NEW YORK -- They spit on the savior. Night after humiliating night in the winter of 1968, Bill Bradley trudged off the court at Madison Square Garden through a storm of peanuts, pennies, and saliva. A highly acclaimed and richly paid rookie, Bradley had been expected to lead the New York Knicks to basketball glory, and he was an utter bust.

Strangers on street corners called him a bum. Cabbies asked how he could cash his check with a straight face. His own coach ridiculed "the Great Man himself," as the New York Times had hailed the promising rookie.

For Bradley, lionized as the epitome of excellence as a three-time All-American at Princeton, an Olympic champion, and a Rhodes Scholar, the indignity was like nothing he had ever tasted. And like nothing he has experienced since.

"I was supposed to be the great white hope," he said in an interview. "Then I was a failure."

In one foul season, Bradley's grand plan nearly came undone. He was destined to be a senator one day, and then president; friends, coaches, and writers had told him so before he was old enough to legally take a drink. And he had set out to fulfill their prophecies, banking on pro basketball fame to propel him.

Then he fell flat. Three years after the author John McPhee had exalted Bradley's athletic and intellectual gifts in the 1965 biography, "A Sense of Where You Are," Bradley had lost his way. His blueprint for the future was as tattered as a discarded hot dog wrapper.

Now, as Bradley enters a crucial phase of his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, the story of how he confronted -- and overcame -- his greatest failure provides a window on both his character and the quirks of circumstance that helped shape his life. His encounter with the other side of renown would shake him, change him and, perhaps more than any experience in his life, steel him for the ever-more-public life that lay ahead.

No one anticipated that Bill Bradley would stumble, not after the triumphs of his youth. As a teenager in Crystal City, Mo., he became an Eagle Scout and a national student government leader as he advanced in high school basketball from All-Conference to All-State to All-American.

His inner drive became the stuff of legend. To boost his leaping power, he filled his sneakers with 10 pounds of lead. To condition himself to dribble without looking at the ball, he donned eyeglasses with cardboard taped to the bottom. He trained 3 1/2 hours a day, Sunday through Friday, eight hours on Saturday. And when a young woman asked him for a date, Bradley politely declined. "I have a girlfriend," he told her. "Basketball."

More than 75 colleges pursued Bradley with basketball scholarships, but he opted for the academic rigors of Princeton, where athletic scholarships are prohibited by the Ivy League.

In a remarkable college career, he averaged more than 30 points a game and, in 1965, led Princeton past the powerhouses of the day to the semifinals of the NCAA national championship. In helping to clinch the consolation game, Bradley scored 58 points, a single-game playoff record, and he finished the season as the college player of the year.

"I watched him play in college," says Bob Cousy, the Hall of Fame playmaker who won six NBA championships with the Boston Celtics. "Despite the fact that he wasn't a 7-footer and wasn't that acrobatic, he had skills that made him every bit as dominant as everyone said he was."

By 19, Bradley had attained such fame that he needed a part-time secretary to help answer his mail.

Infatuated with the tweedy, book-toting celebrity, the New York press corps fawned over Bradley when he joined the Knicks on Dec. 9, 1967. The New York Times declared him an amalgam of "Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy," "the fictional Sir Galahad," and some of the league's best players: Cousy (who had retired four years earlier), Oscar Robertson, and Jerry West.

All the hoopla piqued unusual curiosity among Bradley's new teammates before his first game, which drew a then-rare sellout crowd. "When he got undressed in the locker room," said Dick Barnett, a veteran guard, "we all thought he would have a big `S' on his chest."

Bradley joined a team in dire need of help. For years, the Knicks had dwelled near the cellar of their division, perenially swept aside by the Celtics. In signing Bradley to a four-year, $500,000 contract -- when the average NBA salary was $9,500 -- the Knicks hiked expectations for the rookie. And the fans expected nothing short of greatness from "Dollar Bill."

"They saw him as the savior," says Dave DeBusschere, Bradley's roommate with the Knicks. "New York was starved for a good team, and they expected Bill to singlehandedly turn it around. Not too many players have come into pro basketball under that kind of pressure."

In Bradley's debut, the crowd shrieked every time he touched the ball -- in pregame warmups. "Not even the debut of Babe Ruth as a New York Yankee evoked more hysterical acclaim," the New York Times reported.

Then Bradley failed. He had played the forward position throughout his amateur career, yet the Knicks assigned him to play guard, a role that demanded more speed and dexterity than the 6-foot-5 rookie possessed. "You could tell he wasn't equipped for the role," DeBusschere says. "The guys he was playing against were clearly taking advantage of him."

The Knicks lost eight of their first 10 games with Bradley. Memories of his college heroics quickly faded. And Bradley's inability to guard swifter opponents became an everyday burden, best exemplified in a Christmas game against the Celtics in Boston. As he tried to keep up with Boston's Sam Jones, Bradley suddenly lost track of where he was on the court. Jones sped away; Bradley slammed blindly into the Celtics' massive backup center, Wayne Embry, and crumpled to the parquet floor.

"In those first months, it was clear I wasn't going to make it," Bradley says. "The cheers quickly turned to boos. It was a difficult time."

The Knicks fired their coach, Dick McGuire, after Bradley's 10th game. "That could have been my fault," McGuire said recently of Bradley's early struggle. "I played him at guard, and the other guys were so much quicker."

Yet Bradley remained at guard under McGuire's successor, Red Holzman. And when the rookie continued to struggle, Holzman rode him mercilessly, mocking his Ivy League pedigree and chiding him about his lucrative contract.

McPhee, who remains Bradley's friend, witnessed his pain during the ordeal. Bradley played an average of only 16 minutes a game that season and watched two of his teammates, Walt Frazier and Phil Jackson, earn All-Rookie honors while he languished. "He didn't conceal his feelings on the court," McPhee says. "You could see him brooding on the bench. You knew he was dealing with so much disappointment and self-questioning."

In the locker room, Bradley was no longer a prized interview, says Leonard Koppett, then the Knicks beat writer for the Times. Bradley's confidence was shaken, and when reporters approached him, he had little to say. "He was a little bit aloof," says Koppett, now a columnist for the Oakland Tribune. "He kept out of the limelight as much as he could."

Indeed, DeBusschere says Bradley "felt a sense of embarrassment and fear that his dream of being a pro basketball player might not be achieved."

If not for his life outside basketball, Bradley says, "I might have sat around my hotel room all day thinking about my lack of lateral quickness."

McPhee, who dined with Bradley after many games that season, was struck by how Bradley kept his professional woes from poisoning the rest of his life. "He showed an amazing ability to step aside from his basketball concerns," McPhee says. "He wasn't cold to the situation, but you wouldn't know how much he was hurting if you ate spaghetti with him after a game. The way he dealt with adversity that year was sort of his finest hour."

By all accounts, Bradley's passion to excel never waned. His teammates said he approached every practice as if it could be a turning point. And he sought help after his rookie season from a stranger, Sonny Hill, who ran a summer league in Philadelphia. Bradley, who taught in Harlem that summer, rode the train to Philadelphia twice a week to play against some of the top pros of the day, among them Hal Greer and Earl "The Pearl" Monroe.

"Bill had doubts about himself," says Hill, "but he also had the determination, the grit, and the willingness to reach out and allow others to support him and help him continue his journey."

On Hill's advice, Bradley made a pivotal mental adjustment by forsaking hope of NBA superstardom and accepting that he could flourish only by playing a supporting role on a Knicks team with several players as talented as he was. The transition eased the pressure on Bradley, and he gradually improved, ending the summer season in a legendary game in which Monroe scored 63 points and Bradley 52. "He was just the right person for me that summer," Bradley says of Hill.

Yet Bradley continued to founder in his second season, as Holzman insisted on using him as a reserve guard. Finally, Bradley's break came in January 1969, with a teammate's misfortune: Cazzie Russell broke his ankle. Bradley was tapped to replace Russell in the starting lineup as the team's small forward.

Playing his natural position, Bradley thrived. And the team began to gel as he honed his supporting role, focusing on the intangibles that don't appear in box scores but help make championship teams: picking apart defenses with pinpoint passes, setting screens for teammates, moving without the ball to get free for an open shot.

Bradley, the nonpareil college star, began to solidify his legacy as a consummate team player. "Rather than having the ball all the time, like he did at Princeton, he learned to be one of the greatest players in NBA history without the ball," says Hill, an administrator for the Philadelphia 76ers.

Cousy, a supporter of Bradley's presidential campaign, was coaching the Cincinnati Royals at the time. "With his shooting skills, Bill could have scored much more than his average" of 12.4 points a game over his career, Cousy says. "But he chose to create opportunities for others so his team could prosper."

With memories of his rookie nightmare still raw, Bradley was so intent on remaining a starter after Russell's injury that when he became nauseated before a game in San Diego, he asked for a bucket at the bench to vomit in. Then he repeatedly dry-heaved on the court. "I'm not coming out!" Bradley shouted to the bench, while his teammates laughed at the absurdity.

"I finally was there," Bradley says in hindsight. "I wasn't about to let some stomach virus keep me from staying there."

Less than 18 months later, on May 8, 1970, the Knicks won their first NBA championship. With Bradley still in the starting lineup in 1973, the Knicks won their second -- and only other -- NBA title.

Bradley played 10 years of professional basketball. And though he qualified for only one All-Star team, he was overwhelmingly elected to the Hall of Fame for his contributions to the Knicks and the game at large. "I learned from that experience that resilience is the most important quality a person can have in life," Bradley says. "You need the courage and discipline to keep moving forward even when you don't know how things are going to turn out."

Bradley, who used his Knicks fame as a springboard to an 18-year career as a US senator from New Jersey, says he has relied on the same sense of discipline in his insurgent campaign for the presidency that sustained him during his NBA ordeal. Yet he still wonders at times how his life might have differed if he had failed to turn around his basketball career. "Who knows," he says in a cookie-cutter hotel room on a chilly morning in New Hampshire. "I might be playing piano somewhere."