NBA 1990-91 : Stern Fidgets and Fusses, but His League Is Relaxed

David Stern can’t sit still. Fidget. Won’t sit still. Pace. How did he ever stay inactive long enough to get pudgy in the front court?

In a perfect David Stern world, every phone would have a 94-foot extension cord and every board room plenty of space to roam, though do not take this to mean he is bored. He generates enough kinetic energy to light Manhattan. But bored? No.

Now, the NBA commissioner is in his element. At the annual league meetings in mid-September in Florida, he is with coaches and general managers and sponsors and players and media. Being a people person, Stern is happy. Still, he is restless.

“I don’t like to sit still,” he says during one break in the turbulence. “It’s not something I do well.”

Except when he has to.

“I behave myself,” he says, smiling. “When we were invited to dinner at the White House, I sat still and was a good boy.”

But around his own house--the NBA offices adjacent to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and 27 arenas around the country--the boss who was born to run does just that. And walks. And meets. And plays tennis. And conducts news conferences. And leans motionless against a table. But only for a moment. Pace.

Waste time? Never.

“You hear about NFL meetings going on for days,” Golden State owner Jim Fitzgerald said. “A typical meeting for us--we have two or three of them a year--would be to meet at 6:30 in New York or someplace, start the meeting after (dinner), go until 10:30 or 11, and then break. We’d start again the next morning around 8. By 2 o’clock, we’re all running for our planes. That’s because he makes it move.”

He has for 5 1/2 years now, and not only owners’ meetings. Interest in the NBA has moved, too. Up. Likewise for attendance and income for all involved, Stern’s own salary notwithstanding.

He stands 5 feet 10 and weighs 185 pounds, yet he throws a shadow over an entire sport. Two sports, in fact. The NFL tried to get him interested in replacing Pete Rozelle as commissioner in the summer of 1989. Stern said he never considered jumping empires.

But six months later, he had a new contract, worth a reported $17.5 million for five years, plus a $10-million signing bonus.

Pat Williams, president and general manager of the Orlando Magic, observed that the deal put the league office over the salary cap.

“I was mortified,” Stern said of the reaction to his new contract, even though he understood it was all good-natured ribbing. “Those are private issues that I would be just as happy not to have out in the public. I believe that of everybody, including players. Compensation arrangements are not something that should become ‘out there.’

“I understand that and I appreciate it, but it’s just not a subject. . . .”

He shrugs.

“I understand the nature of the beast,” is the explanation he finally feels comfortable with. “I’m not hiding from it. Maybe mortified would be too hard a word, but I was sort of embarrassed by it. It’s not something, if I could help it, I would want in the public domain.”

The thing is, no one in the NBA had so much as a smidgen of doubt that the money was deserved. What’s $27.5 million, compared to what Stern has helped make for those who surround him?

He parcels out his energy according to challenges. Years ago, it was simply school in New York while working at Stern’s Delicatessen, owned by his parents and located 27 blocks from current NBA headquarters. Then, Rutgers and Columbia Law School.

By 32, he was a partner in a New York firm and working on NBA cases, among them the landmark Oscar Robertson decision that granted free agency to players, and the absorption of four teams from the American Basketball Assn. In 1978, he became the league’s first general counsel, in 1980 the executive vice president for business and legal affairs.

When Lawrence O’Brien announced plans to retire, Stern, then 41, was unanimously selected Nov. 15, 1983, as the league’s fourth commissioner. He took over Feb. 1, 1984.

How much credit he deserves for what has happened since is, of course, subjective. A lawyer with shrewd ability as a businessman and a likable personality, he presented a package that gave owners a strong voice and at the same time allowed players to be involved.

“It’s hard to imagine anyone with all the qualities he has,” said Fitzgerald, one of the senior owners. “One is guts. He’ll do something that will raise the hackles of three or four owners. But he will just shake his head and say, ‘I’m sorry. But we’ll all be better because of it in a few years.’ ”

There is no greater example than implementation of the salary cap. Of all of Stern’s fingerprints on the game--marketing, international play, expansion--that is the achievement he is most proud of, and probably always will be. Not because of the negotiations that give players 53% of the gross revenue each year, not because of the dollars involved, but because of the relationship it promoted between management and players. Former adversaries became partners.

But for all the credit he gets, even that accomplishment was not a true sign of Stern’s genius. As executive vice president, he merely borrowed the idea of promising a percentage of the take to players from the National Football League Players Assn., which made that one of its demands in the strike of 1982.

NBA players had ridiculed the notion of a limit on their salaries a few years earlier. But after Stern combined that suggestion with the NFLPA plan of guaranteed percentages, the NBA, continuing to slump in popularity, bought in. Players and owners became partners when the collective bargaining agreement was signed in 1983, and Stern has been mistakenly perceived ever since as the innovator.

Still, this was Stern at his best, combining knowledge with rapport. Neither side wanted the collective bargaining agreement at first, the owners cringing at giving up profits after making the investments, the players seeing limiting their own salaries as nothing short of heresy.

So Stern made it a behind-the-scenes topic for about a year, prodding and pushing for compromise, until the plan won out, probably as much a product of bad times for the league as the ingenuity of Stern.

There were other happy accidents. Stern’s first full season was Michael Jordan’s rookie year, which put an Air of excitement in another major market to go with the geographical bookends of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. The growth of all-sports cable television gave fans a force-feeding of the game they had been rejecting, to be followed by all-sports radio stations, to be followed by all-sports newspapers. And finally, the league’s longtime struggles had left everyone more open to innovation.

“There were a lot of things in place that I’m now largely credited with,” Stern acknowledged. “The collective bargaining agreement was entered into before I was commissioner. The anti-drug agreement was entered into before I was commissioner. Yes, I was there, but there tends to be a rewriting of history.

“I’m not going to totally eliminate my role in negotiating those, but there’s been a continuum, things that we began to put into place. People tend to write, ‘Stern became commissioner on February 1, ‘84, and then, poof, by a puff of lightning, miracles began.’ Not so.

“Timing is a lot of things. I really believe that the NBA has always had a good product. You catch us in cycles. We were so far down when I got involved that I was pretty sure we were going up regardless. . . . I also wound up inheriting a structure that was more conducive to quick improvement, because no one cared about how we were organizing so the owners let us do pretty much what we wanted to.”

Soon, Stern had won over everyone, even the leader of the players’ union, Larry Fleisher, who originally opposed his selection.

“He’s really not a basketball guy,” Fleisher, who died in the spring of 1989, said a few years ago. “If you were to say, ‘What do you want in the next commissioner?’ it would be someone who came from within the game, not someone who came from the background of law. Someone who could understand the personalities of the player and owner much better.

“But he has been real good at seeing the big picture. He is a totally more mature guy than he was 10 or 12 years ago, and because of that he looks more right for the job. As a litigator, that was his drawback, that he had to look at each individual issue and fight for it instead of looking at the big picture. He brought that to the NBA, but now he’s able to look at things on a much broader sense.”

Turns out no one could have tapped the personalities of the game better. More, it is hard to imagine the leader of any major organization--CEO, commissioner, whatever--having a higher popularity rating than Stern.

As Stan Kasten, president of the Atlanta Hawks, once observed: “He’s gifted at making things about personal relationships.”

When the NBA staff throws a party to celebrate the end of most seasons, Stern regularly stands at the doorway and greets everyone by first name. In an office of several hundred, compared to about 50 when he took over, that makes an impression.

When the NBA plays host at all-star weekends, staff members are encouraged to bring spouses, most at league expense. Some also go on foreign trips, to Europe for the annual McDonald’s Open and, this week, to Japan to watch Phoenix and Utah open the regular season. The same goes for summer meetings at resort atmospheres in Florida and California.

Once at the meetings, Stern remembers, without prompting, who won the tennis title in the informal round-robin competition three years earlier, partly because tennis is his game and partly because that’s just Stern.

So he can work any room? Seriously, this guy can work any continent.

For all his travels and triumphs, Stern displays very little of it to the world. Such is his quest for privacy, not to mention the contradiction of someone who markets the personality of a game but goes to great lengths to keep his own hidden.

It’s that way behind closed doors, too. Step into the commissioner’s 15th-floor office in the Olympic Tower and what do you get? Bric-a-brac.

The Sports Emmy presented to CBS for best live coverage in 1987 for its televising of NBA games, and later forwarded to Stern by network president Neal Pilson as a gift, is impressive, but not overwhelming.

The original panel sketches of Snoopy playing basketball for a “Peanuts” comic strip, sent by Charles Schulz, is striking, but hardly riveting.

Otherwise, there are some souvenirs from overseas visits. “I have a lot of little things around, but the photos I have are in a drawer someplace,” Stern said. “There are photos of President Reagan or President Bush, but I don’t hang them. To me, the fun is tomorrow.”

Stern’s life to outsiders is on a need-to-know basis, and no one really needs to know. He grew up a Knicks’ fan, was told all along by his parents that professional school was in his future and not 40 years’ worth of seven-days-a-week work at the deli, trained hard to become a litigator, went to the NBA and took over as commissioner. What more is there?

Dig for private thoughts somewhere else.

“That’s good,” he said. “I’d just as soon not become an item in the public domain. I think that family and privacy and individuality is something that you should enjoy. I don’t mean to be paranoid about it, but I think that the person in my role should be observed only on the job--how they relate to the owners, the media and the like.”

On the tennis court, Stern moves far better than any 48-year-old recreational player with a gut and overcooked fettuccine for a knee ligament has a right to. The anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee has gone unrepaired since blowing out during a New York lawyers’ league game in 1974. But, to the surprise of no one, he never stops moving. The heat and humidity and bugs advance in endless waves in the Florida afternoon, but the commissioner is in his glory. Fidget.

“Todd, didn’t you win this once, three years ago?” Stern asks Todd Parker, the Clippers’ director of corporate marketing and an opponent in the next doubles match.

Yes, Parker responds.

“Uh-oh,” the commissioner says. “We’ve practically got a defending champion here.”

Stern heads to the court, then comes back to the sidelines.

He ties his shoes.

“We’re going to survive this one, Mr. Brown,” he says to partner Bill Brown, the husband of an executive in the league’s marketing and properties division.

Stern heads back. Then he returns again.

He gets a drink of water.

“This is real tennis,” the commissioner says to no one in particular. “This is going to be real good.”

Finally-- finally! --Stern plays. He and Brown lose to Parker and Michael Krinsky, Golden State’s team orthopedist. But later, almost without interruption, Stern is still playing doubles, battling the opponents and the elements.

He has found another game, another challenge.

This is what gets his power ties loosened during work, a good challenge. You don’t want to leave unfinished business, which is one reason Stern re-upped for another term.

The last time he thought of leaving, the timetable turned into one of the few failures of his administration.

“I’m not sure I thought I would be here this long,” he said. “Frankly, if you asked me in 1984 whether I’d be here in ’90 and under contract through ‘94, I would have said, ‘I don’t think so.’

“All I’ll do is tell the story of the Robertson collective bargaining agreement when we were negotiating in 1976 to settle it. We came upon some obscure point about what would happen in the expiration of (the agreement)in 1987. And I said, ‘You know, guys, let’s be honest. That’s 11 years from now. Who cares? Who’s going to be around to worry about that point?’ Here I am.

“I’m not ready to make any more predictions. Right now, I’m having a very good time. I can’t imagine anything else I’d rather be doing. I like this job. I like the people in the league office. I enjoy dealing with the media, the team personnel, the players. No more predictions.

“I see myself doing this as long as it’s fun and challenging. I don’t have a prediction with respect to where the international work in our office is going. Right now, that looks like there’s another job to be done there for the next three or four years--the Olympics, the World Championships, the Knicks in Barcelona, the Suns and Jazz in Tokyo.

“I just don’t know where it’s going to lead. But there’s a clearly defined agenda that is just going to keep this whole organization busy and growing. And when it stops, that’s when it is going to be time to look someplace else.”

Because then it would be time to sit still.

“Yeah. And I don’t like to sit still.”