It was cold! You could see the breath of the players on the field. The fans, over 4,000 of us, were bundled up against the early April chill.

April 13, 1984, Opening Night: the Vermont Reds, Cincinnati’s Double A farm team, taking on the New Britain Red Sox, Boston’s AA club, in the eight team Eastern League.

The mood was festive. Mayor Bernie Sanders had done it! He had brought professional baseball to Burlington. Fittingly, he had thrown out the ceremonial first pitch.

In the third inning, the lights went out for nearly an hour. We didn’t care. It was a party!

Baseball in Burlington, in venerable Centennial Field (constructed in 1904) on the UVM campus, has never left since that great night. The Reds departed for Chattanooga after four years, four great years — the Reds won the Eastern League Championship three times and came in second a fourth.

The Vermont Mariners camped out for one year in Burlington before leaving for Canton, Ohio, and a new stadium there. I saw 19-year-old Ken Griffey Jr. that summer, who played in 17 games.

I often would see Bernie there at Centennial in the days of the Reds and Expos. I have a vivid image of him, sitting behind home plate in the grandstand, reading the newspaper before the game, in a rumpled sport coat, or in a shirt untucked in the back. He clearly was in a happy place.

Baseball is in Bernie’s blood. He could not help but love the game. He was born in 1941 in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and grew up when New York year after year had three of the best teams in Major League Baseball: the Giants, the Dodgers, and the dreaded Yankees.

Bernie has often waxed emotional about his ties to the Brooklyn Dodgers. “When I was a kid,” he told a group of fans (on a YouTube video), “I grew up in Brooklyn and everyone there was a fervent Dodgers fan. So that’s where my real emotional ties were, with Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Preacher Roe, and all those guys. That was my first baseball love.”

Bernie saw early how a ball team could bind together a community and how devastating it can be when that bond is ripped asunder. He was 16 when the Dodgers abandoned their steadfast followers after the 1957 season for the golden opportunities in California.

Bernie has been asked if that experience influenced his political views. “The idea that a team could be moved someplace was beyond my comprehension,” he has responded. “It was like if they would move the Brooklyn Bridge to California. How can you move the  Brooklyn Bridge to California?”

On occasion, Bernie has told this “joke” from “the old neighborhood”: “The three worst people in modern history were Hitler, Stalin, and (Dodger owner) Walter O’Malley . . . and not necessarily in that order!”

“Did it have an impact? It actually did . . . but,” he adds quickly, “it wasn’t the only thing.”

BERNIE PRACTICES HIS sky hook in a Burlington park in this undated photo from the 1980s. Bernie was a mean pickup hoop player, described as a “strong ball handler, solid outside game, and always, a complete, transforming intensity.”
Photo by Burlington Free Press

Bernie is on my mind as I work my way through “Bernie for Burlington,” the compelling new biography written by Burlingtonian Dan Chiasson.

As a young man, Bernie was a natural and accomplished athlete, absorbed particularly with playing basketball on Brooklyn’s outdoor hardcourts. Chiasson describes him as “always a great pickup player,” who was cut nonetheless from the varsity team at James Madison High School (the enrollment at Madison was about 5,000 students and its basketball team was one of the “top-ranked teams in the city”).

His brother, Larry, claimed Bernie was “a tremendous player.”

In high school, Bernie channeled his energies into track and cross-country where he became a “star athlete,” according to a teammate, and captain of both teams, one of the top high school runners in the city in 1959. His best time in the mile was 4:37, an outstanding time for a high school runner in that era.

Chiasson confirmed Bernie’s basketball chops. “I had seen his game on the pickup courts in Burlington,” he writes in “Bernie for Burlington”: “strong ball handler, solid outside game, and, always, a complete, transforming intensity.”

I like imagining Bernie in Burlington in the chaotic 1970s, in his 30s, finding his footing in counterculture Vermont, playing pickup hoop, a physically taxing enterprise, at once both competitive and collaborative with its own ethos: no ref, call your own fouls and leave your cares and woes at the door.

In 2016, in an article in The Guardian, sportswriter Les Carpenter explored Bernie’s pickup games in the “late ’70s” in Burlington. Bernie was one of 12-15 men who enjoyed a weekly run in the gym behind St. Anthony’s Catholic Church at the corner of Flynn and Pine. Carpenter interviewed Bernie’s mates who provided a glimpse of his game:

“He was crafty.”

“From mid-range, 10-15 feet, he could kill you.”

“He liked to be in charge.”

“He could be argumentative.”

They all commented on his jump shot (a “jump” shot “though he didn’t leave his feet when he shot it”). One of those players, Clem Nilan, said in the Guardian piece, “He moved without the ball very well and got open . . .  and he hit that shot almost every time.”

Former Vermont legislator David Sharpe of Bristol played with Bernie in those games (at 79, he is still playing once a week with an over-50 cohort in Essex). He affirmed in a conversation this week, “Bernie always wanted the ball. He loves the game of basketball.”

I am pleased that I live in the same state as Bernie, glad for the attention he brings us. I feel a kinship to Bernie in our mutual attachment to pickup hoop. I played as long as I physically could (and my son Peter, who occasionally pinch-hits for me in this space, has inherited the impulse).

There’s this other thing too: Bernie and I share a contempt for the pinstriped Evil Empire. In a YouTube video I happened on, Bernie, the old Brooklyn Dodgers fan, was asked his preference — “Red Sox or Yankees?”

Bernie answered without hesitation: “Red Sox.”

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Karl Lindholm, Ph.D., is the Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Studies (retired) at Middlebury College. Email him at [email protected].