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Bill Bradley reflects on a life of wins and losses
It was hardly an even matchup: One of us recently had shoulder surgery, and the other one is me.
Bill Bradley grew up in a small town on the Mississippi River (“Thirty-five miles south of St. Louis, with one stoplight”), with a basketball and a goal.
“I spent a lot of time practicing,” he said. “Three or four hours every day, five days a week, five hours on Saturday and Sunday, nine months a year.”
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And after high school he left little Crystal City, Missouri with 75 college offers, and a new goal. He chose Princeton, but not for basketball: “Princeton did have more Rhodes scholars than any other university,” he said.
Still, in 1965 he led Princeton to the NCAA Final Four. “We lost to Michigan in the semi-finals, and then we had a third-place game and in the third-place game I made 58 points.” And became tournament MVP.
What were his stats? “She’s asking my stats of a game 50 years ago!” Bradley laughed. “Well, let’s see: 22 out of 29 from the field, 14 out of 15 from the free-throw line, 12 rebounds.”
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Bradley was already a sensation, and more than a basketball star; he was just famous. “It comes with certain things,” he said. “I even found a strange woman in my bed. Said, ‘Hi.’ And I called the campus police. Remember, I was Evangelical.”
After graduation, turning down an offer from the New York Knicks, he went to England – a Rhodes scholar and a church-going Christian, until he heard a sermon preaching apartheid in racially-segregated Rhodesia. “I walked out and never returned to that church,” he said.
When Bradley finally appeared in Madison Square Garden, Knicks fans were delirious. “My first game, every time I touched the ball in warm-ups, 18,500 people roared, because I was their savior, supposedly.”
But not for long. “Crowd turned on me,” he said. “Booing me, spitting on me, throwing coins at me, accosting me in the street with, ‘Bradley, you overpaid bum.’ I was failing. And it hurt.”
And yet, today his jersey hangs in Madison Square Garden alongside his teammates’, the storied Knicks of the Seventies – two-time world champions in 1970 and ’73. “We were not the best players in the league, but we were the best team, and for two years we were the best team in the world,” he said.
All these years later, he still feels like the Garden is home. “I really believe it was the first time in my life that I felt like I belonged,” he said.
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Even back in Crystal City, a factory town, most dads worked at Pittsburgh Plate Glass, but Bill Bradley was the banker’s son, the only child of Warren and Suzy Bradley. She was a doting mother, high in expectations but strikingly low on praise: “The only compliment that I ever got from her was on her death bed, when she looked up at me and said, ‘Bill, you’ve been a good boy,'” he recalled. “I was 52.
“My mother always wanted me to be a success; my father always wanted me to be a gentleman. And neither one of them ever wanted me to be a basketball player, or a politician.”
And so, pivoting directly to politics, at 35 Bill Bradley of New Jersey was the youngest member of the United States Senate, a seat he occupied for 18 years.
But the White House? People always said that was Bradley’s destiny. And in 1999 he took his shot … and missed.
TANNEN MAURY/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, his marriage of 33 years was ending. Without a goal, without a job, he felt lost … until he found himself in a new, yet familiar place these last 23 years: investment banking.
“Finally,” he said, “becoming my father’s banker’s son.”
And now, at 80, in an improbable coda to a remarkable career, Bradley reflects on a life of wins and losses in an oral memoir, now streaming on Max: “Bill Bradley: Rolling Along.”
“If you can have an openness and joy about life that allows you to experience other people, nature, feeling the sun on your arms or whatever every day, you are gonna have a full life, whatever you do,” he said.
To watch a trailer for “Bill Bradley: Rolling Along,” click on the video player below:
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Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Carol Ross.
A passenger successfully landed a small plane on Friday after the pilot had a medical emergency, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90 was traveling from Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada to Monterey Regional Airport in California, with a pilot and one other person on board, the FAA said.
The pilot suffered an unspecified medical emergency while flying, the FAA said, forcing the passenger to take the controls and make an emergency landing at Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California.
The Kern Fire Department told CBS News affiliate KBAX that firefighters were called to a report of a medical emergency on the plane. The pilot was reported to be “incapacitated,” the fire department said. Firefighters saw the plane approach and land safely, then “chased” the plane down the runway in emergency vehicles to meet it.
The FAA did not release the passenger or pilot’s identities nor give an update on the pilot’s condition. The pilot was taken to an area hospital by ambulance. The passenger did not report any injuries.
The FAA and the National Transportation Security Board will investigate the incident, the FAA said.
Congolese authorities began vaccination against mpox on Saturday, nearly two months after the disease outbreak that spread from Congo to several African countries and beyond was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.
The 265,000 doses donated to Congo by the European Union and the U.S. were rolled out in the eastern city of Goma in North Kivu province, where hospitals and health workers have been overstretched, struggling to contain the new and possibly more infectious strain of mpox.
Congo, with about 30,000 suspected mpox cases and 859 deaths, accounts for more than 80% of all the cases and 99% of all the deaths reported in Africa this year. All of the Central African nation’s 26 provinces have recorded mpox cases. Officials in Congo previously told CBS News that they’ve struggled to diagnose patients and provide basic care in the vast country of 100 million people, where a fragile, under-resourced healthcare system is also burdened by the stigma associated with the virus.
Although most mpox infections and deaths recorded in Congo are in children under age 15, the doses being administered are only meant for adults and will be given to at-risk populations and front-line workers, Health Minister Roger Kamba said this week.
“Strategies have been put in place by the services in order to vaccinate all targeted personnel,” Muboyayi ChikayaI, the minister’s chief of staff, said as he kicked off the vaccination.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
At least 3 million doses of the vaccine approved for use in children are expected from Japan in the coming days, Kamba said.
Mpox, also known as monkeypox, had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Africa before the disease prompted the 2022 global outbreak that saw wealthy countries quickly respond with vaccines from their stockpiles while Africa received only a few doses despite pleas from its governments.
However, unlike the global outbreak in 2022 that was overwhelmingly focused on gay and bisexual men, mpox in Africa is now being spread via sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups, Dr. Dimie Ogoina, the chair of WHO’s mpox emergency committee, recently told reporters.
More than 34,000 suspected cases and 866 deaths from the virus have been recorded across 16 countries in Africa this year. That is a 200% increase compared to the same period last year, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
A lack of diagnostic materials and basic medicines to treat the virus, which can improve survival rates, have also hampered efforts to contain the outbreak, and access to vaccines remains a challenge.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
The continent of 1.4 billion people has only secured a commitment for 5.9 million doses of mpox vaccines, expected to be available from October through December, Dr. Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa CDC, told reporters last week. Congo remains a priority, he said.
At the vaccination drive in Goma, Dr Jean Bruno Kibunda, the WHO representative, warned that North Kivu province is at a risk of a major outbreak due to the “promiscuity observed in the camps” for displaced people, as one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis caused by armed violence unfolds there.
The news of the vaccination program brought relief to many in Congo, especially in hospitals that had been struggling to manage the outbreak. Doctors with several charities working in the country have told CBS News they’re overstretched and short on supplies, even having to use tents and mattresses on the floor of makeshift isolation wards to treat a constant influx of patients.
“If everyone could be vaccinated, it would be even better to stop the spread of the disease,” said Dr. Musole Mulambamunva Robert, the medical director of Kavumu Hospital, one of the mpox treatment centers in eastern Congo.
Eastern Congo has been beset by conflict for years, with more than 100 armed groups vying for a foothold in the mineral-rich area near the border with Rwanda. Some have been accused of carrying out mass killings.
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