While Bosch's reformist zeal has found plenty of amens among his fellow Compton clergy, most of them have in fact supported Bradley in the past. "I didn't want to be in a coalition if it was going to attack Omar," says Sanders. "I have never degraded or defamed him. I have never supported him formayor, but I've always supported him asmayor. I think he's a brilliant young man, borderline genius, but he doesn't have the temperament or maturity to serve the people. It is Omar's response to all this that has appalled me and made me realize how he really is."â
Like many others, Sanders is curiously able to separate the man from his misdeeds, the promise of the past from the gross disappointments of the present. Compton is family, after all, and Bradley its wayward son. "I still consider him a friend, even though I oppose him," says Newman. And Sanders' good impressions linger: He recalls a visit the mayor paid to his office a few years ago to enlist support for a proposal for a swank new housing tract. "I was truly impressed with his passion," says Sanders, "how he grabbed a pad of paper and a pen and sketched out his ideas right in front of me." Bradley later branded Sanders an enemy, even though he had pledged support for the mayor's project in exchange for the mayor's support of a pet project of his own. The future of both is murky. Sanders says the lesson in all this is that "You can have great passion, and be sincerely wrong."
I SEE OMAR BRADLEY A SECOND TIME because I really have no choice: Over the weekend, I discover that I've left my appointment book in his car. When I walk into his rather lushly appointed office in City Hall, Bradley looks self-satisfied, as if he knew perfectly well from our first contentious moment that I'd end up here. The man who would be king, again, reclines in a big swivel chair behind a wooden desk the size of a dining-room table. On the walls are framed photos of his heroes -- Malcolm, Martin -- and the office décor includes kente cloth, African sculpture, a Kwanzaa candelabra. Away from the streets that he invokes so often, Bradley is quiescent, thoughtful. He still wants to know what I think of him. Figuring I have nothing to lose, I tell him that he righteously scared me during our first meeting, that he appeared to be very much the gangster everybody said he was.
He looks not angry this time, but a bit sheepish. He talks evenly at first, detailing his experiences in school, an influential teacher, his embittering epiphany that education for black students in Compton during the '70s was a joke. As a football player at Centennial, Bradley says, he played vicious defense against the South Bay white teams, "because we were getting even for the fact that we had no books, and our library was a hellhole." He talks about how he read Malcolm X's autobiography at age 9, Eldridge Cleaver at 11, Mein Kampf at 18, later the Rubàiyat and Mao Tse-Tung. This is as much equanimity as the mayor has shown, perhaps as much as he can muster, but the heat and anger are already roiling under his words like lava. He erupts recalling how, as a student at Cal State Long Beach, he challenged another student to tell him about the origin of bagpipes. "They're African," he fumes. "You need me to tell you that, so you can overcome that fucking bullshit . . . Education is a blade. Don't tell me, sister, that I talk too much because of your limited exposure."
His fondest theme, in the end, seems to be not African heritage or education or his own regard of himself as a kind of anointed civic savior, but football. When he talks about football, he seems to be remembering the most things and the best things in the fewest moments. He looks both animated and content. "I once ran 65 yards and caught a guy on the one-yard line," he says. "I hurt my knee. I put him out for five weeks. That's what I do. I enjoyed hitting people, though I wasn't a great athlete. I'd wait all game for a clean shot, then go kill 'em. I got a killer instinct."
He narrows his eyes and smiles a wide, closed-mouth smile. "From the sound of me, I seem bigger than I am. My coach once told a recruiter, 'He's not that big. But if I tell him to run through that wall, he'll run through it.'"
