A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Libraries explains that it is possible for a student to be interested in athletics and civic duties at the same time. A Sense of Where You Are: a Profile of William Warren Bradley is about the American basketball player and government official Bill Bradley. The book was written by the journalist John McPhee who described Bradley’s senior year as a student at Princeton University. Bradley would later have a noteworthy career playing for ten years on the New York Knicks team in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Bradley would later also be elected three times to the United States Senate where he served for over 20 years. This book was generously donated by Ajarn Adul Wichiencharoen and is shelved in the Ajarn Adul Wichiencharoen Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library.

Like Senator Bradley, Ajarn Adul has also been concerned with public service and civil responsibilities, as well as sporting activities. While Ajarn Adul was an avid horseback rider rather than a basketball star, the draw of physical activity and caring for others are shared in common by Senator Bradley and Ajarn Adul.

At the time A Sense of Where You Are was published, Bradley had already won international fame by playing on the gold-medal American men’s basketball team at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. McPhee explains Bradley’s success as a teammate by his discipline and involvement, as well as his other intellectual interests. Senator Bradley was a history major at Princeton University, and his involvement in social responsibility was noteworthy, even as he excelled in sports. He wrote the preface for another book in the collection of the TU Libraries, Shooting Stars: From the Lens of George Kalinsky about a noted sports photographer. A Sense of Where You Are, which originally appeared in shorter form as a magazine article in 1965, describes Senator Bradley as being six feet five inches tall, which did not make him the tallest player on his college team. Yet he had certain innate abilities that were developed by many hours of practice:

Beyond this, it is obviously helpful to a basketball player to be able to see a little more than the next man, and the remark is frequently made about basketball superstars that they have unusual peripheral vision… To discover whether there was anything to all the claims for basketball players’ peripheral vision, I asked Bradley to go with me to the office of Dr. Henry Abrams, a Princeton ophthalmologist, who had agreed to measure Bradley’s total field. Bradley rested his chin in the middle of a device called a perimeter, and Dr. Abrams began asking when he could see a small white dot as it was slowly brought around from behind him, from above, from below, and from either side. To make sure that Bradley wasn’t, in effect, throwing hope passes, Dr. Abrams checked each point three times before plotting it on a chart. There was a chart for each eye, and both charts had irregular circles printed on them, representing the field of vision that a typical perfect eye could be expected to have. Dr. Abrams explained as he worked that these printed circles were logical rather than experimentally established extremes, and that in his experience the circles he had plotted to represent the actual vision fields of his patients had without exception fallen inside the circles printed on the charts. When he finished plotting Bradley’s circles, the one for each eye was larger than the printed model and, in fact, ran completely outside it. 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. Focused horizontally, the typical perfect eye, according to the chart, can see about forty-seven degrees upward. Bradley can see seventy degrees upward. This no doubt explains why he can stare at the floor while he is waiting for lobbed passes to arrive from above. Dr. Abrams said that he doubted whether a person who tried to expand his peripheral vision through exercises could succeed, but he was fascinated to learn that when Bradley was a young boy he tried to do just that. As he walked down the main street of Crystal City, for example, he would keep his eyes focussed straight ahead and try to identify objects in the windows of stores he was passing. For all this, however, Bradley cannot see behind himself.

McPhee describes how Bradley managed to balance sports with academic work as an undergraduate:

He claims that the most important thing basketball gives him at Princeton is “a real period of relief from the academic load.” Because he is the sort of student who does all his academic course work, he doesn’t get much sleep; in fact, he has a perilous contempt for sleep, partly because he has been told that professional basketball players get along on almost none of it. He stays up until his work is done, for if he were to retire any earlier he would be betraying the discipline he has placed upon himself. When he has had to, he has set up schedules of study for himself that have kept him reading from 6 A.M. to midnight every day for as long as eight weeks. On his senior thesis, which is due in April (and is about Harry Truman’s senatorial campaign in 1940), he has already completed more research than many students will do altogether. One of his most enviable gifts is his ability to regiment his conscious mind. After a game, for example, most college players, if they try to study, see all the action over again between the lines in their books. Bradley can, and often does, go straight to the library and work for hours, postponing his mental replay as long as he cares to. If he feels that it’s necessary, he will stay up all night before a basketball game; he did that last winter when he was completing a junior paper, and Princeton barely managed to beat a fairly unspectacular Lafayette team, because Bradley seemed almost unable to lift his arms.

Senator Bradley had early experiences in public speaking, telling audiences that the discipline he learned in practicing for basketball games helped him learn lessons about later life:

You’ve got to face that you’re going to lose. Losses are part of every season, and part of life. The question is, can you adjust? It is important that you don’t get caught up in your own little defeats.

Because of his interest in community welfare, raising money for charity, and other civic efforts, Senator Bradley was looked upon even as an undergraduate as someone who would later be the governor of his home state of Missouri, or even possibly the President of the United States. While he would not be elected president, he did try to run for that office in the year 2000, showing that high-achieving athletes can also focus on public service.

Thailand and Basketball

In July, The Nation reported on an NBA project to send Will Barton, shooting guard of the Denver Nuggets team, to Bangkok to participate in a Jr. NBA program. According to its website, in 2016

Jr. NBA—the NBA’s international youth development program that promotes basketball participation and an active lifestyle among children—will return to Thailand for the third consecutive year. Foremost will once again serve as the presenting partner of Jr. NBA Thailand.

It was presented by Foremost National Training Camp. Khun Pimjan Vimuktanonda, marketing director for FrieslandCampina Thailand, the manufacturer of dairy products, explained that the training session would be

a unique opportunity to inspire children to stay fit and healthy through basketball… More and more children from schools nationwide participate in the Jr. NBA program every year, and we are thrilled to give these Thai athletes the opportunity to get an up-close and personal experience with an NBA player.  In addition to practicing sports in a fun environment, the Jr. NBA Thailand All-Stars will also be given an unforgettable experience when they embark on their overseas experience trip with fellow All-Stars from Southeast Asia later this year.

Since sports also involves questions of nutritional health policies, there is some concern about the results of the South East Asia Nutrition Survey (SEANUTS) launched in 2009 by FrieslandCampina. Among other findings was that Thai children drink relatively less milk per day than youngsters in other countries, which may lead to health issues when combined with lack of physical exercise.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)