Early Life
Bradley was born on July 28, 1943 in Crystal City, Missouri, the only child of Warren (d. 1994), who despite leaving high school after a year had become a bank president, and Susan "Susie" (née Crowe) Bradley (d. 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 must surely be the only great basketball player who wintered regularly in Palm Beach until he was thirteen years old. | ” |
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—The New Yorker, 1965 |
Bradley's wealthy background made his exceptional athletic ability especially unusual. Bradley began playing basketball at the age of nine. He was a star at Crystal City High School, where he scored 3,068 points in his scholastic career, was twice named All-American, and was elected to the Missouri Association of Student Councils. He received 75 college scholarship offers, although he applied to only five schools and only scored a 485 out of 800 on the Verbal portion of the SAT, which—despite being likely in the top third of all test takers that year—normally would have caused selective schools like Princeton University to reject him.
Bradley's basketball ability benefited from his height—5'9" in the 7th grade, 6'1" in the 8th grade, and his adult size of 6'5" 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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