 Improving from his mediocre freshman grades , Bradley graduated magna cum laude after writing his senior thesis about Harry S. Truman 's 1940 United States Senate campaign , titled " On That Record I Stand " , and received a Rhodes Scholarship at Worcester College , University of Oxford . His tenure at Princeton was the subject of Pulitzer Prize @-@ winning author John McPhee 's January 23 , 1965 article " A Sense of Where You Are " in The New Yorker , which McPhee expanded into a book of the same name . The title came from Bradley 's explanation for his ability to repeatedly throw a basketball over his shoulder and into the basket while looking away from it . 
