On March 8, 1965, I went to Philadelphia to watch Princeton play Penn State in the opening round of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. As the two teams were warming up, a contact lens fell to the court from the eye of a Princeton player. He bent over to pick it up but couldn’t see it. Teammates stopped their drills and came to help. They got down on their hands and knees and grovelled, crawled like bugs. Some went completely prone and squinted down along the floorboards. No one saw the lens. Princeton’s Bill Bradley, who happened to be on the sideline talking to his coach, watched with a curiosity that evolved toward impatience as five minutes went by. People in the stands were clapping in unison. Bradley had enough. Leaving the sideline, he walked to mid-court, stopped, bent forward, and pointed at the lens.

Focus like that is an obvious asset in the central vision of a basketball player, and so is peripheral vision, which adds so much to court sense. When Bill was in high school, in Crystal City, Missouri, he would walk down the streets with blinders on his eyes to see if he could read the signs in shopwindows on either side. Nonsense? Court sense. In early December of his senior year at Princeton, I persuaded him to go with me to an ophthalmologist, who plotted his peripheral vision within circles on a graph, and we found that Bill could see as much as twenty-three degrees more than most people. Bill could practically see out the back of his head, let alone a bit of plastic on a floor.

I described these optical scenes in a New Yorker Profile in January, 1965. Princeton went to the Final Four that season, an extracurricular distraction that left Bradley with an intensified deadline for his senior thesis. He was a history major, and his subject—for which he had completed all interviews and other research—was Harry Truman’s second senatorial campaign. Back in Princeton from the Final Four, where he had scored fifty-eight points in his last college game, he was getting so much press attention that he needed a place to hide, a place to write. He hid for a couple of weeks in my house. My wife and I had gone to Florida to begin the research for a piece on oranges, and our children went off with grandparents. We lived in a rural setting. Bill, alone, spooked in the night, heard ghosts. Goblins. Ghouls. Writing day and night about Harry Truman, he sat at my typing table. There was a rug of great value beneath the table. Wearing shoes with sharp leather heels, as nervous as a professional writer, he fidgeted with his feet, scuffing as he wrote, and destroyed the rug, leaving behind a bundle of Persian shreds.

Outside the author’s garage, in 1965.Photograph by John McPhee

I had not met him until 1964, although I had watched him since he was a freshman, when he set some sort of record by making fifty-seven consecutive free throws. As a junior, he agreed to the New Yorker piece, although he wondered why I wasn’t doing it for Time, where I was employed. He spent a large part of that summer in Princeton, reading for his thesis, and he was also in the gym a lot, often just with me feeding basketballs to him, as he kept his edge for the upcoming Tokyo Olympic Games. When he went home to Crystal City, I went with him. His mother put me in a bedroom that looked out on Taylor Avenue and Grace Presbyterian Church, their church. We ran a couple of miles each day on a high-school track. And one day we went to Don Bosco, a basketball camp ten miles west, where Bill introduced me to Ed Macauley.

Macauley ran the camp and Bradley was a featured guest. Macauley had also worked for the St. Louis Hawks, as their star center, and had been an All-American at Saint Louis University. He was known as Easy Ed, for the time it took him to come up the floor. While his teammates ran a fast break, he trailed them almost at a walk. Easy Ed was six feet eight, Bill six-five. Nineteen years later, I accompanied Bill on a campaign visit to the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, where he bucked the currents of a human river behind a sign that read “MEET SENATOR BRADLEY.” One potential voter he met said, “Man, are you tall. You looked small when you played for the Knicks.”

“I was small when I played for the Knicks,” the Senator said. Right enough. He was the small forward. And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M.

Bill spent the early days of his senior year in Tokyo, winning a gold medal. Other Princeton people were there, too—Lesley Bush, a platform diver, who was in her fourth year at Princeton High School; Jed Graef, a backstroker, who had just graduated from the university; and my father, the head physician for the U.S. team. All three athletes were gold medallists. There was withal a matter of yen. If athletes wanted to watch competition in a sport other than their own, they had to pay to get in. Jed wanted to watch the basketball. Bill found a spare equipment bag, added some costume touches, and marched Jed into the arena as a member of the American team. At this point in this narrative, I cannot resist flashing forward to 2003, when Jed’s daughter Dana was a sophomore in my Princeton writing class. One of her essays was about her childhood in western New York. Her mother is a Buddhist priest. Dana said in the essay:

I played in the snow, cut tulips from our neighbors’ yard, and stole cookies year round. I ate crepes for Easter, latkes for Channukah, and chocolate almost every day. I hid our guests’ keys when I wanted them to stay, and rode home from preschool on my father’s shoulders. I wore a white lace dress for my mother’s ordination, a gray satin dress for her sanctioning, and a green dress for my father’s inauguration into the Swimming Hall of Fame.

When Bill Bradley was young, his mother signed him up for enough swimming lessons to improve a bluefin tuna. She was an athlete, a golf-club champion. Bill never took to golf. Tennis lessons produced neither an overhead nor a backhand down the line. But he was somewhat impressed by his competence as a swimmer. For seven years in the nineteen-seventies, my family spent July at a house beside a lake in northern New Hampshire. Actually, we were two merged families, with lots of kids, but we had enough canoes and Rangeley boats to go around. When Bill and his wife, Ernestine, first visited us there, Bill stepped off the dock and into a canoe. He chose a place quite close to one end of the canoe. The other end shot up into the air, pointed at the sky, while Bill’s end penetrated the lake with him in it. I had never heard him mention canoeing lessons. This was in the middle of his ten years as a Knick. The next summer, he announced on arrival that ABC, for its program “The Superstars,” had invited him to Florida with other professional athletes to compete in various sports other than their own. Bill would be competing as a swimmer. So he wanted to take advantage of our lake to prepare to race on television. I had competed in swimming only as a boy at summer camp, but I didn’t lose a race in ten years. For what else it may be worth, I had also been an American Red Cross water-safety instructor during summers in my college years.