This remembrance of David Stern, the late commissioner emeritus of the National Basketball Association, begins with a moment of self-indulgence.
After many years of knowing him, my last meeting and conversation with Stern, who died January 1 at the age of 77 following a brain haemorrhage, was by accident. I was meeting last fall with John Kosner, ESPN’s former digital chief and more recently Stern’s business partner in Micromanagement Ventures, which provides counsel and funding to sports media and technology start-ups.
Kosner brought me in to say hello to Stern, and the former NBA boss immediately peppered me with a series of questions about my move to SportBusiness, the expansion of our American presence, the opening of our Singapore office, and our overall market strategy.
The conversation was classic Stern. He was warm, curious, all in all genuinely interested in what we are doing. But he was by no means throwing softballs, as Stern was also probing seriously to understand our ambitions and where we fit into the global sports business landscape.
I thought a lot about that last conversation I had with Stern upon attending his memorial service in New York, a massive affair at Radio City Music Hall attended by more than 4,000 people, including literally hundreds of C-suite sports industry executives such as league commissioners, team owners, and broadcast network presidents.
The service had all the elements of Stern himself: R-rated jokes, a high degree of smarts and attention to detail, and a deep commitment to service beyond self. Jazz artist Wynton Marsalis, a longtime friend of Stern’s, then relayed a similar notion of the sports industry icon as my experience and those of so many others. He described Stern as “pure caring concealed in vinegar.”
“David was a reformer disguised in the battle gear of an enforcer,” Marsalis continued. “You thought he was one thing, but he was something else altogether. Reform and fiber terrifyingly delivered with the intensity of an itinerant Baptist preacher. Except it was all sleight of hand and a deliberate detour towards opportunity for so many.”
And those references to opportunity signal perhaps the most prevalent theme of Stern’s massive record of accomplishment. Everyone he encountered, whether an employee, colleague, business partner, or outside entity such as a journalist, was always pushed to be better, to grow, and to move beyond their comfort zone.
Or as Golden State Warriors president and former league executive Rick Welts put it more succinctly: “He enjoyed throwing us in the deep end of the pool, to see if we could swim.”
Among the beneficiaries of those Stern pushes was certainly the late superstar Kobe Bryant, who died less than four weeks after the former commissioner and now also comprises part of a 2020 that has quickly started as an annus horribilis for the NBA.
Sometimes those pushes grew highly combative, and there were notably four lockouts with the NBA Players Association during his long run leading the league. Many around the basketball universe were on the receiving end of vicious tirades from Stern. And industry stories are legend of NBA employees recoiling in fear at the mere sight of Stern’s name showing up on their telephone caller IDs.
But again, everywhere he went Stern created greater opportunity as he turned the NBA into a multi-billion dollar colossus and helped redefine what a sports league is and should be.
Val Ackerman, the first president of the Women’s National Basketball Association and now commissioner of the Big East Conference, described Stern as the single most important figure in the women’s sports movement since Billie Jean King.
That’s no faint praise, but deeply merited given Stern created the WNBA – creating a blueprint for the many women’s sports leagues that have followed in its wake – and then steadfastly stood by the venture in the face of withering initial criticism.
Stern’s ambitious global vision for basketball help bring the sport to nearly every corner of the planet, first with the 1992 US Olympic ‘Dream Team’, and then via a dizzying series of business ventures including league offices in China and India, broadcast, digital and social media expansions around the world, and an ever-increasing amount of international games. Millions of people that are now playing basketball and consuming basketball content and weren’t before can be traced back to Stern.
Every other US sports property is still playing catchup internationally to what Stern pioneered with the NBA; work now being carried under his successor, Adam Silver, to newer corners of the world for US sports properties such as Africa.
The David Stern executive tree also has more branches and deeper roots than arguably than other figure in the US sports business, with hundreds upon hundreds of senior leaders, in and out of basketball, owing their careers to Stern.
Stern also expanded opportunity for many of society’s less fortunate through NBA Cares, a league effort he insisted move beyond the comfort zone of community relations into a far more ambitious, forward-looking notion of social responsibility.
And sometimes that mission of expanding opportunity meant literally life and death. Former Los Angeles Lakers star and Basketball Hall of Famer Magic Johnson said Stern’s move to allow Johnson to play in the 1992 NBA All-Star Game gave him the will to keep living after his HIV diagnosis. Countless others were given the same courage by Stern amid widespread public hysteria around HIV and AIDS at the time.
“In a time of need, in the darkest period of my life….my commissioner turned into my angel, and he was able to throw me a lifeline,” Johnson said. “That game saved my life. It gave me the energy to carry on, and to live on.”
And with that, it will be hard to imagine another sports executive who will leave a greater and more impactful legacy than Stern.