David Stern came to power in the N.B.A. in the early 1980s at a pivot point for professional sports in the United States.
Wars between the players and management were in full swing. Major League Baseball and the N.F.L. had each embarked on a scorched-earth strategy to stifle the mounting power of the players and their unions.
Taking all this in a was a 40-something New York lawyer who had another idea. Stern had arrived at the N.B.A. in 1978, after serving as the league’s outside counsel. He bided his time as general counsel and as executive vice president, overseeing the league’s business operations, until 1984, when he became commissioner. And then everything changed.
Stern, who died on Wednesday at 77, viewed the way other leagues managed their players as akin to trying to hold back the ocean. In the television age, players were becoming more popular than ever and in some cases were better known than the games they played and the teams they played for.
Stern looked at the basketball court and saw the world’s greatest athletes, a unique, supersize group of players who could fly through the air on their way to twisting dunks and toss a large ball through a small hoop from 30 feet away. His league had rare talents like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and, beginning in 1984, a guard out of North Carolina named Michael Jordan. Stern, who believed the N.B.A. had failed to leverage the talents and popularity of its past stars, decided that all N.B.A. greats, past and present, would be his tickets to success.
Instead of trying to snuff out the rising power of players — an approach that had cost baseball and football hundreds of millions of dollars and huge chunks of seasons — Stern figured out how to embrace the change and capitalize on it.
Television promotions featured N.B.A. players and their on-court acrobatics. After deciding the league should have a licensing and sponsorship division, which it somehow lacked before he came aboard, Stern hired a young executive named Rick Welts, who is now the president of the Golden State Warriors. They made a dream list of partners — McDonald’s, Coke and others — and then traveled the country telling the story of what the N.B.A. could be.
“He would talk about the athletes, the beauty of the sport, and explain how we were going to create a business structure around this to make it a really good investment,” Welts said. “He was mesmerizing when he would get in a room. You couldn’t not believe him because of the passion.”
Stern vastly expanded NBA Entertainment, the league’s production arm, which he helped launch in 1982 to create highlights and television shows. He cut a deal with the Players Association and a video game maker that led to the creation of what was then one of the most popular video arcade games ever — NBA Jam.
When the International Olympic Committee decided to allow professional athletes to compete, Stern took his biggest stars and created the so-called Dream Team. Suddenly, N.B.A. players were the biggest celebrities in the world’s biggest sporting event, sending the league’s brand into every corner of the world.
Stern would have his labor battles with the players, but the worst of those arrived after the N.B.A. had become one of the world’s most successful sports leagues.
By then, even Stern’s adversaries admired his work.
“He recognized that the game was about the players, and he elevated the marketability of those players in a way that had never happened before,” said Jeff Kessler, the labor lawyer who represented the Players Association in numerous battles with the league during Stern’s tenure.
“Under David, the league embraced the fact that its great majority was made up of young African-Americans, and he helped those players to spread their good will and incredible charisma, and that had never been done before,” Kessler said. “He also was a very worthy adversary and occasional pain in the butt, but I loved him for all of his complexities.”
Stern, who grew up modestly, the son of a deli owner in the Chelsea section of Manhattan long before the area became fashionable, was not an easy person to work for or with, or against. He berated those who questioned his decisions, occasionally in public if they were members of the press. He dressed down employees, sometimes in front of representatives of the league’s partners.
The style bothered some more than others.
“Sometimes the delivery could be challenging, but it got you to the desired outcome,” said Peter Land, the N.B.A.’s director of marketing communications from 1993 to 1998.
Welts said there were days when he left the office wondering if he could continue working for Stern. Then his home phone would ring at 10 p.m., “and he would be Uncle Dave, and he would talk about what we were accomplishing, how great this was going to be,” Welts said. “I’d come in the next day ready to run through a wall for him.”
Other commissioners simply managed sports leagues. Stern fashioned himself as one of the world’s leading chief executives, worthy of hobnobbing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the Allen & Co. media summits in Sun Valley, Idaho.
If players behaved in a way that tarnished the league’s image, he did not hide his wrath.
A 1997 fight between Latrell Sprewell, a star forward for the Warriors, and P.J. Carlesimo, a coach with a reputation for verbally abusing his players, earned Sprewell a one-year suspension and the termination of his contract. An arbitrator later ordered the suspension shortened and allowed Sprewell to recoup the $17.3 million his contract guaranteed him. Stern also had little sympathy for players who brawled with fans after a drink was thrown from the stands late in the fourth quarter of a game between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers in 2004.
But those moves, widely viewed in hindsight as missteps, and Stern’s management style are largely overlooked now because of his ability to understand where the sports business was headed years before any of his rivals did.
Land recalled sharing his idea for announcing a new major deal with Coke in the 1990s at a large news conference with video screens. Stern listened, then told Land to figure out how to hold the news conference in a movie theater because the highlight reel would look better on a huge screen.
“You’d go into his office thinking that you had thought of everything,” Land said. “Then he would home in on the one thing you hadn’t thought of, and when you heard it you would think, ‘Darn, he’s right.’”
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David Stern Saw Where the Sports World Was Headed Long Before It Got There - The New York Times
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