All of them will be there at All-Star Weekend, the NBA’s annual midseason party. It’s not merely a game anymore, it’s a show.
There will be Shaq and Kobe, KG and AI, T-Mac, Jason and David, all the guys we know by a single name.
No, not David Robinson. David Stern.
The littlest guy might be the biggest name of them all.
It is 20 years ago this month that David Stern, the deli owner’s son from New York who was a slow, poor-shooting guard on his synagogue team, became commissioner of the NBA. During that time he has become perhaps the biggest man in basketball.
Sure, he had Larry and Magic, and he was about to get Michael. He never scored a basket, and the closest he came to a dunk was with a doughnut. No one ever turned on the TV to watch him, and he signs more checks than autographs.
But NBA owners annually sign about $10 million in checks to pay Stern, and they believe he’s well worth it. Franchise values have increased from about $10 million to $250 million since Stern took over.
If the NBA isn’t the world’s most successful sports league, it might be the most popular and innovative.
The league Stern inherited was a near-bankrupt sports wasteland. Half-filled arenas were the norm, and the players were thought to be too black and/or too stoned to appeal to corporate and Middle America.
On Stern’s watch it has become one of the greatest marketing vehicles ever for sports figures. The NBA might not be the originator of all the marketing and commercial features that identify pro sports today, but it has been the acknowledged leader in expanding sports into an unsurpassed entertainment vehicle with international reach.
At the vanguard of it all is the New York lawyer with the quick wit, personal charm, disarming sense of humor and keen business acumen who took over a fishing trawler and turned it into a cruise ship.
“I view myself as sort of a caretaker/trustee,” Stern said “I can make a very good argument that anyone here could have availed themselves of the same opportunity if he came to the NBA when I did.”
Stern, 61, joined the NBA as its general counsel in 1976, when the league was rocked by drug problems.
“Taking stock a little and looking back, there was an enormous set of events taking place, and I was here to help steer the ship through the currents,” Stern said. “I have benefited from the new buildings, the TV revolution, sports marketing, globalization, collective bargaining.
“I go back with the league 30 years, and I’m trying to get it right. That’s why I’m still here.”
All-Star Weekend has become a midwinter celebration of the best of the NBA. This year, in conjunction with Stern’s anniversary, it’s also a time to reflect on what he hath wrought.
It’s not uncommon for critics to dwell on the NBA’s problems: Kobe Bryant’s legal issues; erratic behavior by the likes of Rasheed Wallace; declining attendance in cities such as Atlanta; and a slower, lower-scoring game.
But it could be that the NBA’s success magnifies its so-called problems.
TV ratings are up despite a massive shift to cable. It is on the verge of expanding in some form beyond North America. The value of its franchises keeps increasing, with expansion Charlotte coming in next season for $300 million.
The league not only has been in the vanguard of racial integration, it has recruited and accepted international players, expanding a talent base with stars known throughout the world.
It’s the players who make the game, of course, but Stern has made sure they have been in position to do so.
As the league’s general counsel, he was instrumental in achieving the landmark collective bargaining agreement that established the salary cap and assured years of labor peace, interrupted only by the 1998 lockout. Stern views the only work stoppage in league history as one of his low points, and yet the NBA’s track record in labor relations is superior to those in pro baseball, football and hockey.
In other areas, such as racial equality, community outreach, entertainment appeal and merchandising savvy, Stern’s NBA is a pro sports paradigm.
“I used to use the Disney analogy,” he said. “We’re not just a sports league, not just a game. We’re an entertainment attraction, used by TV for entertainment programming. It’s brand marketing in sports. Some said it was pretentious and silly. But the NBA is, in fact, a global brand.”
Everyone knows the NBA, especially with international All-Stars Yao Ming (China), Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) and Peja Stojakovic (Croatia) helping it achieve worldwide renown. But just who is this commissioner who is one of the most famous and successful in the history of pro sports?
To friends, co-workers and associates, he is a workaholic who frets privately about neglecting his two adult sons when they were growing up to tend to the league that became his baby. He is a demanding boss who seeks the best and the brightest and gives employees latitude to do their jobs, but sets a high standard.
He has an explosive temper, never seen in public, which intimates say is more tactical and theatrical.
But Stern also is fiercely protective of his league, like a mother with a child. He has been known to call top TV bosses late at night after seeing too many empty seats on camera or hearing an unfavorable assessment from a commentator.
Trying to catch him with a negative take on anything NBA-related is like trying to get a politician to admit fault.
“The next time I spin something, it won’t be the first time,” Stern likes to say.
He is not averse to seeing or hearing his name in the media and remains the most accessible of commissioners. But he is a private man whose hobby and job seem indistinguishable.
Stern graduated from Rutgers in 1963 and from Columbia Law School in 1966. A native of Manhattan, where his father ran a successful delicatessen, he grew up with two sisters. He was a fan of baseball’s New York Giants, living the dream of every blue-collar son who became an educated professional.
He joined the New York law firm of Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn and became a partner at 32. While there, he took on several landmark NBA cases, including the Oscar Robertson antitrust settlement and the ABA merger.
In September 1976, he joined the NBA as its first general counsel. He became a vice president in 1978 before being elected the NBA’s fourth commissioner in February 1984, replacing Larry O’Brien.
When NFL owners approached him about succeeding Pete Rozelle in 1989, Stern received a $10 million bonus to stay and a $27 million, five-year contract.
The league’s burgeoning success combined with his personal magnetism and organizational skills enabled him to become a sort of commissioner/king. NBA owners meetings were once described as less organized than street rebellions during the French Revolution.
Although Stern likes to say he works at the pleasure of the owners, this is only technically correct. Stern runs the NBA and effectively tells the owners what they will do.
He is able to do so because he has made them all richer and successful and, frankly, he knows a lot more about being a success in sports than they do.
“I come out of the legal profession,” Stern said. “The client is the NBA. The product is the players and the game. Nobody buys tickets to see commissioners. They’ll hold us responsible if things are not working well. But the attention is on the players.”
Stern likes to talk about the racial strides the league has made–very few U.S. companies have a higher percentage of people of color in positions of authority–the business successes and the international expansion. He frets over drug expulsions, but the enlightened drug policies he helped enact in the early 1980s gave the league credibility with the public and with marketers.
There have been mistakes and missteps. No one is sure about Stern’s hopes for the WNBA, the minor league NBDL, the prospect of an age limit for new players or the likelihood of another lockout. But no one is doubting David.
“If you said to me when I was 41, would I be here in 25 years, I’d have laughed,” Stern said. “If you said it when I was 51, I’d have laughed also. Now that I’m 61, I don’t know. It’s actually more fun because it gets more and more difficult. But there’s no place in sports like a courtside seat at an NBA game.”
Yes, he does love this game.
Under his watch
David Stern’s top 3
1. The salary cap. It was first imposed in 1983 right before David Stern officially took office. But he was instrumental in its development, which became a model for sports and effectively saved the NBA.
2. Magic, Larry and Michael. Stern was the beneficiary of the most exciting talent to come into the NBA with Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. But Stern took advantage of their games and presence and the marketing ideas first advanced by Nike to bring the NBA playoffs in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a level with baseball’s World Series.
3. Globalization. The NBA began an international tournament in 1987 that led to NBA players being made eligible for the Olympics and the famous 1992 Dream Team. International players today have a huge place in the NBA, and the NBA has become the only major American sport to reach beyond U.S. boundaries.
David Stern’s bottom 3
1. The 1998 lockout. It produced the longest work stoppage in NBA history. It was more due to the intransigence of the players’ association, but Stern was always the commissioner with all the answers and the great compromiser–and he couldn’t make it work.
2. The Bad Boys. Stern allowed marketing fever to get out of control by allowing the talented Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s to effectively sanction rough play that would force a league crackdown on violence.
3. The NBDL and WNBA. Perhaps it’s too early to pass judgment, but Stern was unable to build a minor league out of the current top minor leagues, like the CBA. His WNBA experiment, while socially worthy, has been kept alive only because NBA teams subsidize the effort under Stern’s mandate.
