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Bill Bradley

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William Warren Bradley (born July 28, 1943) is an American politician and former professional basketball player. He served three terms as a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey (1979–1997). He ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for president in the 2000 election, which he lost to Vice President Al Gore. Bradley was born and raised in Crystal City, Missouri, a small town 45 miles (72 km) south of St. Louis. He excelled at basketball from an early age. He did well academically and was an all-county and all-state basketball player in high school. 

He was offered 75 college scholarships, but declined them all to attend Princeton University. He won a gold medal as a member of the 1964 Olympic basketball team and was the NCAA Player of the Year in 1965, when Princeton finished third in the NCAA Tournament. After graduating in 1965, he attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship where he was a member of Worcester College, delaying a decision for two years on whether or not to play in the National Basketball Association (NBA).

While at Oxford, Bradley played one season of professional basketball in Europe and eventually decided to join the New York Knicks in the 1967–68 season, after serving six months in the Air Force Reserve. He spent his entire ten-year professional basketball career playing for the Knicks, winning NBA titles in 1970 and 1973. Retiring in 1977, he ran for a seat in the United States Senate the following year, from his adopted home state of New Jersey. He was re-elected in 1984 and 1990, left the Senate in 1997, and was an unsuccessful candidate for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.

Bradley is the author of seven non-fiction books, most recently We Can All Do Better, and hosts a weekly radio show, American Voices, on Sirius Satellite Radio. He is a corporate director of Starbucks and a partner at investment bank Allen & Company in New York City. Bradley is a member of the ReFormers Caucus of Issue One. He also serves on that group's advisory board. Bradley is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2008 Bradley was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

Bradley was born on July 28, 1943, in Crystal City, Missouri, the only child of Warren (June 22, 1901 – October 1, 1994), who despite leaving high school after a year had become a bank president, and Susan "Susie" Crowe (June 12, 1909 – November 30, 1995), a teacher and former high school basketball player. Politicians and politics were standard dinner-table topics in Bradley's childhood, and he described his father as a "solid Republican" who was an elector for Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election. An active Boy Scout, he became an Eagle Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow.

Bradley's basketball ability benefited from his height—5 feet 9 inches (1.75 m) in the seventh grade, 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 m) in the eighth grade, and his adult size of 6 feet 5 inches (1.96 m) by the age of 15—and unusually wide peripheral vision, which he worked to improve by focusing on faraway objects while walking. During his high school years, Bradley maintained a rigorous practice schedule, a habit he carried through college. 

He would work on the court for "three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day. He put ten pounds of lead slivers in his sneakers, set up chairs as opponents and dribbled in a slalom fashion around them, and wore eyeglass frames that had a piece of cardboard taped to them so that he could not see the floor, for "a good dribbler never looks at the ball."

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