The last time I saw David Stern was the day after the greatest night of my professional life.
It was a Friday in September in Springfield, Mass., minutes before the Basketball Hall of Fame’s 2019 induction ceremony. The previous evening, I had noticed Stern in the crowd as I nervously ambled through my speech after receiving the Hall’s Curt Gowdy Award, but we missed each other in the aftermath.
So I was thrilled when I spotted him heading toward the red carpet outside Symphony Hall, where the ceremony would soon begin. Impartial journalists probably aren’t supposed to say such things, but I couldn’t help my ever-nostalgic self.
“I miss you,” I told Stern.
“I don’t miss you,” Stern replied, explaining that he was actually seeing my work more often now as a voracious reader of The New York Times.
He then skipped right past the pleasantries about the peak achievement of my career to tell me he had been wanting to call me about several things I had written.
“And tell you how wrong you are,” Stern said.
The Commish was not finished.
“When are you going to get it right about player empowerment?” Stern said. “Have you forgotten Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wanting out of Milwaukee and forcing a trade to the Lakers? Have you forgotten Wilt Chamberlain living in New York when he played for Philadelphia? This has been happening in our league for years.”
With that, Stern trudged away. If he wasn’t pressed for time, I’m sure the lecture would have been louder and longer, because with Stern lectures always were. It was our final interaction before he died on Wednesday, nearly three weeks after he had surgery for a sudden brain hemorrhage.
Throughout his 30-year run as commissioner, as anyone who ever jousted with the Columbia-schooled lawyer would tell you, engaging with David J. Stern meant you had to be prepared for him to castigate you. My longtime colleague Jack McCallum, who chronicled Stern for decades for Sports Illustrated, likened such interactions to “trying to do the Times crossword puzzle while he shouted insults at you.”
For all of his unmatched impact in steering the league from its darkest days in the late 1970s and early 1980s to a position of global prominence second only to world soccer, Stern ran the N.B.A. in an unforgiving manner befitting his surname. He was a workaholic, a perfectionist and, yes, often a bully.
“It’s terrifying go in his office,” Charles Barkley recently shared on an “Inside The N.B.A.” broadcast on TNT, recounting the dread Stern could inspire in those he summoned to his old mahogany-paneled lair at Olympic Tower in Midtown. Yet Barkley, the Hall of Fame player turned broadcaster, was quick to add that “even when he was giving it to me, he did it like a father figure.”
He was the commissioner I grew up with, too, as a teenager mesmerized by those unforgettable commercials in the 1980s, invariably set to a lively track from The Pointer Sisters, proclaiming basketball to be “America’s Game.” Then, suddenly, I was writing daily about Stern and his “fannntastic” league in the 1990s soon after Michael Jordan’s gravity-defying brilliance and the worldwide appeal of the Dream Team had taken the game to Europe, Asia and beyond.
Mark Cuban’s arrival as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks on Jan. 4, 2000, 20 years ago this weekend, changed my interactions with Stern forever. The brash, outspoken Cuban was the Barkley of team owners; reporters assigned to cover the Mavericks could scarcely dare to leave his side for fear of missing the latest inflammatory quote or sideline fit that would bring a fine from the league office.
Through Cuban’s first few seasons, stalking Stern became mandatory for me as staff writer for The Dallas Morning News. It was my responsibility to chase Stern as he walked away from any public appearance in hopes he would answer a few one-on-one questions about Cuban’s latest transgressions.
The greeting was always the same: “What do you want now, Stein?” — except there was almost always an expletive thrown in.
“He and I had many battles, but most ended with a hug or a laugh,” Cuban said by email Wednesday night. “We didn’t always see eye to eye, but we always knew we were on the same side.”
Maybe Stern was overly cranky and combative at the end of his reign. Maybe Stern should have stepped down sooner than he did. Maybe Stern should have shown more remorse about his role in the SuperSonics’ exit from Seattle in 2008 — or the league’s failure to expel Donald Sterling, the former team owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. Stern’s successor, Adam Silver, quickly did so after taking over when recordings emerged of Sterling making racist statements.
Yet for all the negativity in Stern’s later years, it is hard to quibble with the assessment put forth by two of the most influential voices in the modern game. Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr and the popular writer Bill Simmons both described Stern in recent days as the most important non-player who ever graced the league.
At his worst, Stern was branded an effective dictator, but I see it as a tribute to Silver that his first five seasons in charge, with such a gentler style, featured so many more highs than lows. I’ve always believed that a commissioner needs to stray closer to dictator status, and inspire the sort of fear Barkley described, to maintain the requisite authority. Silver’s collaborative approach is certainly more appropriate in 2020, with the Stern approach increasingly frowned upon, but in some ways it may be even harder to pull off.
Stern loyalists counter the tales of condescension, arrogance, fury and other unflattering portrayals with reminders of his compassion, social consciousness and how hard he fought for minorities and women in the game. For all of Stern’s willingness to play the villain, Stern’s death inspired the sort of heartfelt condolences and tributes befitting a political dignitary.
Lon Rosen, the longtime agent for Magic Johnson, called to make sure I hadn’t forgotten how Stern wouldn’t stop at ensuring that Johnson would be able to play in the 1992 All-Star Game mere months after announcing he had contracted H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
“Earvin’s real dream was to play in the Olympics,” Rosen said. “David had to make that happen. It was not a fait accompli, but David was able to get Earvin permission to play on the Dream Team.”
Rosen, for me, was a natural for swapping Stern stories. Now the executive vice president and chief marketing officer of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Rosen helped assemble the unforgettable news conference on Nov. 7, 1991, where Johnson, now one of the Dodgers’ primary owners, suddenly retired from the Lakers “because of the H.I.V. virus that I have attained.”
My first N.B.A. assignment as an out-of-college journalist was joining the Los Angeles Daily News army covering that news conference. My specific instructions: a sidebar on Stern.
Rosen went on to share that, as close as Johnson and Stern were, there were times even Magic got scolded. In 1990, Rosen was pursuing a one-on-one game in Las Vegas pitting Magic against Michael with a pay-per-view television audience and a huge cash prize. Stern implored Johnson to back out, convinced that it was a bad look for the league for its stars to duel like boxers, and Magic did.
“There was another time we were in a contract dispute with Converse and he yelled at me like I was a child: ‘You’re going to ruin Magic Johnson!’” Rosen recalled. “But that was David.”
That was Stern — to everyone. You understood and accepted it, which is why I urged him in that last encounter to please call any time he wanted to highlight my stupidity.
You understood, most of all, that Stern wanted anyone who had anything to do with the N.B.A. to care as deeply as he did. Even the pesky scribes like me who just covered it.
Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
