In the spirit of the insistently effective economy which it was written, I’ll keep my comments of John McPhee’s “A Sense of Where You Are” somewhat brief and somewhat to the point. This was the fifth book I’ve read in 2014 as I continue on my quest to read 12 books before the end of the year. We found this dog-eared, slightly disintegrating version of “A Sense of Where You Are” on our way home from the San Diego 100 in June, in a “free book” bin in the shade of the Mono Lake Committee’s office in Lee Vining, Calif. The wonderful writer Rachel Toor, in a Facebook post a couple of weeks ago, said I could probably read “A Sense of Where You Are” in a single sitting. She wasn’t far from the truth. Less than 100 pages long, it’s a bit longer than McPhee’s original 17,000-word profile of Princeton basketball star Bill Bradley that originally appeared in the Jan. 23, 1965 issue of The New Yorker. The New Yorker story is considered one of the great works of non-fiction journalism. McPhee worked with legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, boiling the verbiage down to such a concise, singular point the two men were considering the use of commas and semi-colons in the same concerned manner that a couple of Biblical scholars might’ve addressed the Dead Sea Scrolls. The attention to detail is evident, and effective. McPhee, throughout his career, has always tended toward loners and craftsmen, people with wheelbarrows full of talent and focus who are willing to lose themselves in the intoxicating process of practice making something perfect. Bill Bradley, the handsome, dark-haired, 6-foot-5, Missouri-born, Sunday School-teaching, Rhodes Scholarship-bound, All-American basketball player for Princeton University, was McPhee’s first such profile. Bradley’s story, now nearly 50 years old, still resonates. Why? Here are five examples why. 1) Perhaps the most impressive moment of reporting in the book comes when McPhee addresses Bradley’s vision, which at times can seem other-worldly. Bradley, a prolific scorer, is also a skilled passer. He threads passes to his teammates that even his teammates have a hard time catching, because Bradley’s passing touch is so deft, so unlikely and creative. Sportwriters of today typically go the lazy route in describing such a gift. They stumble along in the vague language of coaching cliché, praising a player’s “court sense” or “field vision” and leave it at that. Not McPhee. The writer is determined to see why Bradley’s vision is extraordinary. So he actually takes Bradley to a Princeton-area ophthalmologist. The results? Bill Bradley’s eyesight is not only perfect, it’s anywhere from 15 to almost 40 percent more perfect than the average human being. Young sportswriters, take note: Use concrete examples to reinforce your point. Perfect eyesight that’s 15 to almost 40 percent beyond perfect? That’s writing with authority to the highest power. 2) McPhee’s writing perfectly matches Bradley’s single-minded, carefully choreographed approach to the game he plays. There is nothing flashy about McPhee’s writing. At first, it seems solid. Simple and solid, like the rocks McPhee would write about later on in his career. Gradually, though, the committed craftsmanship grows on you. The words begin to string together softly, less like rocks and more like fine cashmere, just as Bradley, alone in a gym, lofts shot after shot, each one splashing perfectly through the rim’s nylon. Here’s a McPhee description of the young man, Ken Shank, who was Bradley’s teammate for four years and every day during Princeton practice challenged Bradley to become a better player, to ask more of himself, because Shank was an unorthodox and greatly underappreciated athlete who forced Bradley to think, react, and adjust to unorthodox attacks: “(Shank) appeared to be too slim and fragile, the silhouette of his legs did not suggest power; he wore tortoise-shell glasses; and he had a fairly heavy beard that gave him a dark chin and the look of a sleepless genius who had been sent from the library stacks rather than the bench.” 3) McPhee clearly understands his subject about as well as anyone ever could. He graces Bradley with enough sporting gravitas to seem almost unreal. Yet this is the beauty of McPhee’s non-fiction; this is a true story. Bill Bradley actually did win an Olympic gold medal with the U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team in 1964; he was the nation’s greatest player in 1965; he darn near led Princeton to an unlikely national title; he was a young man who turned down offers from the nation’s blue-blood programs, UCLA, Kentucky, Duke, and paid his own way to attend to Ivy League Princeton because he wished to be challenged academically as well as athletically; he was so focused and driven that immediately after Princeton’s season ended in the NCAA Final Four, he returned to Princeton, went into seclusion in a friend’s house and labored 15 hours a day for 30 days straight in producing a monumental 33,000-word senior thesis. Perhaps the most startling thing about Bradley wasn’t the fact that he was a great basketball player, or a future Rhodes Scholar; it was the fact that he never intended to play professional basketball after his days at Princeton were over. That he went on, after two years at Oxford, to star for a decade – winning two world titles – with the New York Knicks, might be the biggest surprise of all. As well, Bradley would go on and become a three-term U.S. Senator and 2000 Democratic Party Presidential candidate. 4) There isn’t a moment in this book where McPhee isn’t with Bradley, either literally, or off in the writer’s distance, inhabiting his subject’s life in order to better explain Bradley to the reader. Near the end of the book, after it is clear that Bradley is a humble and proudly unflashy young man, McPhee demonstrates how good Bradley really is, how superior, all along, this crazy-talented young man has been. In the third-place NCAA Finals game, Bradley decides to start shooting at will. No longer is he the quiet son of a banker from a 4,000-person town in Missouri. No longer is the hesitant star, the player his colorful coach, Butch van Breda Kolff, has to constantly implore to shoot the ball. He is, simply, McPhee writes, “out of his mind.” “In the final four minutes and forty-six seconds, Bradley changed almost all of the important records of national championship basketball,” McPhee writes. Bradley, who finished with an NCAA Tournament record 58 points, scored 16 points in less than five minutes on hook shots and jump shots and running shots in the lane and layups off pressure steals. This frenzy of scoring only came, McPhee writes, after Bradley’s normally restrained, focused veneer had finally come down, “After Van Breda Kolff and the others had persuaded him to forget his usual standards and to shoot every time he got the ball.” I shudder to think how many points Bradley, who averaged close to 30 points per game during his three years of playing varsity basketball at Princeton, could have scored if he had allowed himself to more often play “out of his mind.” 5) In 1965, John McPhee was only starting an illustrious career. There would be many great books to come: “Annals of the Former World,” “Basin and Range,” “Coming into the Country,” “Levels of the Game.” McPhee would write about geology and the natural world and he would find dozens, if not hundreds, of profile subjects who were exceptional in their own way – intense, focused people intent on bettering themselves and their various fields of interest/profession. McPhee’s quest would always be about not simply understanding something, but boiling it down to its finest, most understandable and transformational essence. “A Sense of Where You Are” was the beginning of it all for John McPhee. In Bill Bradley, McPhee not only found an All-American basketball player who also happened to be a fascinating New Yorker profile, McPhee was able to crack the writing code that would change non-fiction book and magazine writing forever. In Bradley, whom McPhee early on calls “the truly complete basketball player,” the clear feeling is this isn’t just a sense of where both men are in 1965; it’s a sense of the greatness that awaits for McPhee, who will soon enough become one of the truly complete writers of our time. Next up: “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” by Alan Sillitoe, the classic collection of short fiction of one of England’s most important post-World War II writers. amazon/Sense-Where-You-Are-Princeton/dp/0374526893
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:57:20 +0000
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