Issue #23/78, November 18 - December 2, 1999  

How I Got Myself Tossed From a Bill Bradley Fundraiser

By Matt Taibbi

"Eggheads unite: you have nothing to lose but your yolks." - Adlai Stevenson

At the first sight of him, my shoulders sagged from relief, and a broad, joyful smile came across my face. He was all the evidence I ever needed. There was a God after all!

I first saw him this past Sunday, on the sixth floor of Madison Square Garden, in the building's grim concrete-walled security office. At the time I was flanked by four security guards in maroon sportcoats, who had escorted me arm in arm from my seat in the stadium, where I had been watching that day's loathsome Bill Bradley Presidential Campaign Fundraiser. Security had been called in to my rescue after a crowd of Bradley supporters jumped on me for heckling the candidate. I'd let my body go limp during the fracas, and the poor guards had to drag my body up the stadium steps and out like a sack of potatoes, with me screaming and gesticulating the whole way.

In the rush after the incident I was hyperventilating, glowering, agitated, confused, eyes snapped wide open as the guards led me downward in the Garden freight elevator... On the one hand, I felt triumphant: I'd developed a plan, carried it out, and everything had seemingly gone well. All the same, I was desperate for some empirical evidence of the righteousness of my actions--and no one in sight was offering me any. Until I saw him, that is.

He was a man in a chicken suit, hunched over on a plastic chair in the security office and kneading his forehead with an open hand while two New York City cops interrogated him. When the guards pushed me into the room I heard one of the cops point to him and bark, "He's not producing a ticket." Then one of the cops pointed at me. "Is he with the chicken guy?"

"No," said one of the guards. "He's alone."

The hell I am, I thought. I am one with the international fraternity of losers. This man in the chicken suit, I felt like saying-- he is my brother. I smiled at my new friend. He looked up at me with a weary expression and sighed. He understood. I was not alone.

The next morning, when I looked through the newspapers over juice and coffee in the liberty of my New York home, I found out that the chicken suit man was not my brother at all. According to the Daily News, he was a plant by the Al Gore campaign, sent to the Bradley event on a tactical anti-spin mission. He was a partisan chicken. I threw the papers away and sagged in my chair, disgusted. There are no silver linings to American Presidential politics, not even little ones.

FORMER NEW JERSEY SENATOR Bill Bradley is white hot right now, America's new darling. If you're like me, an upper middle-class white intellectual, then you've probably already watched your entire family and a good half of your friends jump on his bandwagon in the last month or so. There's something about Bradley that makes affluent white college grads weak in the knees. It might be his grumbling, gawky braininess, his very vagueness, his tendency to explain himself in cryptic bursts of important-sounding polysyllables; he is living proof that one can come across exactly like a black comedian's impersonation of white people and still be a legitimate threat to rule to world. Or it might be his unabashedly asexual clamminess--he must be a relief to all those people shackled to low-sex, high stress corporate lifestyles who had to sit around for eight years watching Bill Clinton stuff chicks under his desk. It's like a tacit campaign promise, Bradley's sexlessness; vote for this Bill, and we guarantee that your leader will get laid just as rarely as you do.

Whatever the appeal is, it's not obvious, at least not to his supporters. Most of the people I know who support Bradley don't have a real good answer when I ask them what their reasons are. The first thing out of their mouths is usually, "I love Bradley!"; the next is, "He seems like a good guy." If you press them a little, they might say, "He seems honest." And that's about it.

But arguing the matter with a Bradley fan generally won't get you anywhere. Even if they're forced to admit that they don't know what the hell he stands for, most Bradley supporters will still stand by their man. It's like an article of faith with these people. Only it's the worst kind of faith-- the secular, humanist, left-leaning rich liberal know-it-all kind. It's faith from the kind of people who'll insist even under torture that faith is a relativist intellectual construct.

Reporters from papers like the Times and the Post tend to cream in their jeans at the mere mention of Bill Bradley's name.

The press loves Bradley, too. God, do they love him. The cartoon hearts all but ooze off the page when newspaper writers describe his campaign appearances. The Bradley portraits that appear in the mass-market publications--like the cover story in last week's Newsweek (see Press Review)--tend to be slavish exercises in journalistic mythmaking. One of the favored journalistic methods for lavishing praise on Bradley is the nakedly transparent technique of lauding his braininess via so-called "criticism" of his egghead-y public persona. For example, New York Times reporter Richard L. Berke, in a November 9 article on Bradley, quoted advertising executive Mark DiMassino to illustrate Bradley's "problems" as a candidate:

"Then, Mr. Dimassino said, 'there was the boring', and the fact that Mr. Bradley only had two kinds of ideas: 'Smart ideas that will move people and smart ideas that make people's eyes glaze over.'"

The obvious implication is that Bradley's only problem is that he's just too darn smart, an assertion that in the defiantly anal-retentive micro-type of the New York Times looks a hell of a lot like an endorsement. Newsweek also praised Bradley's hyper-cerebral inaccessibility; under a photo of Bradley's wife Ernestine, the magazine included the following caption: "Ernestine is Bradley's only confidante, but even she is sometimes baffled by her husband." Translation: Bradley's so smart, not even his wife knows what he's thinking.

The combined effect of all of this is to present the world with an image of Bill Bradley as a sort of Ivy League Scarlet Pimpernel, a Princeton aristocrat who has descended into the netherworld of Presidential Politics in the guise of a mysterious and reluctant lone hero intent on protecting America's decent folk. Bradley is painted everywhere as a man of our time, a net literate ("Bradley is doing especially well among 'new economy' Democrats, who work with technology and are plugged into the digital marketplace," saysThe Washington Post; Newsweek describes election day in New Hampshire as being "the day when stock in BillBradley.com goes public"), a hip MTV-age athlete-celebrity (Newsweek droolingly noted that Michael Jordan himself might eventually play a key role in Bradley's campaign), and a public figure who blends in nicely with the material furnishings of our turn-of-the-century lives ("the Adlai Stevenson of the SUV set" --the Washington Post). Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he's good people, one of us, and his politician's mask is just that, a mask, a humble but necessary tool to help disguise his good breeding for the greater good.

Bradley's support in the polls grows daily. The latest Newsweek poll has him with 36% support among New Hampshire voters compared to Vice President Al Gore's 46%, and the magazine cheerfully claims the gap is "narrowing". New stories appear in the press every day noting the panic in Gore's camp before the Bradley juggernaut. One New York Times article noted with undisguised glee last week that Gore's friends, obviously desperate to stop the Bradley onslaught at any cost, have even begun talking up Gore as a basketball player in his own right. Times writers Melinda Hennenberger and Jane Gross tacked the following sneering parenthetical comment onto that news: "(Note to Gore 2000: The vice-president, who averaged 2.6 points a game at Harvard in his freshman year, might well be advised to concede the basketball primary.)"

Media support for the Bradley candidacy is so blind in its enthusiasm that reporters have regularly overlooked obvious factual contradictions in order to preserve his hero-status image. In fact, the Bradley media blitz reminds me a lot of the universally indulgent treatment that Russia's "privatization czar" Anatoly Chubais received from foreign reporters until very recently.

Like Chubais, who was being championed as a crusader for fair play even as he openly orchestrated bogus auctions and took payoffs from gangsters, Bradley is constantly given credit for being that which any rational observer could see that he patently is not. The most preposterous claim the press puts forward about Bradley is that he doesn't want to be President very much. Newsweek noted that Republican John McCain and Bradley "don't seem to need to win to be complete", while the Washington Post said that Bradley "gives off an air...of distate for politics as usual." These stories came out simulateneously with much the less-publicized revelation in Adweek Magazine that Bradley has been working with a high-powered team of Madison Avenue advertising executives for almost 16 months now in preparation for the election, not the behavior of a man who doesn't want very strongly to be president.

Descriptions of Bradley's supposed reluctance for office also often come alongside the observation that Bradley has been very cautious in his public statements to date, has repeatedly ducked debates with Gore or insisted on debating during obscure low-ratings TV and radio time slots, and has "conveniently" rediscovered a love for basketball after having shown no virtually no interest in the game at all since retiring from the NBA. "Only rather recently," wrote the New York Times, "with a timing that some of Vice President Al Gore's supporters say strikes them as terribly convenient, did [Bradley] rediscover his love of the game."

The contradiction is obvious. If Bradley is to be saluted for his supposed reluctance for office, then that must be because his lack of ambition would translate into greater candor and less politicking. But for all his "reluctance", Bradley has not been more candid, less cautious, run a less carefully-orchestrated media campaign, or done less violence to his normal routine in order to have a chance at the office. He's repeatedly ducked unscripted public appearances, hired heavy-hitter ad executives with experience marketing products like Colgate toothpaste and Lotus automobiles to craft his image, and gone out of his way to turn himself into a basketball fan again after having not so much as attended a game since retiring from the New York Knicks in 1977. If anything, he's been a more enthusiastic and zealously effective politicker than the other candidates.

Not one major American publication has touched on this theme yet. Which is too bad, because Bradley's behavior raises an obvious question. If a candidate is reluctant to hold office but no more candid than the candidate who openly craves office, is that a good thing? It seems to me that it isn't. Anyone who runs for president should to want to be president very badly. It's not the kind of job you want the would-be leader to enter into half-heartedly. No, there's something very sinister about a "reluctant" candidate who pursues a high-tech win-at-all-costs campaign, only you'll never hear that said in public.

The press routinely lets Bradley have his cake and eat it too. They'll let him run on the one hand on the Jimmy Carter "I'm a regular guy who drives a shitty car" ticket (Newsweek notes: "Bradley didn't exactly fit in among the Valley's digerati; he drove a battered white sedan with decidedly uncool New Jersey plates"), but at the same time write uncritically and without skepticism of the more than $2 million in speaking and consulting fees from upper-crust corporations he received as income in the last two years.

The latter component of the Bradley image has been particularly difficult for me to swallow. When reporters write about all the money Bradley has taken from Wall Street clients as a private citizen in the last two years, they never describe him as a typical politician cashing in on old favors from his days on the Senate Finance Committee, but rather as a man who went into private business as a means of staying in touch with Working America. Bradley, Newsweek noted, could have just stayed home with his "beloved Stair Master" after moving back to New Jersey in the wake of his 1997 retirement, but instead he chose to answer a higher calling. "He didn't stay long," the magazine said of his retirement. "Instead, he plotted a course of constant travel that would keep him plugged into virtually every power center in America--and make him some serious money...Among his corporate consultancies was a cushy advising job at the Wall Street consulting firm J.P. Morgan, worth $327,000 for the year."

Despite Bradley's obvious determination to reap the benefits of the contacts he made during his Senate years, he has somehow gotten away with campaigning as a man uninterested in money. The most shocking example I've seen of this came in that same abovementioned Newsweek article. In what had to be collusive effort between candidate and publication, Bradley and Newsweek

The Washington Post recalls the "Madly For Adlai" Stevenson campaign-- and the famous shoe photo--of the 1950s in its analysis of the Bradley phenomenon.

teamed up to show America the candidate in the process of buying what allegedly was the first pair of dress shoes he'd bought in 25 years.

Aside from the fact that this is obviously bullshit--they haven't yet invented the pair of dress shoes that can survive twenty years on the feet of a millionaire U.S. Senator--the photo itself is a grossly shameless piece of propagandeering. In fact, this photo (shown lon the next page) is more or less exactly the same photograph that Life Magazine ran of Adlai Stevenson in 1956--the famous picture of Stevenson, with his legs crossed, baring a shoe with a hole in it. Despite the fact that virtually every photojournalist in America would recognize the Stevenson campaign cliche pose from 2,000 yards, Newsweek ran the photo without outing Bradley's obvious ploy to appropriate the affectionately-remembered Stevenson image. By a not-so-strange strange coincidence, The Washington Post came out a week later with an article heralding the "Madly For Bradley" movement among Democratic voters, a reference to the "Madly For Adlai" movement of Stevenson's day.

When I first saw that "Bradley-As-Stevenson" photo, a chill went up my

Newsweek resurrects the Stevenson photo, neglecting to tell readers it's a rerun.

spine. It was straight out of Orwell. It was the headline announcing "War With Oceania!" instead of "War With Oceania Again!" Regurgitate the image and pretend no one notices. Sell the old-time religion as the New Jerusalem.

That's what drives me so crazy about Bill Bradley. It's not so much the candidate himself that gets me. It's not even that as a Senator he voted against the minimum wage increase, voted for the hugely regressive Social Security Payroll tax, did not speak out against the Kosovo bombing, or was a steadfast supporter of sinister free-trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT. It's the reaction to him among people I know that I can't stand... the fact that he symbolizes that maddening instinct we have in America of celebrating conformity in the guise of choice, of always going confidently and enthusiastically with the flow, no matter how empty or false might be the place where the flow is leading.

YEARS AGO, long before I even gave Bill Bradley a second thought, I was fleeing America to get away from that flow. A sense I'd had since childhood of not quite fitting in no matter how hard I tried had been exacerbated in college, and I left the country as soon as I graduated.

The thing that had caused me the most anxiety in my college years were the keg parties. Year after year, semester after semester, almost everyone I knew whipped himself up into a frenzy at the slightest mention of a keg party. You know: "Parr-r-r-r-tay!", "Woomp, there it is," the whole deal. For three days every weekend, the whole school would get shitfaced, puke its guts out, reduce the dorms to rubble, and then spend the four-day postmortem talking about what a great time it had.

Still, almost no one I knew got laid very much, and the music was always so loud around the damn keg that you never had a conversation worth remembering later. I went along with it for years, secretly convinced that everyone else was like me and aware that the whole thing was twisted and sad all along. I figured it would end some day, when everyone got older.

But then I reached a certain age and realized I was wrong. It never ended. After college, everyone just traded their keg parties for their careers. Instead of getting up for the weekend, everyone got up for joining the pack, shackling themselves to demeaning corporate jobs, and filling in their steadily dwindling free hours with things like the internet, fantasy football, and designer coffees. Unlike college, this was too much of an investment for me to just passively go along with, so I panicked and split the country. And I haven't been able to come back for any significant length of time since.

Now, every time I try to come back, it seems to get worse. The cheering gets louder and louder and the keg party gets lamer and lamer. Sometimes it even frightens me. Case in point: about a month ago, I came home to New York from Moscow with the idea of covering the presidential campaign for the eXile. I had arrived in the States bursting with enthusiasm for the project, but by my second night home, I was beginning to feel uneasy. This always happens to me when I come home to the States; within about 36 hours my resolve disappears and I start thinking seriously about suicide. In this instance, the first crushing moment came when I saw a commercial on late-night television.

The ad started off with a shot of an athletic man in his late twenties--about my age-- tossing an opponent in a judo ring. It then cut to a shot of him smiling and towel-drying his hair in the locker-room. "I'm a cop, so I've gotta have a lot of energy," the hero says. Next thing you know, the in-shape cop is holding up a Slim-Fast shake. The ad wraps up when he turns to the camera and says, "Slim-Fast-- It's my energy drink!"

Jesus Christ, I thought. Since when do we look to cops to sell us diet drinks? When I see a cop--and I know I'm not the only one--my first instinct is to cross the street and get the hell out of his way. How did things get so twisted around that the same guys who are serving out no-knock search warrants on pot-heads--and busting guys in chicken suits-- are the same guys people my age trust to make their consumer choices? You have to hate fun an awful lot to embrace a society that thinks cops are hip and sexy.

Over the years the keg party has gotten mean and intolerant. Being good-looking, rich, and happy is in; ugly low-income dissenters are out. A billboard in New York advertising a soap opera: "The Good, the Bad, and--very rarely--the Ugly." Weirdly, the in-crowd people try hard to be into abstinence and denial and self-denigration, as though it's good for them. Half the country (including some people in my family) is on the insane no-carbohydrate Atkins diet, and people feel genuinely guilty when they eat a piece of bread. Smoking is banned almost everywhere. Caffeine will be next: I saw an episode of "Ellen" in which a character vows to give up coffee, then looks longingly at Ellen Degeneres as she sips her Espresso. "If I were to kiss you right now, would I taste coffee?" he says. That scores about a six on the laugh-track-o-meter. The message is obvious; we've weaned ourselves off of so many pleasures that sex is something we no longer actively consider as a possibility (particularly since the women, like Ellen, are likely to be unreceptive lesbians, appropriately on guard against Spur Posse-oid sex offenders), so when someone brings up kissing, a taste of taboo coffee is about the best you can hope for... When I saw that show, I imagined the analogous scene from a Soviet sitcom. Man to woman: "If I rubbed your thighs, could I feel your imported blue jeans?" Woman says no; he doesn't get to feel the blue jeans! Cue the laugh track!

This time back, after a few weeks of this, I was beginning to lose my mind--particularly since I was making an effort to read the political news in the American papers every day. If the keg party is unnerving in American TV sitcoms these days, it's even worse on the campaign trail. Political reporters unabashedly describe the candidates as empty poll-driven media manipulators, laugh at the very idea that actual issues might be discussed (candidates who went on about issues were likely to be called "boring" or "meandering", as George Bush was in the New York Times), and yet still insist on passing off the whole state of affairs as entirely normal. There is an unspoken implication in all the news reports that anyone who isn't more interested in the election as a vapid horse race than as a meaningful contest of ideologies has to be a spoilsport, and a party pooper. Nowhere is there outrage over all the falseness and emptiness; but one can look anywhere and find worshipful enthusiasm and praise for all the politicians who are begging for a chance to bring still more of this emptiness into our lives.

These were the kinds of thoughts that went through my head as I prepared to go cover the Bill Bradley "Garden Party" fundraiser, which by all accounts was to be the biggest public event of the campaign season to date. I had been following Bradley's progress in the news for weeks and knew instinctively that he was at the very center of the vortex of the keg party. You can see it in his eyes--he has a creepy, Nixonian kind of shiftiness in him, the look of a man who harbors ugly ambitions deep down inside and zealously protects them from outside interference, the look of a man who despises himself and yet still contrives for some reason to get us to love him.

This is despite the fact that nothing could be less lovable than Bill Bradley--he has all the warmth of a spider crab. Learning to love Bill Bradley is like learning to love not drinking coffee, or not eating bread. It's self-flagellation, pure and simple. It's what our country's all about these days. Or somebody wants things that way, anyway.

ON THE MORNING of the event I got up early, went out to play a game of touch football with some old friends, came home, showered, then sat alone in my apartment considering my strategy for the day. I stared at the Newsweek cover and a pile of other news clips heralding the event, and fumed for a while. Something had to be done, but what? Finally I took out my wallet, pulled every piece of identification out of it, emptied my shoulder bag completely, and changed into a black Lee Harvey Oswald-style suit. ESPN droned on in the background as I checked and rechecked my pockets for any and all identifying items...

At one o'clock I left home a perfectly untraceable criminal, with a head full of resentment and frustration. They want me to love Bill Bradley? Fuck that. It was time to stand up and make it plain that this was one party I wasn't going to just go along with.

My original idea was to just cause a scene at the event, throw a comic wrench in the works. About the best plan I could come up with on this score was to stand up in the middle of Bradley's speech and scream, "Bill Bradley, what is the frequency!" over and over again until security asked me to leave. But then, when I actually got to the stadium, I got genuinely pissed off and had to change my plans dramatically.

The event itself was intended to be a sort of combination celebrity roast and political fundraiser. A parade of ex-NBA stars and other Bradley acquaintances would be trotted out before the crowd to show their support, and also throw out a sound bite or two that might help make Bradley's case on the evening news. At the same time, the New York crowd would get to relive some old New York Knick memories. It was supposed to be like Larry Bird night, only in service of the eventual seizure of the reins of government.

It wasn't cheap, either. I'd had to pay a hundred bucks for my nosebleed-seat ticket--the better seats were $500 and $1000. When I went the Garden the day before to buy my seat, the cashier--a short, bent-looking New Yorker with a bushy mustache--seemed almost embarrassed. "Holy shit," I said, when he handed me the price list. "Who would pay a hundred bucks for the worst seat in the house?"

He shrugged. I could read it in his face: "Not me, pal. For the Knicks, I'd maybe spend fifty, but a hundred for Bill Bradley... I mean, I like the guy, but..."

"Yeah, well, that's what they're getting, I guess," he said.

"Have you sold a lot of seats?" I asked.

"Um, not too many," he said.

But when I actually got inside, the stadium was relatively full. (The final attendance was 7,500, according to the New York Times). A lot of the seats were filled with little black kids. I made some inquiries of people in the seats around me in the upper decks and learned that Bradley supporters had gone around to public schools in poor neighborhoods handing out tickets to kids. The crowd was therefore not as white and upper-class as it would have been otherwise.

The kids were mostly hanging out in the corridors around the hot dogs stand throughout the event, but the adult paying crowd was cheering practically before it began. The emcee came out--it turned out to be Robin Roberts, the black female anchorwoman host of ESPN "Sportscenter". (A show I normally like; my first disillusionment of the afternoon). "We're going to have some fun!" she shouted. "No stuffy black-tie affair here!"

Well, no shit, I thought. At a black tie event, you at least get a sit-down dinner. That this was not black tie did not, of course mean the afternoon was any less scripted, any less lavish, but no one besides me seemed to care.

As Roberts started I got up to get a program. While I was gone, the fanatically-smiling white woman in her fifties who had been sitting next to me threw her coat on my seat. When I came back, she looked up at me with an annoyed expression.

"Excuse me," I said.

Slow tilt of the head; a wrinkling of the nose, as to the smell of rotting cheese. "Did you want to sit here?" she asked.

"I was sitting here," I said.

She frowned. "Well, I thought you'd left," she said. She made no move to take her coat away.

I stood there and considered the situation. Had I missed something? Was there a reason why I should have to ask her to clear my seat? "Well," I said finally, "I didn't leave. I'm back."

"So you want your seat back," she said.

"Yes, that's right," I said.

She angrily took her coat away and turned to face the proceedings. Host Roberts had just introduced a twelve year-old girl from Brooklyn who was singing the national anthem. Smile-lady was almost weeping from delight at the show already. "Wow, what a voice!" she said.

This was to become a pattern for the rest of the afternoon. Anytime anyone on stage did anything at all, even as simple as waving a hand, this woman next to me would start cheering and spouting gushing life-affirming comments to a friend of hers in the next seat. The worst of it came when Roberts started introducing the Bradley guests. When Dr. J came out, it was "Wow! Dr. J!" For Rebecca Lobo, it was "Rebecca Lobo! She's really good!" Moses Malone: "Wow!" And when cheerleaders came out and started throwing t-shirts into the stands (honest to God, "brainy" Bradley sent cheerleaders out there, complete with pom-poms), this woman said:

"Wow! T-shirts!"

I'd been marking down everything she said in my reporter's notebook, and she'd caught on pretty early. Finally, when she caught me writing "Sez old bag: wow t-shirts!", she turned to her friend and whispered something about me. Then she turned to me.

"What are you taking notes for?" she asked.

I'd been waiting for that. "I work for the FBI," I said.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

I glared at her. "That's classified."

She didn't believe me, but she shut up anyway, clearly freaked out. In truth I was having trouble coping by then. One by one, Roberts had called out the names of almost all the sports heroes of my childhood. And one by one, those same heroes grabbed microphones and essentially exhorted the crowd to vote for Bill Bradley for president because he'd been such a good basketball player.

Now, as an ex-jock, I've always had a passion for sports cliches--all those hilariously meaningless and repetitive paeans to "teamwork" and "unselfishness" and "just doing what it takes to win". I love that stuff. The very dumbness and irrelevance of jock talk has always seemed touching to me, particularly since it never seems to change. Like the ocean, jock blather is always there. Whenever I come home, I try to listen to it as much as I can, because it calms my nerves.

But now that cultural refuge was evaporating before my eyes. The invisible Madison Avenue handlers for this spidery politician Bill Bradley had attached a harness to jock talk and were driving it hard. No less a figure than Bill Russell, a figure who in my hometown of Boston occupies almost mythical status as a "thinking" athlete, got up and said that Bradley was his man because he was "always part of a winning team." Bradley "always refused to lose," said Russell, to enormous response. John Havlicek took the floor and told an aw-shucks story about the way Bradley never failed to hit the jumper off the double screen down low, and about what a great "team player" he was. Female basketball star Nancy Liberman gushed about Bradley: "I used to listen to the Knicks on the radio and dream of being here on the floor of Madison Square Garden. And now I'm here!"

I think the hardest thing for me to swallow was the sight of John McEnroe. This is a guy on my top ten list of heroes--the brilliantly gifted athlete who played with passion and never seemed afraid to be unpopular. Now retired and a hip elder statesman of New York society, Mac clearly wanted to make amends for his old surliness and turn "team player" after all those years as a rugged individualist. He spoke of how great it was for him to be able to contribute to a common effort, how Bill Bradley was a man who was to be praised for being part of one of the great teams in NBA history, and how athletes like Bradley had a lot to contribute to society because they have this experience as team performers...

"Let's hear it for the athlete as president!" Mac barked, his voice as arrogant as ever. Then he went on for a while about his new role as Davis Cup captain, and what a privilege it was for him to represent a great, great country like the United States of America, blah, blah, blah. Like all the other speakers before him, this "outspoken" athlete said nothing about Bradley's politics or what he stood for. I sighed and silently crossed McEnroe off my list of idols.

But the worst was yet to come. Ex-Portland/Celtic great Bill Walton's speech started off with promise. He was the only speaker of the lot to talk concretely about politics. He mentioned Bradley's pro-choice status, and noted that Bradley was in favor of reducing the national debt--which seemed to me a not terribly courageous position, but at least it was something. But then Walton said something incredible. "Bill Bradley," he said, "understands that freedom isn't about smoking cigarettes and carrying AK-47s. It's about justice and responsibility."

Holy shit, I thought. Bill Walton--potsmoking Grateful Dead fan Bill Walton--is coming out and telling us that freedom isn't about smoking cigarrettes? Has the world gone mad? Apparently so: the crowd cheered wildly. I wondered if they would have cheered if he'd said freedom wasn't about having the right against self-incrimination. Probably yes, I thought. It's come to that.

Finally, the Bradley people unveiled the ultimate photo op--Willis Reed. There are few images as sacred to the New York sports fan as that of injured Knick Willis Reed hobbling alone along the stadium runway to take the floor against Wilt Chamberlain in game 7 of the 1970 NBA finals. In a society as obsessed with sports as ours is, getting Willis Reed to run along the Madison Square Garden corridor again is something akin to getting Moses to do his Red Sea trick again.

No problem: Moses was available. The Garden lights dimmed and Reed lumbered down the corridor under a single spotlight, his while Knicks uniform gleaming in the darkness. The shlock religiosity of the image was so overwhelming that I actually laughed at first, until I heard a hush of genuine awe come over the crowd. They believed.

"Wow, Willis Reed," said the woman next to me, in a whisper.

Bradley and a host of other ex-Knicks then joined Reed on the floor and ran a "set play" at one basket, with Reed finishing off the layup. All six players grabbed microphones and started with the sports cliches--again the "teamwork" theme, again "unselfishness"... Walt "Clyde" Frazier showed his corporate plugging skills in recalling his special bond with Bradley on the court. "Before there was ESPN, Bill and I had E-S-P," he said. The crowd roared.

Heroic odes to unity and teamwork. High-tech light shows. Mythical men in uniforms paraded before the leader. Flags waving everywhere; awestruck crowds. Where had I seen this before?

When Bradley's old teammates left the floor, leaving the candidate to make his speech, I stood up. I couldn't take it anymore; it was time. I cupped my hands around my mouth and screamed:

"ARE YOU PEOPLE ALL OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS?"

Silence, then whispers, the shuffling of bodies in seats...

Somewhere in the distance, Bradley had begun speaking. I couldn't hear him. On my half of the stadium, the crowd had turned around to face me.

"Are you all crazy?" I repeated. "WHAT DOES BEING A BASKETBALL PLAYER HAVE TO DO WITH BEING PRESIDENT?"

"Shut your mouth!" someone shouted.

"You're all crazy!" I said. "This is straight out of Nazi Germany! DIDN'T YOU PEOPLE SEE 'TRIUMPH OF THE WILL'?"

"Sit down!" a guy a few rows down shouted (on the cover photo, he is visible as the hand in the lower right corner). "Sit down, I'm telling you!"

"Fuck you!" I answered. "This isn't politics! THIS IS THE ICE CAPADES!"

Things happened pretty fast after that. The guy below me jumped out of his seat and rushed after me. He was much smaller than I was, but he pushed me to the ground anyway. I'd expected that and let it happen. By the time I got up, someone else had gotten hold of me, tearing two buttons off my shirt. A third person got into the act somewhere and for a split second I was concerned I might be trampled... Just relax, I thought, don't resist, don't fight back... I went limp, falling backwards into a crowd of security guards. They started to drag me away; I reached forward for my bag, only to have it snatched away by a fat twentysomething Bradley volunteer with a big "Bradley STAFF" tag around his neck... Security pulled me upwards, with the Bradley staffer following.

I went on screaming--what the hell? "Why don't you ask about the ethanol subsidies!" I shouted.

A row of black kids in the upper deck shouted something at me. Too late, I realized they were cheering for me. "Fuck you!" I shouted, too pumped to think straight by then. They cheered even harder at that. By then I was almost out of the stadium, so I gave it one last blast. "It's not about basketball!" I shouted. "It's not about basketball! It's not about basketball!"

Before I knew it, there were photographers crisscrossing in front of me, walking crablike in reverse and snapping flash photos as the guards led me out of the building. I felt like Sirhan Sirhan and probably looked enough like him by then, too--I had that same consciousness of irrepressible facial derangement you get when you're on acid. Out of the corner of my eye I perceived that the Bradley staffer carrying my bag had dropped back; I turned around in time to catch him rifling through it. That makes sense, I thought. He's looking for the gun. Finding none, he raced after us and handed it to the guard, and then backed off as we went into the fateful elevator.

The Garden security chief tried to get me to talk to the cops who were interrogating the chicken, but in the end they had to let me go when I insisted I hadn't committed a crime. The formal detention ended when I produced my ticket stub. Bradley staffers crowded around the door. "Did you get a name?" an officious-looking black woman with a Bradley tag asked the guards.

"No," he said. "He won't give it. Let's get him out of here. John Doe ejection."

The guards led me out the door and I walked home.