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The Boss said it best, some people are “Born to Run.”
In New Jersey politics — according to a new profile piece from The Atlantic — those people are former professional athletes like New York Knicks legend Senator Bill Bradley and, in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Sue Altman.
Altman started the transition from the hardwood to the hustings when she was a teacher and coach who was willing to stand up to then-governor Chris Christie to fight for New Jersey’s public schools.
In the race to replace career politician Tom Kean Jr., it is Altman’s “intensity that vibrates through a Zoom screen” and her willingness to challenge “the state’s old-boys’ club, regardless of its party” that has enabled her to grow a winning coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and Independent voters.
The Atlantic: Born to Run
David Graham | June 18, 2024
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Politics has come to look like sports in many ways: the big money, the intense rivalries, the infotainment coverage. And some of the boldface names are exactly the same, thanks to a string of high-profile retired sports stars running for, and sometimes winning, high office.
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“Why should we exclude athletes? We’ve got enough lawyers!” said Bill Bradley, laughing, when I asked him about retired stars running for office. The basketball Hall of Famer represented New Jersey for three terms in the Senate and vied for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.
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When Bradley first ran in 1978, just a year removed from the NBA, his path was unusual, and figures like Senator Jim Bunning (formerly of the MLB) and Representatives Jack Kemp and Steve Largent (both NFL) were rare enough to be curiosities. Now each election seems to feature enough former stars to stock a sideline.
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Sue Altman, one such first-time candidate, has been running for most of her life. As a kid, she ran track and raced up and down the soccer pitch and basketball court. At Columbia University, where she was a standout point guard on the women’s basketball team, she ran the offense. She went running before games, because she was afraid that if she didn’t, she’d have too much energy and commit fouls (“which was borne out to be true,” she told me). She even joined the cross-country team on a lark. After college, she took off for Ireland and then Germany, where she played pro basketball.
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Now she’s running again—this time for the U.S. House. Altman, a Democrat, is trying to unseat Representative Tom Kean Jr., a Republican, in a district in northwest New Jersey. After her pro-ball stints overseas, she returned to the Garden State and began teaching and coaching basketball. Battles over education policy drew her into politics, and she now hopes to move into elected office in a race that The Cook Political Report has judged a toss-up—or perhaps a jump ball.
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Bradley was not new to political issues when he first ran for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, having dabbled in public affairs during his career with the New York Knicks. He found that his fame was helpful, at least as a starting point. “They’d seen me on the court for 10 years in their living rooms. They saw me under pressure. They formed some opinion of who I was as a human being,” he told me. “After that, you have to deliver. I used to say, because I was a pro player, I’d have 70 people at my town-hall meeting instead of 30. That only meant I could fail in front of 70 people. I’ve seen too many people who were athletes lose because they thought that’s all they needed.”
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For athletes, the benefits are more psychological. They may find that their first career is over by the time they turn 40, and that normal life is a bit pedestrian; politics provides the competition to which they are accustomed. “One of the things you read in so many accounts of former athletes is how difficult it is for them to live in the regular-world context where people just exist, they don’t win,” Niven told me. “But you know, in politics, people do win and lose.”
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Bradley believes that the skills that dictate success in sports, such as commitment and selflessness, tend to predict success in politics too. “You’d be surprised by how many people in basketball stop working. The same thing in Congress. If you’re there every day putting in the effort, that pays off in the long run,” he said. “The senator who was pushing to get to the front of the line at the press conference wasn’t always the best senator.”
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If Altman wants to test those skills, she’ll have to win first. She told me that the balancing act of being a student-athlete at an Ivy League school is the best preparation she’s had for campaigning. “You wake up every day with a bunch of tasks at hand that have to get done, and your mood, your feeling, what you feel like doing today—none of that matters. What matters is you have a lot of things that have to get done,” she said. “Being a college athlete is that way.”
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Altman speaks with an intensity that vibrates through a Zoom screen, and I was glad I’d passed up a spokesperson’s offer to play a friendly game of one-on-one with her. (Tom Flaherty, who coached Altman in AAU ball, told me, “I would be scared if she was my daughter … because she is so relentless.”)
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Since she left the court, she’s turned that intensity toward politics. Altman grew up in a Republican family, and was herself once a registered Republican, but she began advocating against education cuts proposed by then–New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican. She won attention after a 2016 town-hall meeting in Camden, when the governor, frustrated by her interruptions, tossed the microphone to her at short range. She easily snagged it—“He didn’t know I was a professional basketball player”—and read him the riot act.
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Three years later, state troopers hauled her out of a state Senate hearing after she confronted the businessman and New Jersey Democratic macher George Norcross over corporate tax breaks, in a moment that, The New York Times wrote, “laid bare the deepening fault lines within the Democratic Party in one of America’s bluest states.” (Norcross was indicted on state racketeering charges yesterday. He did not immediately comment on the charges.)
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In her congressional campaign, Altman has sought to paint Kean as both a nepo baby—his father was governor of New Jersey—and an agent of the MAGA agenda, and like many Democrats nationwide, she has made abortion rights a campaign centerpiece. But she sees her clashes with Christie, Norcross, and Kean as similar challenges to the state’s old-boys’ club, regardless of its party. (In a statement, the Kean campaign accused Atlman of lying about the congressman’s record, adding, “But ultimately the voters in NJ-07 won’t be fooled.”)
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“Politics should not be entirely sports, right? Sometimes we think of it like sports—you’re on the red team or you’re on the blue team, and you’re cheering really hard for your team, and I think that’s actually a really terrible way to think about politics,” she said.
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But she told me that she still thinks athletics has some lessons for political leaders, especially in a time of polarized acrimony. “Are there any American shared values left? And I think there are. I think work ethic, perseverance, and courage are at the top of that list,” she said. “Sports is this really blunt distillation of those values.”
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