Bradley to open NCSU seminars

Ex-senator to discuss Russian role

RALEIGH -- Long before ESPN's hero-making hype machine had been invented for Michael Jordan, Brett Favre and other 20th-century athletic icons, Bill Bradley had his own schoolboy legend cultivated on the literary pages of The New Yorker.

The Missouri native spurned a basketball scholarship offer to Kentucky and turned down a chance to come to Duke University. Instead he went to Princeton, which he thought would offer his best academic chance at landing a Rhodes Scholarship four years later.

An admiring John McPhee was there in 1962 to chronicle his routine of working through a series of set shots, hook shots and jump shots in warm-ups. The writer's fascination with the two-time All American's gift for passing led him to take Bradley to a Princeton ophthalmologist to measure his peripheral vision.

It turned out that looking straight ahead, Bradley could see a full 195 degrees around, about 15 degrees more than those limited by mere perfect vision could see. Bradley later put that same broad perspective to use in three terms as a Democratic U.S. Senator for New Jersey; tonight, Bradley lands at N.C. State's Stewart Theatre to discuss Russia's place in international affairs and the conflict in Georgia.

After he graduated with honors and a 30.2 point-per-game scoring average -- and after a brief detour to Oxford for that Rhodes Scholarship -- Bradley had a 10-year tenure with a New York Knicks club that won two NBA championships in the early 1970s. Short shorts aside, "Dollar Bill" was a steady, if not flashy, contributor on a club stocked with Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe and other oversized, Hall of Fame personalities.

In some respects, the same could be said of his political career, which culminated in a run against incumbent Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic Party's 2000 presidential nomination. In politics and basketball, the dunk triumphs over the discreet, but crucial, assist. Bradley's work on the tax reform act of 1986 helped simplify the tax code but couldn't match the C-Span sizzle of other candidates.

During Bradley's presidential run in 2000, the late columnist Molly Ivins once praised him as a class act. She also believed, however, that a successful candidate on the national stage needed "some Elvis to him."

"Bradley has zip in the Elvis department," she wrote.

No one ever accused Elvis of understanding all the complexities of Russia's role in the 21st century, however.