Personal History – Under the Carpetbag

A sixty-year friendship.

- By John McPhee

On March 8, 1965, I went to Philadelphia to watch Princeton play Penn State in the opening round of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. As the two teams were warming up, a contact lens fell to the court from the eye of a Princeton player. He bent over to pick it up but couldn’t see it. Teammates stopped their drills and came to help. They got down on their hands and knees and grovelled, crawled like bugs. Some went completely prone and squinted down along the floorboards. No one saw the lens. Princeton’s Bill Bradley, who happened to be on the sideline talking to his coach, watched with a curiosity that evolved toward impatience as five minutes went by. People in the stands were clapping in unison. Bradley had enough. Leaving the sideline, he walked to mid-court, stopped, bent forward, and pointed at the lens.

Focus like that is an obvious asset in the central vision of a basketball player, and so is peripheral vision, which adds so much to court sense. When Bill was in high school, in Crystal City, Missouri, he would walk down the streets with blinders on his eyes to see if he could read the signs in shopwindows on either side. Nonsense? Court sense. In early December of his senior year at Princeton, I persuaded him to go with me to an ophthalmologist, who plotted his peripheral vision within circles on a graph, and we found that Bill could see as much as twenty-three degrees more than most people. Bill could practically see out the back of his head, let alone a bit of plastic on a floor.

I described these optical scenes in a