Bill Bradley was born on July 28, 1943 in Crystal City, Missouri, a small, multiethnic, middle class town on the Mississippi River.  A basketball player at Princeton and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he won a gold medal with the U.S. Olympic team in 1964.  When he returned from Oxford, Bradley joined the Air Force Reserves, "not waiting to be drafted" and delaying his start with the New York Knicks until mid-season. 

Over his career, Bradley won two NBA championships with the Knicks.  In his 1976 book Life on the Run , Bradley credited his NBA career with educating him on racial issues.

Bill married Ernestine Schlant in 1974 and the two settled in New Jersey.  Ernestine still holds the position she did then, on the faculty of New Jersey's Montclair State University.  They have one daughter.

In 1977, Bill Bradley retired from basketball and ran for Senate in New Jersey.  He won and, at thirty-five, was sworn in as the youngest member of the U.S. Senate -- a post New Jersey voters trusted him with for three terms.

Senator Bradley described why he's running for President this way:

"I'm running because I think my ability matches the moment. Prior times I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't think I was ready. Now I'm at the top of my game, and I'm ready to offer my leadership to the country. I think it's exhilarating to try to lead the country at this particular time in our history.

"I want to be a good steward of a good economy. I want to make sure that every child in America has a chance to realize his or her potential. I want to give people a sense of where we're headed in the midst of all this change that we're experiencing now on multiple levels. And I want to do that in a way that allows people once again to regain some faith in their democracy -- that their participation actually counts. You don't have to give money. That's important, but your participation also counts. The key to this campaign is going to be to get more and more people who have not been a part of campaigns to get involved because they recognize that something is different.

"I'm not going to go out and get poll-tested phrases and just spit them back to you. But I'm going to be going out and telling people what I believe, where I think the country should go, and doing so with a great candor because I respect them -- with their ability to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of our lives today in a way that allows our children to have a better future than we do today."