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Values of the Game

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Overview

As the Presidential run heats up with the start of the primary season in New Hampshire on February 2, the attention to the candidates and their issues will become even more intense.Values of the Game is an ideal book to understand Bill Bradley, the man and the candidate.The values that Bill speaks of so frequently during his campaign speeches are reflected in Values of the Game--responsibility, discipline, passion, selflessness and respect. Bill Bradley, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination for 2000, former U.S. senator from New Jersey from 1979 to 1997, and a member of two championship New York Knicks teams, returns to the scene of his first career and his first great passion, basketball. Things have changed since Bradley's championship days, but what separates winners and losers remains very much the same: No collection of players, no matter how good, can win unless they form a team. And no team can succeed unless it shares common values, among them courage, discipline, resilience, respect, and an unmitigated passion for the game.

Editorial Reviews

As nearly everyone knows, former Senator from New Jersey Bradley used to play professional basketball in the NBA. In Values of the Game, he reminisces about the lessons of commitment, courage, and integrity he learned through his participation in sports. Bradley is careful to spend the majority of his time sharing insights learned from others, and, as a result, this work is more than a typical sports biography. The book speaks both to the love of sports and to sportsmanship. It would be a good recommendation for youth collections if Bradley were better known to this audience. Perhaps his candidacy for U.S. President will draw some young readers to this work. The narration by John Randolph Jones is pleasant but no more than adequate. Recommended where interest warrants.--Ray Vignovich, West Des Moines P.L., IA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Bill Bradley

One of this country's most remarkable public figures, Bill Bradley has had a multifaceted career as an athlete, author, and elected leader. Born in Missouri in 1943, Bradley has since high school distinguished himself as both an athlete and an intellectual. He played three varsity seasons on Princeton University's basketball team and was a two-time All-American. During his senior year he was named College Player of the Year and helped lead Princeton to the semifinals of the NCAA tournament. After graduation, Bradley decided to put his basketball career on hold for two years in order to attend Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. He returned to play for the New York Knicks, where he was an integral part of two world championship teams and an all-star. His experiences as a basketball player formed the basis for his celebrated first book, Life on the Run. After retiring from basketball with a Hall-of-Fame career, Bradley turned his attention to another longstanding passion, government. Having lived in New Jersey during his career with the Knicks, Bradley ran as the Democratic candidate for Senator there and won handily. Upon arriving in office, he focused on issues such as tax reform and eventually established a reputation as one of the most intelligent and principled public servants in Washington. He was re-elected in 1984 in a landslide, and again in 1990 in a much more closely-contested race with future New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman. Disillusioned with the partisanship and rancor on Capitol Hill, Bradley retired from the Senate in 1996. He taught at Stanford, the University of Maryland and Notre Dame, and authored two books, Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir, and Values of the Game. In 2000, Bradley re-entered the political arena, losing to Al Gore in a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. He then authored The Journey From Here, articulating his vision for the future of the country.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Rosetta Books

Filesize

419.80 KB

Number of Pages

96

eBook ISBN

9780795330490

Awards

  • Listen Up Awards

Excerpt from: Values of the Game by Bill Bradley

Perspective: Balancing Act
Team players know exactly where they are in relation both to their opponents and their teammates. Off the court, they come to understand the fleeting nature of victory while appreciating the breadth of support needed to achieve it. Knowledge of one's strengths and weaknesses remains a necessary but not sufficient step to success; acting on that knowledge requires perspective.

"Winning brings out the best in people who are good and the worst in people who are not," Pete Carril wrote in his memoir. You can see that pattern of behavior forming as early as high school. Some players become insufferable when they win. Others handle victory with modesty and dignity, and earn admiration for it. "When you win, don't crow; when you lose, don't cry," Arvel Popp, my high school coach, used to say. A perspective on victory comes from knowing who is responsible for it in a team sport. Never is it one player.

In 1965, I set the record for the highest number of points in an NCAA tournament game: 58. Several years later, when Austin Carr of Notre Dame scored 61 points in a game, people asked me whether I was disappointed that he had broken my record. My answer was that I didn't care, that records were made to be broken. Like batons in a relay race, they are passed from one athlete to another. In team sports the only record that's important is the team's, not a team member's. UCLA's ten NCAA championships in twelve years and the Boston Celtics' eleven NBA championships in thirteen years are the most impressive and important records in basketball. I predict that they'll never be broken -- until they are.



* * *
Basketball, perhaps above all other sports, affords a unique perspective on a fundamental moral issue of our times: the need for racial unity. Bill Russell once said that the reason he liked the game was because it was about numbers, while much else in life was politics. The implication was that given the politics of life in America, a black man would not be able to rise with his ability, because somewhere along the line racist thinking and racists acts would subvert his achievement, whereas in basketball you got the rebound or you didn't. The ball went in or it missed. There were no artificial barriers between ability and reward.

On a February evening in 1998, an organization called XNBA assembled in New York City to give its first awards to basketball players, owners, and coaches who had shaped the modern game. Bill Russell presented an award to Red Auerbach, his old coach -- the man who had won nine NBA championships in ten years but had been named Coach of the Year only once. Russell got right to the point about his friendship with Red. "I never considered him a social innovator," Russell said, "but Red did things. For example, the Celtics. . .were the first team to draft a black player, a number one draft pick from one of the Negro colleges; the first team to start five black players; and the first team to hire a black coach. And I never once thought that Auerbach did that for any other reason but that he thought this was the best man for the job. And that's the only way to do things like that."