Aspiring To Higher Things

McMillen went to Maryland with no partisan feelings or party affiliation. "I didn't really have much of a social conscience," McMillen says. "I can remember sitting in my dorm room when a Vietnam demonstration broke out on campus. I had to close the window because the tear gas interfered with studying. The issues weren't important to me. But what Senator Tydings said did interest me, and as much as anybody else he started me eventually thinking about public service."

Tydings wasn't the only one who sized up McMillen as a good political prospect. He was appointed as a teen-ager to the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports during the Nixon Administration. And Martha Mitchell, Attorney General John Mitchell 's wife, called and suggested that he work for Nixon 's reelection in the summer of 1972. "I told Martha that not only were the Olympics something I had always wanted to do," says McMillen, "but that I thought that I had a patriotic duty to go."

The Olympics, says McMillen, were something of a basketball interlude, but the last three seconds of the final game, which the Soviet Union won 51-50 after time had apparently run out with the U.S. the victor, was the most emotional moment he has experienced in his life. He was the man on the inbounds pass which led to the Soviet victory. "I was never so high as I was when we thought we had won and never so low when they told us we had lost."

By then McMillen was a Democrat, at least in his sympathies. "The Democrats appealed to my sense of justice and humanity," he says. "In social issues and even foreign policy, the Democratic philosophy is based on a desire to improve things for disadvantaged people. The underlying Republican philosophy is concerned with how to retain their status and affluence and to protect themselves against other classes and races."

Almost as soon as he arrived at Maryland , McMillen began scouting out how to get to Oxford one day as a Rhodes scholar. He lined up patrons, and called, approached or wrote to a hundred or so Rhodes scholars, including Princeton All-America Bill Bradley , then with the New York Knicks and now a U.S. Senator from New Jersey , and Supreme Court Justice Byron White , who had been an All-America halfback at the University of Colorado . "I am not somebody who goes hunting without a gun," Tom McMillen says, clinically.

He bagged the Rhodes , and at Oxford read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Bradley 's subject—among his interests being the causes and conduct of World War II and its historical heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill . However, it was apparently easier for McMillen to get into Oxford than it was for him to deal with the change in disciplines. "In high school and at Maryland I was, more or less, a grind," he says. "I had a retentive memory and I took in whatever information was given. Then I regurgitated it when I was asked. At Oxford , they not only expected me to take in information but also to speculate about it, analyze it and create something from it. I was in a daze for a few months, but it was one of the most important experiences of my life. I learned how to think and to enjoy it."

McMillen also continued playing basketball, signing with Virtus Sinudyne of Bologna to play in an Italian league. To do so, he made two all-night commutes each week between Oxford and wherever the team was performing, sometimes as far as Tel Aviv and Leningrad . "I studied and slept in the car from the airport to the game site, and I'd crash on Saturdays in an apartment in Italy ," he says. "I never missed any of my lectures or tutorials and didn't miss much of the social experience of being at Oxford ."

While McMillen was thus engaged in 1975, Donald Dell , his lawyer and agent, informed him that the NBA and ABA were about to merge, and that when they did, McMillen's market value would decline sharply. Dell strongly suggested that he sign a contract (both Virginia of the ABA and Buffalo of the NBA had made him a first-round pick) and show up to play the next fall. McMillen agreed and proposed to his Oxford advisers that he complete the second and final year of his work there during the next three summers. They said he would have to choose between being a full-time resident Rhodes scholar or a pro forward. The negotiations were deadlocked until McMillen discovered that, because of the press of the diamond and empire-building business, Cecil Rhodes , the program's founder, had completed his education as a part-time student. The Oxfords capitulated.

McMillen signed with the Buffalo Braves in 1975 and was forced to adjust once again. He got into only 50 of the Braves' 82 games and averaged only 4.7 points. He was dealt to the Knicks midway through the following season and found himself sitting on the bench next to Bradley , who was in his last season.

McMillen's most productive NBA season was 1977-78 for the Atlanta Hawks , who had traded a second-round draft choice for him. He averaged 9.9 points a game as a sometime starter on Hubie Brown 's blood-and-guts Hawks.