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There has been much press commentary, most of it comically exaggerated, about Bernie Sanders’s prowess as a high school athlete. The candidate preposterously boasted to CNN’s Chris Cuomo in a televised town hall discussion in Iowa in late January: “I was a very good athlete. I was a pretty good basketball player. My elementary school in Brooklyn won the borough championship – hardly worth mentioning, but we did. And, yes, I did take third place in the New York City one-mile race. I was a very good long-distance runner – not a great runner, but I was captain of my cross-country team.”
Those claims deserve a closer look.
First, an article earlier this year in The Washington Post, “The Untold Story of Bernie Sanders, High School Track Star,” noted that the winning time in the one-mile race in which Sanders placed third was a mediocre 4 minutes and 37 seconds.
Second, Marc Bloom, a well-known track writer who ran for Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay High School at roughly the same time as Sanders competed for Madison, pointed-out in a 2012 New York Times article that the scholastic record for the 2.5 mile course at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx was held in 1966 by Marty Liquori, a future Olympian, at 12 minutes and 23 seconds, nearly two minutes faster than Sanders’s 14 minutes and 16 seconds on the same course in October 1958.
Thus, an impartial evaluation of Sanders’s track talent is that he was an average athlete who was not good enough to win a college scholarship.
His claim of being a “pretty good basketball player” is even more delusional. Beginning in the early 20th century and extending into the 1980s, New York City produced the world’s greatest basketball players and coaches. The PSAL was founded in 1903, and the city’s first hoops hotspot was the Jewish Lower East Side, which produced Hall of Fame players Nat Holman, Barney Sedran, and Marty Friedman.
Playing for Brooklyn high schools when Sanders was a Madison student in the late 1950s were future Hall of Famers Lenny Wilkens and Connie Hawkins of Boys High School and Billy Cunningham of Erasmus. Thousands of other New York City hoopsters in the late 1950s received college athletic scholarships. The passion for basketball among Jewish teenagers in the 1950s is exemplified by the fact that Sandy Koufax, who went on to become a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, starred in basketball as well as baseball for Brooklyn’s Lafayette High.
The legendary Mickey Fisher, the Boys High hoops coach in the 1940s and 1950s, took a leave of absence in 1960 to coach the fledgling Israel Olympic squad. Two well-known Jewish athletes who attended Boys High were Irving Mondschein, the 8th-place finisher in the decathlon in the 1948 Olympics and Colonel David “Mickey” Marcus, the West Point boxing champion and World War II veteran who helped professionalize the Israel Defense Forces during the War of Independence until his death in a friendly-fire incident in June 1948.
Madison’s equally renowned basketball coach, Jammy Moskowitz, played pro basketball in the 1920s and 1930s and coached several NBA players, including Rudy LaRusso and Andrew “Fuzzy” Levane. Moreover, the longtime track coach for Madison, Nat Krinsky, grew up in Brownsville, was an All-American hoops player for CCNY in 1921 (for Coach Holman), and also played professionally.
Sanders is quoted as having disrespectfully dubbed Krinsky “Nat The Nose” in an article last summer in Tablet, an online Jewish magazine. “Straight Outta Brooklyn by Way of Vermont: The Bernie Sanders Story,” by Jas Chana, misspells the coach’s name as “Crinsky” and the author and her editors were apparently unaware of Krinsky’s athletic renown and that his two sons attended Madison and became successful professionals – Rear Admiral Paul Krinsky is the retired superintendent of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and Edward Krinsky captained Harvard’s basketball team in 1954, became a winning high school coach on Long Island, and headed the United States Basketball League.
