Bill Bradley

At 81 years old, Bill Bradley has this physical status:

William Warren Bradley (born July 28, 1943) is an American politician and former professional basketball player.

He served three terms as a Democratic senator from the United States. Senator Bob Domini of New Jersey.

In the 2000 election, he failed unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party's nomination for president. Bradley was born and raised in Crystal City, Missouri, a small town 45 miles (72 kilometers) south of St. Louis.

He excelled at basketball from an early age.

In high school, he did well academically and was an all-count and all-state basketball player.

He was given 75 college scholarships but decided against attending Princeton University.

In 1964, he earned a gold medal as a member of the 1964 Olympic basketball team and was named the NCAA Player of the Year, when Princeton finished third in the NCAA Tournament.

He attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1965, delaying a decision for two years about whether or not to participate in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Bradley played one season of professional basketball in Europe and then decided to join the New York Knicks in the 1967–68 season after spending six months in the Air Force Reserve.

He spent his entire ten-year NBA career with the Knicks, winning NBA titles in 1970 and 1973.

He retiring in 1977 from his adopted home state of New Jersey, and sought a seat in the United States Senate the following year.

He was re-elected in 1984 and 1990, departed the Senate in 1997, and was a no-shower for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination. Bradley is the author of seven non-fiction books, the most recent We Can All Do Better, and he hosts American Voices, a weekly radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

He is a corporate director of Starbucks and a partner at investment bank Allen & Company in New York City.

Bradley is a member of Issue One's ReFormers Caucus.

He also serves on the Advisory Board of the organization. Bradley was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2008.

Early life

Bradley was born on July 28, 1943, in Crystal City, Missouri, the only child of Warren Warren (June 22, 1901-1996), a teacher and former high school basketball player, as well as a bank president. In Bradley's childhood, politics and politics were common dinner-table topics, and he described his father as a "solid Republican" who voted for Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. He became an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of the Arrow as an active Boy Scout.

Bradley began playing basketball at the age of nine. He was a member of Crystal City High School, where he earned 3,068 points in his scholastic career, twice named All-American and was elected to the Missouri Association of Student Councils. He received 75 college scholarships but only five colleges and only received a 485 out of 800 on the Verbal portion of the SAT, which may have caused selective schools like Princeton University to refuse him.

Bradley's basketball skills flourished after his height, 5 feet 9 inches (1.85 m) in the eighth grade, and his adult size of 6 foot 5 inches (1.96 m) by the age of 15, which he managed to develop by focusing on faraway objects while walking. Bradley maintained a strict workout regimen during his high school years, a habit he continued with throughout college. After school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five, and in the summer, three and a half hours a day, but not quite three hours per day. He put ten pounds of lead slivers in his sneakers, set up chairs as witnesses, and sluggishly dribbled about them, and wore eyeglass frames with a piece of cardboard tape attached to them so he could not see the ground."

Personal life

In 1974, Bradley married Ernestine (née Misslbeck) Schlant, a German-born scholar of comparative literature. Stephanie, she has a daughter from a previous marriage, and Theresa Anne is their only child. Bradley and Schlant divorced in 2007, and Betty Sue Flowers, the former director of the LBJ Library, lives with them.

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