'From mid-range he could kill you': Bernie Sanders' basketball days
Team-mates from 1970s Vermont remember the presidential hopeful as an on-court leader – with very sharp elbows
Every winter Wednesday night in late 1970s Burlington, Vermont, a small group of men met at the gym behind St Anthony’s Catholic Church to play basketball. They huddled against the cold in work boots, sweaters and jackets and were relieved when the most enthusiastic of them arrived with the key he had secured from the church office.
Inside, they quickly changed into gym shorts and T-shirts, careful to keep snow off the tile floor that made up the court. There were almost always 12 to 15 of them, most in their mid-to-late 30s – men with college degrees still unsure of their position in life, clinging to youth as responsibility approached. Among them were several woodworkers, a teacher, a college professor, an aspiring filmmaker, a religious man, a car mechanic and a wild-haired film-strip maker from New York named Bernie Sanders.
All these years later they remember him well. He was not the best player but certainly not the worst, with a deadly set-shot, rugged elbows and a brusque, Brooklyn twang that echoed through the tiny gym every time he spoke.
“Give me da bawwwwwwl!” shouts Clem Nilan, one of the game’s participants, doing his best impersonation of Sanders on the court.
They laugh when they watch him on the debates. For the Sanders everyone sees now speaking with his arms, flailing his hands and waggling an index finger is the same one they recall from those long ago Wednesdays angling stork-like for rebounds and barking for passes.
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/feb/17/from-mid-range-he-could-kill-you-bernie-sanders-basketball-days
It was the Iowa CNN town hall “debate” where Bernie Sanders was asked what kind of athlete he used to be. He fondly recalled his youth basketball days, where, he says, he was a star player on his Brooklyn grammar school basketball team. This appears to be true. Newspaper accounts tell of his school, PS 197, winning the Burrough Championship, just as Sanders recalled on CNN.
http://www.sportsgrid.com/video/the-electability-of-the-long-distance-runner-bernie-sanders-casually-brags-about-his-sports-background/
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