Scott Bradley, who would go on to play major league baseball for the Mariners and Yankees, was the future pro athlete of the three sons of Gerry and Mary Bradley, who moved across from a playground in Essex Fells, N.J., so that their boys could play whatever game they loved.
“In hockey, I would have 7-8 breakaways a game and might make one,” Scott said. “Bob wasn’t the stickhandler and skater I was, but he would be in the right spot four times and score three goals.
“Today, when the family plays golf, we’re all just playing to the green while he’s playing to the 100-yard marker, calculating. His greatest attribute as an athlete was his mind.²
That got Bob Bradley, the coach of the U.S. World Cup team, a ticket into Princeton, where a gruesome leg break his sophomore year in a soccer game could have opened all doors had it opened his mind to industry, law or medicine. Bradley still wanted soccer, his single-mindedness reflected in the grueling rehab that enabled him to score four goals in his first game back, and his misery the year he spent after graduation in a prestigious Proctor and Gamble executive raining program.
“I have to get back into sports,” he told Scott, now Princeton’s baseball coach. Pursuing a Masters in Education at Ohio University, Bob got a break when the soccer coach there suddenly resigned, leaving Bradley the best qualified guy on campus for the job. He won some games and an opportunity as an assistant on Bruce Arena’s University of Virginia powerhouse, then in 1984, the head job at Princeton before rejoining Arenas to win the first two championships in MLS history at D.C. United.
Bradley’s first pro head coaching season was a championship one with the expansion Chicago Fire. And despite critics of his clenched personality and system, he had a winning record with the MetroStars when he was fired by Alexi Lalas, then success at Chivas USA.
“The group always is bigger to Bob than the sum of the parts,” said Jeff Agoos, the Red Bulls director of scouting, who played for Bradley at two MLS stops. “Who wouldn’t want to look like Brazil and win games? But it’s about results, playing ugly sometimes to win.
It gets even uglier on the Internet about a coach perceived to never have coached a 0-0 game he didn’t love, who answers pointed questions mostly in careful generalities, who, never mind having a brother who works in the media (Jeff is ESPN The Magazine’s soccer writer), seems to barely tolerate the job’s public responsibilities.
Only Bradley’s son, Michael, a U.S. midfielder, chooses to be less anecdotal tan his father, especially about any awkwardness in the coach-player-son relationship.
“It’s not something I think about a lot,” Michael says tightly. I know it’s not something he thinks about a lot.
That probably is true, since mostly what either thinks about is soccer.
“We all realize as we get older we are more like our parents than we ever want to be,” smiles U.S. star Landon Donovan. “Certainly their intensity and passion are similar. I think it rubs off on al of us.
Sometimes during the 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Donovan says his coach devotes to his team, he seeks input from players who have come to respect his devotion.
“He’s very thorough and sticks to his plan,”said defender Carlos Bocanegra.
“The guys have bought into it.
Bradley’s starting success at the Confederations Cup last summer sold them while expanding the view of the United States’ emergence as a soccer power. His critics believe a larger name from grander soccer lands should man those high-powered binoculars, but they don’t play for him.
The day I retired as a player, Bob gave me ‘Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book,’ told me it was the best book on coaching and teaching he had ever read,” Scott Bradley said. “You can’t reach every player or team exactly the same, every situation is different.
“Bob looks at the whole picture.