Distinguished author John McPhee wrote “A Sense of Where You Are,” the definitive book about Bill Bradley’s Princeton basketball career, in 1965.
It only seems like McPhee’s seminal work had been sitting on my shelf that long.
A pandemic makes for strange book-fellows, though, so I finally — finally! — read it recently. And while there are some passages that might seem a bit clunky to the modern reader (e.g., All teams once in a while have to suffer through poor officiating, because even outstanding officials have off nights, just as outstanding players do), there is without question a certain incisiveness about the book, and a certain elegance:
After watching Bradley several times, even when he was eighteen, it seemed to me that I had been watching all the possibilities of the game that I had ever imagined, and then some. His play was integral. There was nothing missing.
McPhee’s book also offers plenty of surprises, none bigger (at least to me) than when he describes Lancaster native Ken Shank, a senior and reserve forward on the Tigers’ 1964-65 Final Four team, trundling off the bench and pouring in 14 points late in a Feb. 13, 1965 rout of Dartmouth.
“My 15 minutes of fame came early in life,” Shank, a 1961 McCaskey graduate, told me over the phone from his New Jersey home a few weeks ago.
Then he chuckled about it — and, really, at the idea of fame itself. He is a retired attorney, and weeks away from his 77th birthday. Through the years people have taken one look at him — he stands 6-6 — and wondered aloud as to whether he might have ever played basketball. He has always informed them that why yes, he had. That he had, in fact, once been teammates with Bradley, who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Knicks and later served 18 years in the U.S. Senate.
That usually resonated. Now, Shank said, he receives only blank looks, and a question that is unfathomable to those of us of a certain age: Who’s Bill Bradley?
“Fame is a fleeting thing,” Shank said, “even for a guy who was a senator.”
Then he chuckled again, something he did easily and often throughout our half-hour conversation. Nobody had really asked him about that Dartmouth game for a while, he told me as he sat in his home, awaiting the start of the Phillies game. (“Geez, almighty — relief pitching,” he grumbled at one point. “I can find 10 guys behind the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts to pitch better than their relief pitchers do.”)
Certainly, though, he was happy to revisit the affair against the Big Green, an eventual 103-64 victory on the part of the host Tigers.
“I remember quite a lot about that night,” he said, chuckling again.
A seldom-used sub, he recalls thinking he might get some run during a two-game weekend set featuring Harvard (a middle-of-the-pack Ivy League team) and Dartmouth (a bottom feeder). Sure enough he saw some action against the Crimson, and according to McPhee was inserted into the Dartmouth game with eight minutes left and Princeton up 86-52 — much to the delight of the home fans, who celebrated Shank in much the same way fan bases celebrate end-of-benchers everywhere.
“Ken Shank Fan Club,” read one of the signs that was raised, according to McPhee.
“Ken Shank For President,” read another.
It was one of only 27 games Shank played in his three collegiate seasons; he would average just 2.1 points and 1.6 rebounds a night for his career. And almost as soon as he hit the floor, he hoisted a shot, fully aware that it annoyed coach Butch van Breda Kolff no end when subs did that.
Shank missed, but no matter.
“When you don’t play a lot, you like to come in, firing away,” he reasoned.
He hit his next shot, then another. The hall was in madness, McPhee writes.
There were four more attempts, all of which Shank made — and some of which, he said, would be 3-pointers in this day and age. He also nailed a pair of free throws.
“Not that I remember everything precisely, but there’s some things I do remember,” he said. “I was in the game longer than this, but from the time I made my first shot to the time I made my last shot, it was four minutes and 16 seconds, if you’re really counting. And during that time I was the only one on the floor who scored. It was a lot of fun.”
McPhee was duly impressed: The figmented hero proved to be a real one. And in a sweet gesture van Breda Kolff subbed the sainted Bradley in for Shank in the closing seconds.
Mostly Shank spent his collegiate career chasing Bradley around the practice floor. A two-time District Three high jump champion at McCaskey — and a key part of a Tornado team that went 15-6 and pushed Reading to the brink before falling in the 1960-61 Central Penn League championship game — he was athletic enough to at least hang with a guy who scored over 2,000 points in three years at Princeton, while averaging over 30 a game.
“I have to rate him as one of the best defensive players that I’ve ever worked against,” Bradley told the New Era’s George Kirchner for a piece that appeared on March 17, 1965, adding that Shank “always gives me a real good workout and makes me earn everything I get.”
Shank called the 6-5 Bradley “one of the best, if not the best, college basketball player of his time of his size,” and marveled at his hand-eye coordination, his ability to create his own shot and his tireless off-ball movement.
“It made it interesting (in practice),” Shank said. “When you don’t play a lot in the games — OK, which I wasn’t — to keep your interest, you like to be doing something that’s challenging, and that was challenging. … You feel you’re wasting your time if you’re not making some contribution and doing something that takes effort. My skills (were) I could run and could jump, and I could cover people.”
Bradley capped his college career with a 58-point explosion against Wichita State in the NCAA consolation game. Then he became a Rhodes Scholar. Then a Knick, winning a pair of NBA titles as part of the Willis Reed–Walt Frazier–Dave DeBusschere nucleus. Then a senator.
Shank earned his law degree from Yale in 1969 and practiced through 2015. He has returned to Lancaster only on occasion through the years, whether on business or to bury his parents. But when he saw a 717 area code on his caller ID that day a few weeks ago, he couldn’t help but pick up.
“Thanks for calling,” he told me as our conversation was winding down. “It perked me up this afternoon.”
Fifteen minutes can, after all, last a long time. They can even give you a sense of where you are.