BROWSE BOOK REVIEWS

A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE

Bill Bradley At Princeton

by John McPhee

Featured vintage review selection (week of April 29, 2013)

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Note from Kirkus' Vintage Review Editor:

The NBA playoffs are here again and the New York Knicks are relevant again. In the 70’s, they were an excellent team and one of their stars was Bill Bradley, perhaps the most cerebral professional basketball player ever. The gifted essayist John McPhee portrayed Bradley, the collegiate player, in A Sense of Where You Are, which Kirkus adored. “What a rare sports book! The story of Princeton's phenomenal basketball superstar, Bill Bradley, constantly takes the reader right in the middle of the action,” we wrote at the time. — April 29, 2013

KIRKUS REVIEW

What a rare sports book! The story of Princeton's phenomenal basketball superstar, Bill Bradley, constantly takes the reader right in the middle of the action. Seldom has court psychology been better explained, while revealing at the same time a player's temperament. Early in high school Bill put in three and a half hour practice sessions which, along with his natural attributes, resulted in what can only be called a physical genius for the game. His sensibilities are now such that he can shoot baskets backward without seeing the basket and make blind passes to team members merely on intuition. As he analyzes himself, his great faculty is simply having "a sense of where you are". Not a giant by basketball standards, Bradley is a passer rather than a high scorer and prefers the sport of the game to personal glory. Now a post-graduate, he has accepted a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and turned down a $50,000 offer from the NY Knickerbockers. Twenty-one, and an Olympic champion, he has retired to the cloisters!

Pub Date: Sept. 27th, 1965

ISBN: 0374526893

Page count: 240pp

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12th, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 1965