It's hardly the funniest entry in the history of the strip. It was the words "peripheral vision" that, well, caught TB's eye (that's not bad, actually).
If you're a Princeton basketball fan and John McPhee fan, then the term "peripheral vision" conjures up one specific person.
In fact, in his 1965 classic "A Sense Of Where You Are," McPhee wrote this about Bradley's eyesight:
With both eyes open and looking straight ahead, Bradley sees a hundred and ninety-five degrees on the horizontal and about seventy degrees straight down, or about fifteen and five degrees more, respectively, than what is officially considered perfection. Most surprising, however, is what he can see above him. Focussed horizontally, the typical perfect eye, according to the chart, can see about forty-seven degrees upward. Bradley can see seventy degrees upward.
Earlier in the story, when he first brought up the subject of peripheral vision, McPhee also wrote this:
People used to say that Bob Cousy, the immortal back-court man of the Boston Celtics, could look due east and enjoy a sunset.
The original article appeared on Jan. 23, 1965, in the New Yorker and was McPhee's big break with magazine. It was always McPhee's dream to write for the magazine, but his submissions had been rejected consistently in the years since he'd graduated from Princeton (in 1953), a time during which he wrote for, well, Time (the "caught TB's eye" thing was better).
Back in December of 1964, Princeton and Michigan played each other in the first game of the ECAC Holiday Festival in Madison Square Garden. Michigan was the No. 1-ranked team in the country at the time, and the teams would meet again a few months later in the NCAA Final Four.
In that game, held in Portland, Ore., Bradley would score 29 points in a loss but come back to score 58 against Wichita State in the third-place game for a Final Four record that stands to this day. The first game, the one in the Garden, saw Bradley score 41 but foul out with four minutes to go as Michigan rallied from 12 down to win 80-78.
That Michigan team was led by Cazzie Russell, with whom Bradley would win the first of his two NBA championships (in 1969-70) with the New York Knicks. The first meeting was well-hyped to say the least, as McPhee wrote about in his article:
For a couple of days before the game, the sports pages of the New York newspapers were crammed with headlines, articles, and even cartoons comparing Bradley and Russell, asking which was the better player, and looking toward what one paper called the most momentous individual confrontation in ten years of basketball. One additional factor—something that meant relatively little to Bradley—was that the game was to be played in Madison Square Garden. Bradley had never played in the Garden, but, because he mistrusts metropolitan standards, he refused to concede that the mere location of the coming test meant anything at all. When a reporter asked him how he felt about appearing there, he replied, “It’s just like any other place. The baskets are ten feet high.”
Hey, is there a chance that the writers of the movie "Hoosiers" came up with their iconic scene about how the height of the basket at the state finals was the same as the height of the basket back at Hickory High School?
The original version of "A Sense Of Where You Are" was a magazine article, as TB said. The extended version became the first of McPhee's more than 30 books. The project was the professional turning point of is career, one that went on to include a Pulitzer Prize and a reputation as one of the greatest American writers ever.
Now in his 90s, McPhee is still writing.
As for Bradley, he turned 82 a week ago. The two have stayed very close in the decades since McPhee first wrote about Bradley (TB's classmate).
You can read the entire original article HERE.
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