The octogenarian Hall of Famer edged forward in his chair, running on Fanta and popcorn and Swiss chocolate, extending both arms toward the television like a sixth Knicks defender in the closing minutes of his old team\u2019s first N.B.A. finals game in a generation.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrunson. Come on. Yeah. Heyyyyyyyyyy!\u201d Bill Bradley shouted at the Knicks star Jalen Brunson, beaming in a blue sweater inside his small Manhattan viewing party as New York retook the lead late in its Game 1 victory over the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday night. \u201cThat\u2019s what you do when you\u2019re a champion.\u201d<\/p>\n
He knows something about that.<\/p>\n
Mr. Bradley, the 82-year-old former United States senator from New Jersey, helped deliver the last Knicks titles in 1970<\/a> and 1973<\/a>, when a three-year drought felt like less of a festering citywide wound.<\/p>\n When this series moves on Monday from San Antonio to Madison Square Garden for Game 3, Mr. Bradley will be there, he said, somewhere beneath his retired No. 24<\/a> in the rafters. (The next evening, in this high season of Knicks revelry and reunion, he plans to have dinner with his former teammates Walt Frazier<\/a> and Earl Monroe, whose numbers hang nearby.)<\/p>\n But with the team in Texas this week, I asked Mr. Bradley if he would mind some extra company for Game 1, wherever he might be watching. He obliged, asking only that the location of his (very) modest gathering \u2014 just Mr. Bradley and his daughter, a finals family tradition \u2014 not be disclosed for privacy reasons.<\/p>\n To watch championship basketball with Bill Bradley is to talent-scout at Lincoln Center with Baryshnikov, to hear the whispers of Scorsese at a Sundance screening.<\/p>\n He catches more, overreacts less, processes differently.<\/p>\n \u201cHis feet,\u201d Mr. Bradley said of Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 French game-breaker for the Spurs, whose effortless dunks and boundless shooting range have captivated even casual followers \u2014 but whose technical soundness seemed to dazzle this audience. \u201cWatch his feet.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSee him set up that rhythm?\u201d Mr. Bradley observed later as OG Anunoby of the Knicks sent Mr. Wembanyama off balance with a procession of percussive fakes. \u201cBack, forward, back, forward.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t rush,\u201d he said softly, as the Knicks fell behind by double digits in the third quarter. \u201cThe key is the flow out of which the shot comes.\u201d<\/p>\n For basketball fans of a certain era and Knicks partisans of all kinds \u2014 and Mr. Bradley retains that descriptor, among many others: Rhodes scholar, 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, fierce opponent of a runaway sports betting industry \u2014 he remains a figure of outsize fascination.<\/p>\n He was the son of Crystal City, Mo., who became a college prodigy and an international celebrity \u2014 the Princeton phenom who taught Sunday school, listened to \u201cThe Sound of Music\u201d before games, imagined he was facing Yale to find extra motivation against the Soviet Union in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (The Russians called him<\/a> \u201cShootnik,\u201d admiringly.)<\/p>\n More than that, Mr. Bradley played a kind of intuitive, egalitarian game that prized ball movement and off-ball movement and selflessness and dwelled little on individual accolades.<\/p>\n \u201cI consciously didn\u2019t do any commercials,\u201d he said on Wednesday after seeing an ad featuring current and former Knicks. \u201cI had this idea that my commitment to the game was a pure commitment, blah blah blah.\u201d (He clarified that he believed unswervingly in that blah blah blah.)<\/p>\n