'Rolling' with Bill Bradley

The NBA star, senator and presidential candidate hits the stage in 'Bill Bradley: Rolling Along,' an introspective monologue documentary.

Bill Bradley may have had a long career in politics that included a presidential run in 2000, but he was never known for being especially charismatic. He wasn’t someone with the gift of keeping audiences rapt- hell, he couldn’t even out-charisma Al Gore. 

So it’s a pleasant surprise that the now 80-year-old Bradley proves especially adept at the one-man show medium. 

Bill Bradley: Rolling Along, a documentary version of Bradley’s earlier stage show, absolutely blew me away when I saw it last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, and now it’s made its debut on Max. It’s the story of a guy with a pretty amazing, only-in-America life, who turns out to be pretty great at telling it. 

The Rolling Along film was directed by Michael Tollin, who has had his hand in a long list of sports documentaries from The Last Dance to the outstanding 30 for 30 installment Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?; Spike Lee and Frank Oz are both credited as producers. 

 The 90-minute film is simple and minimalist: It shows Bradley, clad in a blue sweater, standing on a bare stage telling his stories, while there are occasional cuts to video clips. Throughout, Bradley shows a decency that’s too often missing, these days, from both the athletic and political worlds. 

Bradley is a native of Crystal City, Mo., close to the geographical middle of the country; the “Rolling Along” is a reference to the nearby Missouri River. He was a man from the Midwest who converted to evangelical Christianity as a teenager and later became a professional athlete- not exactly a common pedigree, these days, for a career in Democratic electoral politics. 

Bradley tells the stories of his upbringing in Missouri, his arrival in Princeton, and his play on the gold medal-winning Olympic basketball team in 1964 when he helped intimidate the Russians with a few words in Russian that he had learned from a Princeton professor. 

Drafted by the New York Knicks in the waning days of the NBA’s old territorial draft, Bradley wasn’t sure he wanted to play professional basketball and spent time at Oxford first. He shares some stories about his famous teammates, including Willis Reed and Phil Jackson, and how he was part of the last two championships the Knicks have won to date. 

Bradley discusses how he made the transition from athletics to politics, and how this soft-spoken Midwesterner became enough of an authentic East Coaster to get elected to three terms as a U.S. Senator from New Jersey, one of the most parochial, political-machine-centric states in the country. Not only was Bradley a rare New Jersey politician to never get accused of crimes or scandal, but he was a radically different personality from the loud Chris Christie types so often elected by that state. 

Then, a while after he left the Senate, Bradley ran for president in 2000. He got some good early press and a sliver of passionate support — I remember seeing a lot of Bradley stickers around my college campus throughout the fall of 1999 — although he didn’t end up winning any states in his run against Al Gore. That was the end of Bradley’s political career, and he tried his hand at banking, which had been his father’s profession, in the 2000s. And much like his one-time opponent Gore, his marriage ended after he was out of politics. 

From his talk of racist relatives back in Missouri, to tales of his friendship with a Japanese-American college teammate who had grown up in an internment camp to his walking out of a church when they endorsed Rhodesia, to the discussions about racial topics he would have with his basketball teammates, a commitment to antiracism is a through-line of the entire documentary. 

It’s a bit of a cliche that white politicians who played sports and had Black teammates are more attuned to American race relations than most politicians — see the  “politicians who have showered with Blacks” bit from one of Al Franken’s books — but in Bradley’s case, it appears to be true. “Never look down on people you don’t understand,” in fact, are his parting words. 

Bill Bradley: Rolling Along is streaming on Max.