Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hails from Brooklyn, a borough where barstoolers once loved to wrestle with the following conundrum.
Question: You’re in a room with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Walter O’Malley. You have a gun with only two bullets. Who do you shoot?
Answer: O’Malley. Twice. Just to make sure he’s dead.
What the dastardly O’Malley did to share billing with the other two villains was move the Brooklyn Dodgers from New York to Los Angeles in 1957. Sanders was 16 when the transplant occurred, a long-time regular in the 60 cent seats at the majestic yet diminutive Ebbets Field, a teenager so in thrall to a team revered locally as “Dem Bums” that, even at 74, he can still rattle off their line-up from 1951.
That O'Malley went west in search of a larger stadium and more money has been used to explain everything from Sanders' subsequent indifference to professional sport to his political beliefs. Whether or not discovering major league owners are motivated by revenue more than romance precipitated his move to the left, his brand of democratic socialism had Donald Trump recently warning supporters that Sanders reaching the White House would herald the golfing apocalypse.
“No more golf – no more golf,” screeched Trump. “You won’t have golf any more. You won’t have any money left to be golfing.”
That kind of scaremongering underlines what an outsized impact Sanders has had on the campaign so far. Ahead of next Monday’s opening caucus in Iowa, perhaps the most refreshing aspect of his approach to vote-getting has been a refusal to adhere to so many of the tired, old political tropes. In this regard, his attitude to sport is typical.
It is accepted practice for presidential hopefuls to exaggerate their knowledge of games and allegiances to teams. The belief is that doing so somehow makes them appear more downhome and ordinary in a way that will appeal to gullible regular folk. A dangerous tactic that can backfire. In 2004, John Kerry was justly hammered for describing Manny Ortez as his favourite Boston Red Sox player at a time when his local team’s most beloved icons were Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz. Imagine somebody running for a Dáil seat in Kilkenny talking up his long-standing admiration for DJ Shefflin and you get the picture.
As a congressman and now a senator representing Vermont, Sanders has always eschewed this type of fakery and tomfoolery, styling himself, in complete contrast, as somebody who retains proper perspective about the place of sport in society.
Grilled
During the congressional hearings into steroids in baseball in 2005, while so many of his peers grandstanded for the cameras, he berated journalists for turning up in such droves just because big names like Jose Canseco, Curt Schilling and Mark McGwire were being grilled.
“So I want to say to our media friends, that when some of us talk about the collapse of our healthcare system and millions of people not having any health insurance, come and join us,” said Sanders. “And when we talk about the United States having the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialised world at a time when the rich are going richer, come on down. Now maybe we may have to bring great baseball players to help us talk about childhood poverty. I don’t know. I would hope not. I’d hope we could have some of the great experts and I would hope you would come.”
More recently, he's castigated colleges for spending lavishly on football stadiums while underpaying faculty and overcharging students. Constantly putting principles ahead of populism could explain why his upstart campaign will at least prolong a Democratic primary contest that was once presumed to be a straightforward coronation of Hillary Clinton.
Here is a candidate that doesn’t go in for airbrushing. When Sanders’s wife Jane was being interviewed last month, a story was told about him turning off the Super Bowl at half-time. The type of scandalous move other candidates would quake at being made public lest, in some McCarthyite frenzy, they’d be accused of un-American activity, the Sanders family thought the whole thing merely indicative of his charming eccentricity. “What American does that?” asked his step-daughter Carina.
Perhaps the kind who voted to outlaw fantasy sports as gambling long before that became a cause du jour for some of his peers in Washington. Or the man who, as the socialist mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, persuaded a minor league baseball club called the Vermont Reds to base themselves there. Like his teenage love affair with the Dodgers, that ended badly too when the Reds eventually left town and headed west to Ohio.
Endorsements
Despite his refusal to shamelessly exploit sport, Sanders has been picking up high-profile endorsements from athletes like UFC’s Ronda Rousey, Seattle Seahawks’ defensive lineman Michael Bennett and NBA icon Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
“We used to play ball every day,” said Sanders of his idyllic childhood on the streets of Flatbush. “One of the differences, by the way, between today and way back then is maybe you learnt a little bit about democracy . . . Everybody knew how good you were. It didn’t matter how much money you had. You were the third-best basketball player. Everybody knew it, ’cause they played with you, day in and day out.”
Sport taught him democracy then and also how money ultimately wins out. As good a preparation for an election as any.
