It was late in the summer of 1995, weeks of labor strife having consumed the N.B.A., and an off-season lockout had come to an end. David Stern, suddenly viewed by players as more corporate pariah than patriarchal commissioner, was asked about Michael Jordan’s uncharacteristic (anti-owner) activism, which one national commentator had compared to a “drive-by shooting.”
Mercifully free of crisis mode, back to being the guardian of all things N.B.A., Papa Stern was having none of that.
“Damn the people who say that Michael was just being greedy, that he should just shut up and play,” he said, though actually beginning with a more vigorous four-letter word. “That’s a code.”
It was nearly a quarter-century before Laura Ingraham and LeBron James, before “shut up and dribble” became a widely mouthed phrase for the 21st century often used as coded racist criticism of black players. Stern, who died on Wednesday at age 77 after having a brain hemorrhage in December, could plainly see that America was a long way from being post-racial. He would say that people — and least of all him — should never delude themselves about that, no matter how popular and prosperous the league was becoming on the backs of Jordan and other black stars.
Within a culture he knew could easily turn on young men of color for something as simple as the grooming choice of cornrows, this was a fine line Stern walked and the calculated game he played across three expansionist decades at the helm. Within the league — which included players, owners, executives, even news media regulars — there could be related skirmishes, even protracted battles.
But inside its boundaries, he would insist, there were adversaries but no actual enemies.
The son of a Manhattan delicatessen owner, Stern carried a proud childhood ethos, having grown up in leafy Teaneck, N.J., which in 1976 was described by The New York Times as a “national model for successful suburban integration” and the “first Northern suburb to vote in favor of busing to achieve integrated schools in the early 1960s.”
Before settling permanently in Westchester County, Stern lived in Teaneck with his wife and two young sons while commuting into Manhattan as a young lawyer. In his spare time, he worked pro bono on a 1970s anti-housing-discrimination case in Northern New Jersey, which later resulted in a settlement that The Times would call groundbreaking.
While working on a book about the N.B.A.’s growth pains in the mid-1990s, my co-author Armen Keteyian and I interviewed Lee Porter, a fair-housing supporter, who told us that Stern had been her legal and spiritual adviser in developing a strategy to entrap Bergen County real estate brokers who habitually steered black couples away from white neighborhoods and towns. During that period, she and her colleagues spent so much time huddling with Stern at his home that two decades later she could recall the exact address.
So understand that the N.B.A. work environment Stern entered in the 1970s — as counsel for a professional basketball league with an increasingly black player base, scuffling for respect — was not unfamiliar to him. Yet when Stern asked George Gallantz — his mentor at the firm of Proskauer, Rose, Goetz and Mendelsohn and the overseer of the N.B.A.’s outside counsel account — if he thought it was a good career move to accept Commissioner Larry O’Brien’s offer to work solely for the league in 1978, Gallantz looked at him with disbelief.
“How can you put your life in the hands of one client?” he asked his ambitious, combative and whip-smart protégé.
The N.B.A. at the time could barely pay its bills, but Stern wanted to be where the action was. His mind was made up. Basketball felt like a calling. He sheepishly told Gallantz that he’d “give it a try.”
By the time Stern ceded the top job to his handpicked successor, Adam Silver, and became commissioner emeritus in 2014, he had 48 years in association with the league that was, by reputation, America’s most progressive. Sitting alongside Stern at N.B.A. headquarters in Manhattan days before the baton was officially passed, Silver told me: “His dad owned a deli. He went to public school. He was a regular guy who was not born into this.”
Yet the argument could be made — and Stern would probably have been the first to make it — that he was born for the challenges and crises that inevitably loomed, like the so-called Malice at the Palace. In all my years of covering Stern, I never saw him grimmer than he was on the November 2004 night in New York when he announced suspensions for three Indiana Pacers — Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O’Neal — who had brawled in the stands and on the court with abusive and likely inebriated fans at the Detroit Pistons’ home arena, The Palace of Auburn Hills.
All things considered, including unacceptable provocation from courtside customers, Stern feared that raw footage of black players beating on white fans presented a potentially dire threat to the N.B.A. He also recognized the danger in fueling the fire in those quick to demonize them as overpaid thugs much faster than they would brawling hockey players.
But if moving the needle on social and racial advancement were life-affirming benefits of an influential business, protecting its widespread marketability and growing the pie no matter how it eventually was sliced was always the mission that came first for Stern.
“One-nothing,” Stern said when asked if there had been a hierarchal vote on the need to go nuclear, especially on Artest, who is now known as Metta World Peace and was suspended for more than 70 games.
While Stern seldom hid from debate or debacle, the litigator in him on occasion was obscured by the autocrat. Looking back on his controversial 2011 veto of New Orleans’s trading of Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers, Stern admitted in 2016 that he should have better explained his responsibility to execute the best deal possible after the league had taken temporary ownership of the franchise during the search for a buyer.
There would be more behavioral disorder, precipitated by players, owners and even a referee, Tim Donaghy, who was prosecuted in 2007 for betting on games he worked. Labor-management conflagrations would come close to season cancellations. Reactions by Stern — the 2005 player dress code he championed, for one — would be criticized as pandering overreaction to that same segment of society he had denounced for speaking in racial code or objecting to cornrows.
During a painful and costly in-season lockout in 2011, HBO’s Bryant Gumbel went so far as to call Stern “some kind of modern plantation overseer.” Never one to waste a counterpunching opportunity, he told me in a telephone interview: “I have worked harder for inclusiveness and diversity than he could ever understand. So when I heard what he said I sat back and waited for the emails from the people who know me, who have worked with me.”
He named one, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and reminded me of how Dr. Harry Edwards, the civil rights activist, had praised him in the aftermath of the Pacers-fans brawl as “an honest broker of the product who, at the end of the day, respects the men who play in his league and the community from which they come.”
Gumbel’s charge gained little traction, but it rankled Stern — a lifelong Democrat who called President Obama’s election “profoundly transformational” — that his honest broker reputation didn’t necessarily resonate with a younger, less obliged generation.
He ultimately felt vindicated when many trendsetting players, who had initially resented the dress code, reveled in making fashion statements, and more money, while growing their brands.
In the end, Stern was content to let his record speak for itself, resisting efforts by authors and publishers to write a memoir as his league kept growing, conquering faraway lands, creating new revenue streams. He called the Dream Team’s invasion of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona a high point, a demonstration of how, under his leadership, the N.B.A. became the feel-good American export of its time.
The league’s stars became global icons, but with additional fame came heightened leverage — along with scorn for using it, for something as basic as a contractual right, as when LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers, his original team, for the Miami Heat in 2010. But might Stern’s earlier critics have had second thoughts when James and others had to walk the commissioner’s fine line, waffling on the recent conflict with the Chinese government over a single tweet by a Houston Rockets executive supporting protesters in Hong Kong?
With so much revenue at stake, those difficult choices — stand proud or pander — could feel like life on the edge. But the combatant in Stern seemed to relish the challenges and the accompanying adrenaline rushes — his version of the last two minutes of a tight playoff game. Which explains why he left one court for another way back when. And which also is why, when asked in 2014 what, in effect, he would want written on his career tombstone, Stern instantly recalled the title of a book written by his predecessor, O’Brien, about his years as a strategist for the Democratic Party.
“No final victories,” he said, upon completion of his 30-year tour de force.
Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
