A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton

By John McPhee

Book Overview

When John McPhee met Bill Bradley, both were at the beginning of their careers. "A Sense of Where You Are," McPhee's first book, is about Bradley when he was the best basketball player Princeton had ever seen. McPhee delineates for the reader the training and techniques that made Bradley the extraordinary athlete he was, and this part of the book is a blueprint of superlative basketball. But athletic prowess alone would not explain Bradley's magnetism, which is in the quality of the man himself--his self-discipline, his rationality, and his sense of responsibility. Here is a portrait of Bradley as he was in college, before his time with the New York Knicks and his election to the U.S. Senate--a story that suggests the abundant beginnings of his professional careers in sport and politics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374514852
• ISBN13: 9780374514853
• Release Date: October 1978
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

New Journalism Classic

Whether you like sports or not, McPhee's book is so well written that it carries you along. Bradley at Princeton seems so ancient compared with the sports scene today, but the story reveals unknowingly how much we have lost in the culture when it comes to heroes.

An elegant look at the game of basketball.

I'm writing this review because the fact that it didn't have a 5-star rating irritated me. I first saw the McPhee/Bill Bradley piece in the New Yorker Magazine about 30 years ago. After reading it I xeroxed the entire article and sent copies of it to every member of the University of South Carolina basketball team (which for those of you who are as old as I am was coached by the legendary Frank McGuire (the assistant coach...

a sense of grace

Curious about Bill Bradley, the man? Sometimes a sense of the man can be had by looking at the youth. This book was written in 1965 after Bradley had finished his Princeton career and was on his way to Oxford. John McPhee's books pack powerful character studies into deceptively simple language. On the surface this is a book about basketball (it's a good book about basketball!), and about excellence through dedication and...

Bradley's basketball play provides a key to his character.

John McPhee's profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton is classic McPhee: the careful, meticulous observer;the passionate but objective reporter; the master wordsmith. For anyone who hasn't read McPhee, this is a great introduction to his work (it's also McPhee's first book, and has been in print every year since it was written in the mid-'60s).What do you call this book? Sports writing? A detailed profile? Both, I guess, and...

Bradley's success results from integrity and hard work.

Written when Bill Bradley was still a student at Princeton, the book is a synthesis of McPhee's interviews with and observations of the three-time All American. It creates a picture of Bradley as a person of character who brings his personal integrity to whatever he does and who succeeds as a result of hard work applied in accord with his personal principles. We learn, for example, that as a youngster Bradley apparently...