one on the phone, one pacing up and down. I looked around and I thought, ‘This is not a lot different than the Knick locker room,’ and I felt, ‘I’m home.’
Q: You experienced hostility from the Madison Square Garden crowd as a rookie in 1965, right?
A: Absolutely. I was out at guard. I was too slow to play guard. I had a whole big publicity thing, made more money than other people made … and then I failed, fell flat on my face. I was too slow to play guard. And the crowd booed me, spit on me, threw coins at me, accosted me in the street with, ‘Bradley you overpaid bum!’ And I just kept working along, kept working harder and working harder, and the following year Cazzie Russell broke his ankle. And the coach moved me to forward, which was the natural position for me. I played 40 minutes a night with four other guys for 39 games, the team gelled. I found my place. But those early years seared me in a way that lasted a lifetime.
Q: How did you get through that?
A: I just hunkered down. Summertime I played in Rucker’s in Harlem, and Baker League in Philadelphia, and worked out every day. I probably was still gonna be challenged as a guard, and then Cazzie broke his ankle, they moved me to forward, the rest is history.
Q: Where were you on the court when Willis Reed limped out for Game 7 of the 1970 Finals against the Lakers?
A: I was shooting around the key. And I heard this roar, because when we left the locker room, I didn’t know if he was gonna come out. [Dave] DeBusschere later told me he knew because he’d hang around at the end. He said, ‘Big fella, just give us 15 minutes.’ Willis said, ‘I’ll be there.’ I didn’t know that. Then the building began to shake, right? And I turned, it was Willis, and he walked out on the court. I looked down at the Lakers, and Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor all stopped practice and looked at Willis. They wanted to see if they could tell how hurt he was. After hitting those two shots, the Garden crowd was skyrocketing, the building roof was going off. [Clyde] Frazier was flying, had the finest seventh game of any player in history, in my view. And the rest of us played well as a team. And we became world champions.
Q: Was that the loudest you heard the Garden?
A: I’ve heard it loud a lot. But certainly that night, the noise had the most meaning because it was a noise of respect for the captain who put it all on the line for his teammates and for the city and the organization. It was another dimension to that moment as opposed to us coming back from 12 down and beating Detroit on a Thursday night or a Tuesday night.
Q: Did you ever consider asking Clyde to wear one of his outfits?
A: I never did. They’re colorful and wonderful, and I’m all for that. Clyde as an individual is extremely conservative— not politically, but he always got sleep, he always ate health food, he was eating seeds before it was cool to eat seeds, right? He had such a generous, kind personality, and I think you see that today. I think what people respond to now with Walt Frazier is not just the clothes, obviously, or the great athlete of the past, but he’s a really good man. And they recognize that and they like him because he’s a good man.
Q: What was DeBusschere like as a roommate?
A: Dave DeBusschere became the older brother I never had. I was an only child. We were on the road for nine months a year. Developed a deep friendship. I remember when I was sworn into the Senate, I looked up there in the gallery, there was Dave with tears in his eyes. I ran for president, he campaigned for me in Iowa and New Hampshire. I always would look forward to seeing him, and he would always have something to say about the game I found interesting. Of course, as a human being he embodied the values that I believed in in terms of what it takes to be a champion.
Q: Did you have any inkling that Phil Jackson would become an 11-time NBA champion coach?
A: If you asked me when I saw Phil, did I think he was gonna be a coach? No. But in retrospect, if you looked at how Phil played, he had deep knowledge of the game, he was totally unselfish, he was a fierce competitor. Some of the most memorable moments, pickup practices playing one-on-one with Phil, he didn’t want to lose. And he was a studier of people. I can see how all those things came together to make him one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game.
Q: Describe Red Holzman.
A: One of the greatest basketball coaches of all time. He was a coach of men, not boys. No Saturday night pep talks. Only three rules: hit the open man on offense, help out on defense, and the hotel bar belongs to me. He knew what it was to coach a professional team.
Q: Who gave you the nickname “Dollar Bill”?
A: I think either Willis, [Dick] Barnett or Frazier.
Q: How did you feel about it?
A: Fine. I’ve told it 100 different ways: What does it mean? Well, it means, what? I still have the first dollar, I’m really tight with money … could mean that, right (smile)? Does it mean that I was the money player sometimes, I hit the open shot at the end of the game? It could be that. Who knows? Was it my initial contract, which was bigger than others? Yeah, probably the origin was the latter, and then it morphed into the previous two.
Q: The Jets won it in 1969, the Knicks won it and the Mets won it. What do you remember about the city back then?
A: It was rockin’. It was a city of champions, and we had to do our share.
Q: Jalen Brunson, could he have played on your Knicks teams?
A: I like Jalen Brunson. Could he have played? It’s a different game. People could say, ‘How would the old Knicks perform against the Chicago Bulls or the San Francisco Warriors?’ and I’d do the matchup, and I was ending up with [Scottie] Pippen, and I would say, ‘Help!’ But [Jalen is] a good player, and he’s learning how to make other players on his team better, and that’s the key. When I go to a game, I always like to count the number of passes that are made after the ball passes half-court. The objective in basketball is the maximum player movement and ball movement that rewards unselfishness. And I think the Knicks are beginning to see that. Their run in January was amazing, right? What strikes me is that was a run that we had in my year before the championship when the team gelled. We knew that we were gonna be a champion that year [1970]. A 14-2 January leads into real possibilities in February. And if you do something in February — the more you win like that, and the more you win unselfishly — the more likely it is that you’re gonna be playing in May. And to me, that’s the goal. Are you playing in May or June?
Q: So this current Knicks team should give the city hope?
A: Yeah. … Once a Knick, always a Knick fan. I’m a long-suffering Knick fan for 50 years. I’d like to see the team do it for [James] Dolan. I’d like to see them do it for themselves. I’d like to see them do it for the city. I’d like to see them do it for the old guys who still believe in them.
Q: Tom Thibodeau.
A: I like Thibodeau. He seems to understand unselfishness is important, moving the ball’s important. Again, it’s a little different game now because you have the pick-and-roll, and too much in my view, every team does too much pick-and-roll. I’d much rather have five players moving. But in the context of that, I still see backdoor plays, I still see Knicks moving without the ball. That’s taught, that’s not natural.
Q: What was it like winning the 1964 Olympic gold?
A: It was a tremendous honor for me. It wasn’t the best basketball in the world. The best basketball’s the NBA. But it was a great honor to represent your country and stand on the podium with your gold medal and hear the national anthem played and see the flag raised. A memorable and deep experience, but at the same time, on an equal level with me, was living in the Olympic village, where all countries lived. I knew we were gonna play the Russians. There was a Russian player, he played guard, and I was an Evangelical at that time. And so I went into Tokyo to a Bible store, and bought a Bible in Russian, and I gave him the Bible (laugh). He was a little perplexed. That’s what I did in those days (smile). This guy was actually Latvian, but he was born in the Soviet Union.
Q: Your 58-point game for Princeton in the 1965 Final Four consolation game.
A: What happened was, we were playing Wichita State, and I always hit the open man, right? In that game, I’d hit ’em, they’d throw back to me. We had a timeout and the coach [Butch Van Breda Kolff] says, ‘Shoot the damn ball!’ And so I did. I had no idea how many points it was.
Q: Reaching the Final Four, before losing to Michigan, had to be a thrill though, right?
A: It was. Throughout my life, I’ve never sought to be All-American or pro or whatever. I always wanted to win the competition in which my team was engaged. High school championship, didn’t get it. College championship, got to the Final Four, didn’t get it. And then came 1970, and the realization of what it was to be the best.
Q: Describe what it was like running against Al Gore for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.
A: In retrospect, it was probably a long, long shot to challenge a sitting vice president. But I think that running for president was one of the greatest honors I ever had because of the way people react to you when you’re running. They look at you and they say, ‘Who do I trust with my job? Who do I trust with my life? Who do I believe has a view of life similar to my own?’ A lot of that comes to you when you’re standing before people at a town meeting. And with Gore, we had debates. We had tough competition, but obviously he had more firepower. He won, and then I endorsed him after he won the primary, and campaigned for him when he ran against [George W.] Bush. Because that’s what you do. That’s what you learn as a kid — if you lose, you congratulate the winner, whether it’s politics, or basketball. You act out of honor, and not grievance.
Q: How do you think your life would have changed if you had become president?
A: (Smile) I wouldn’t be talking to you here today, and I wouldn’t be doing a one-man show. Basically, when you become president, your life ends for all intents and purposes after the presidency. Not that you don’t have a good life, but your life is over. After losing, I went into finance and became my father’s banker son, finally. I liked the companies that I worked with. The latest would be a metabolic disease company that I think may have found the answer to diabetes. Former presidents, it’s like you’re locked into a box. And you can’t get out of that box. So not being the president opened up a lot of territory for me to grow and to experience life in all its beauty, and tragedy.
Q: How proud are you of being a Rhodes Scholar?
A: I found my time in Oxford to be enormously rich. My first year there, I commuted to Italy, and once somewhere else in Europe playing with an Italian meat-packing firm team in the European Cup championships. And we won the European Cup that first year. I drove 500 miles around Russia, what was then the Soviet Union. I lived in Germany and tried to learn the language. I was a reporter for KMOX radio in St. Louis, and interviewed a buddy of Jack Kennedy’s on the assassination date three years after the tragedy. I interviewed Mary Quant, the originator of the miniskirt. Oxford was a time of opening up and experiencing life in a way that I didn’t at Princeton, where things were pretty much rigid.
Q: JFK.
A: Exciting president whose tragic death affected the country for the whole next 15, 20 years.
Q: The Vietnam War.
A: An American tragedy.
Q: Richard Nixon.
A: Richard Nixon when I was a kid was thought to be the bad guy. But compared to our former president, Nixon is a paragon of virtue and American democracy. So it depends on your point of view. He was smart, and he worked with other people. He had to get the support from Republicans and Democrats.
Q: January 6?
A: A dark day in American history.
Q: Do you remember where you were?
A: I was watching some of it in my apartment, and I couldn’t believe it because all these people streamed into what used to be my Madison Square Garden — the Capitol, right? And I knew those hallways, those marble hallways that had been worn down by people walking in to talk to congressmen and senators about the future. And now you had people defiling it, and you had people in the Senate chamber, which was a place that, for me, was a kind of a sanctuary. I remember taking Phil Jackson and the Bulls into the Senate chamber one day when the Senate was out of session. And they walked around like they were looking at center court, and Michael Jordan went right to the Majority Leader’s desk (smile), not telling him where it was. January 6 was a day that I hope we will never repeat.
Q: Rodney King.
A: It was an episode that struck at the very heart of my soul. I was very angry when I saw it on videotape, and I went to the Senate floor to speak and made my 56-81 speech. I wanted that speech to make a difference in people’s lives. But it didn’t because those things still happen. Which only reminds us we have a distance to go.
Q: Put into words what you did.
A: The videotape showed the LAPD hitting Rodney King, an unarmed African-American man, 56 times in 81 seconds with batons. And a neighbor caught it on videotape, and there it was. And when I saw that, I became so angry that I came to the Senate, cleared my desk, wrote the speech, went to the Senate floor, and then spontaneously I picked up a pen that was on my desk, and hit the desk 56 times in 81 seconds so that people would have some idea of what it is to be beaten that long with a baton.
Q: Barry Goldwater.
A: Again, conservative. He was instrumental in me becoming a Democrat because I was an intern in Washington that summer between my junior and senior year. The issue was the 1964 Civil Rights Act that desegregated public accommodations, hotels, restaurants, of my Missouri childhood, for example. And it was sponsored by a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, and when I saw Sen. Goldwater stand and vote against that bill, that day I became a Democrat. When I was in the Senate and served with him, I found him to be collegial, I found him to be interested in other people. He was a westerner more than anything else, meaning he came from a state that needed water, and I was the chairman of Water and Power, and responsible for water in 20 western states, of which a portion was Arizona. And so (laugh) I always thought of him as a westerner because the people who live there always appreciate the fragility of life because if the water’s not there, life isn’t there either.
Q: Stan Musial.
A: One of my childhood heroes. I was extremely honored to get the Musial Award just a couple of months ago. He embodied the values I care about in addition to being a great clutch hitter. You saw the film, I mimic Stan The Man’s stance when I talk about going into Sportman’s Park in St. Louis with my father.
Q: Chuck Berry.
A: One of my childhood heroes. If I think about the presidential campaign, there are two moments that stick out in my mind. One was when Chuck Berry appeared for me at a rally in St. Louis. The other was when I had a fundraiser in Madison Square Garden and 9,500 people came along with all my teammates and other NBA greats on the floor to support me. That was a tremendously moving moment.
Q: As a boy, what drove you?
A: I think I was driven by parental love. I always wanted to do well by my parents. And I remember going to Easy Ed Macauley’s basketball camp when I was like 14. The night before I was supposed to go to the Macauley camp in August of that year, I was playing in the backyard, the phone rang and I ran to get the phone. And jumped over a hammock and fell. I hit my elbow and injured my elbow, so I could not use my right hand when I went to Macauley’s camp. So I had to do everything left-handed, and I think that kind of caught Macauley’s attention and some of the other coaches. I remember he’d lecture the campers every day. One day he said, ‘Remember, if you’re not practicing, somebody somewhere is practicing. Given roughly equal ability, he’s gonna win.’ That’s the origin of my workaholism. I never wanted to lose because I didn’t put the effort in. … That value was set in concrete at Easy Ed Macauley’s basketball camp.
Q: How proud do you think you made your parents?
A: Well, on my mother’s death bed, she said, ‘Bill, you’ve been a good boy.’ I was 52. I think that tells you.
Q: And your father?
A: I could do no wrong. He was a constant positive force in my life. He was disabled, however, calcified arthritis of the lower spine. I never saw him drive a car or tie his shoes or put his jackets on. We did those things for him.
Q: What do you hope we take from your performative autobiography?
A: Let me put it this way: We did a focus group about the film. Showed it to 50 people, then narrowed it down to 15 people from all over the country. And the guy said, ‘What is this about?’ And the answers were, it’s about all of us. … It’s about love of the game, love of the country. It’s about perseverance, forgiveness, joy, sadness, triumph. In other words, it’s a human story, not a hero’s story. And I hope people will see themselves in it, as some of the people in this focus group did. And I hope that it will lead to some healing in a country that desperately needs the healing. It boils down to giving your opponent the benefit of the doubt, and listening, and not simply shouting. It’s not just power and money that’s important in life. … I hope it touches people. It’s not your normal documentary. It’s an attempt for me to touch people’s hearts in a way that it ennobles their best selves.
Q: “Never look down on people you don’t understand.”
A: That was my grandfather. And you just hit the most important line in the whole film. It appears three times.
Q: Why is that the most important line?
A: It’s a way of living: … Have some humility about what you know about somebody who has a different life than you do. Whatever their color, ethnicity, background … whether they come from Appalachia or whether they come from Harlem or whether they come from Wyoming or Texas. … Part of my hope about the film was that it could have a healing effect on people. And they could see what they share with each other as opposed to what divides them. That’s why at the end, I say they could learn a lot in a time of this division from what made the Knick team successful so many years ago — take responsibility for yourself, respect your fellow human being, disagree with them openly and honestly, enjoy their humanity and … never look down on people you don’t understand.
