Happy 80th

Remember seven days ago? 

That's when TigerBlog wrote this as his first sentence: 

So it's the final Monday in July. 

TB isn't sure what's more telling, the fact that he was wrong about that or that only one person noticed. Anyway, today really is the final Monday in July.

The final Friday in July was July 28, which also happened to be the 80th birthday of Bill Bradley. TigerBlog saw a piece on Bradley's 80th on the ESPN show "Pardon The Interruption," which began its "Happy Times" segment by wishing him a happy 80th.

Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, the show's hosts, have talked about Bradley on his birthday before. They, like anyone who knows anything about him, were overwhelmingly impressed.

How could you not be? 

Not that you need TB to remind you of any of this, but Bradley has accomplished a lot in those 80 years. He was born in Crystal City, Missouri, and he came to Princeton (instead of Duke) in 1961. He was a star on the freshman baseball team, but it was in basketball that he made his mark.

By the time he graduated, Bradley had scored 2,503 varsity points at Princeton in only three years, with no three-point line. No Princeton men's player who has played before or since has reached 2,000 points, or 1,900 or 1,800 or 1,700. Only one, Ian Hummer, has even reached 1,600, finishing with 1,625.

Bella Alarie, the career record holder for the women, finished with 1,703. If Alarie kept up her career average of 16.1 points per game, she would have need to play 50 more games to catch Bradley's total. 

On the men's side, Hummer would have had to play 67 more at his career scoring average.

Bradley led Princeton to the 1965 NCAA Final Four. He is the only player in Tiger men's basketball history to score at least 40 points in a game, something he did 11 times, including in his final game, a 58-point night against Wichita State in the Final Four consolation game. Those 58 points are still the record for a Final Four game.  

He was also the captain of the 1964 Olympic gold medal-winning USA basketball team, and he won the Sullivan Award as the nation's top amateur athlete.

After Princeton, Bradley went on to a Rhodes Scholarship and then two NBA championships with the Knicks, who have not won another one since. 

Next it was into politics, where he was a three-time U.S. Senator from New Jersey and candidate for President of the United States. He recently performed in a one-man show about his life entitled "Rolling Along."

The "PTI" bit about Bradley's birthday also mentioned John McPhee's "A Sense of Where You Are," which began as a "New Yorker" story on Bradley's senior year of 1965 and then expanded into McPhee's first book. Kornheiser and Wilborn called it "one of the best sports biographies ever written;" it's possible that it's actually the best.

Did TB really need to go through the whole bio again. Yes. It needs to be repeated over and over, so that none of his remarkable accomplishments are forgotten and that they can continue to be held in the awe that they deserve. 

TigerBlog has interacted with him many times, and his humility is obvious. He truly is one of the most remarkable Americans who has ever lived — and he would never even remotely refer to him in that way. He's a humble man, but it's hard to be around him and not think about his remarkable life. 

One thing about Bradley that TB didn't realize is that he was one day older than Phyllis Chase, whose 80th birthday was Saturday. Sadly, Phyllis wasn't around to celebrate; she passed away earlier this month. 

There was to have been a party to celebrate, and everyone who knew her and watched her battle with cancer so much wanted her to be around still to be a part of it. Instead, that party became a celebration of her life. 

As with any other celebration like this, it was fun. It was just like the big birthday party she was going to have, and while everyone was laughing and having a good time, it was easy to forget that this was not how it was supposed to be.

Happy 80th Bill Bradley. 

Happy 80th Phyllis Chase. 

TB kept expecting her to walk in at any minute. Of course she didn't. If she could have, she would have been laughing along with everyone else. She would have loved it.