“When you play basketball for a while you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this” he said throwing it over his shoulder again and right through the hoop. “You develop a sense of where you are”.

Most basketball players appropriate fragments of other players’ styles, and thus develop their own. This is what Bradley has done, but one of the things that sets him apart from nearly everyone else is that the process has been conscious rather than osmotic.

The secret of shooting is concentration.

Many basketball players, including reasonably good ones, could spend five years in a gym and not make ten out of thirteen left-handed hook shots, but this was part of Bradley’s daily routine.

His high-scoring totals are the result of his high percentage of accuracy, not an impulse to shoot every time he gets the ball.

One of his most enviable gifts is his ability to regiment his conscious mind. After a game, for example, most players if they try to study, see all the action over again between lines in their books. Bradley can, and often does, go straight to the library and work for hours, postponing mental re-play as long as he cares to.

Bradley often tells his audiences, “Basketball discipline carriers over into your life,” continuing, “You’ve got to face that you’re going to lose. Losses are part of every season, part of life. The question is, can you adjust? It is important that you don’t caught up in your own little defeats.”

The metaphor for basketball is to be found in these compounding alternatives. Every time a basketball player takes a step, an entire new geometry of action is created around him. In ten seconds, with or without the ball, a good player may see perhaps a hundred alternatives and, from them, make half a dozen choices as he goes along. A great player will see even more alternatives and will make more choices, and this multiradial way of looking at things can carry over into his life.

Because BRadley’s inclination to analyze every gesture in basketball is fairly uncommon, other players look at him as if they think him a little odd when he seeks them out after a fame and asks them to show him what they did in making a move that he particularly admired.

“Others can run faster and jump higher. The difference between Bill and the other basketball players is self-discipline”…his creed, which he picked up from Ed Macauley, is “When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win.”

If he sat down, he says, he would have lowered his standards, for he believes that “there has never been a great athlete who did not know what pain is.”

He borrowed keys to the gym and set a schedule for himself that he adhered to for four full years…he put ten pounds of lead slivers in his sneakers, set up chairs as opponents and dribbled in slalom fashion around them, and wore eyeglass frames that has a piece of cardboard taped to them so that he could not see the floor, for a good dribbler never looks at the ball.

Basketball was one-millionth of what he had to offer.

Many basketball players, outstanding ones included, have a tendency to be rather tastelessly rococo in the their style, and Bradley stands out in contrast to them because he adorns nothing that he does.

As he saw it, any outstanding player naturally hopes to be a member of the country’s No. 1 team, but if that never happens, the next-best thing is to be tested against the No. 1 team.

During most of the afternoon, when any other player in his situation would probably have been watching television, shooting pool, or playing ping-pong or poker-anything to divert the mind-Bradley sat alone and concentrated on the coming game, on the components of his own play, and the importance of him and his team of what would occur.

“…we didn’t know what our top was…if we could play that lackadaisically and lethargically and still beat a good team, then why couldn’t we go somewhere?”

His classmates also designated Bradley as the person they most respected. And as a kind od afterthought, they named him best athlete.