Stern refuses to give any more ground

The NBA tipped off Tuesday night with plenty of new rules and one fewer fan. The first didn’t lead directly to the second, though that’s not to say they’re unrelated.

Not to Commissioner David Stern, anyway.

An Orlando season-ticket holder named Hooman Hamzehloui was banished from attending games at any of the league’s arenas after reportedly calling Houston’s Dikembe Mutombo a “monkey” last week at an exhibition game between the Houston Rockets and the Magic.

There is no such thing as a good time or place to fire off racial epithets at a man who stands 7 feet 2. But doing it a few days before the NBA paused to pay tribute to Red Auerbach, whose pioneering integration efforts burnished his legacy more than all those championship banners combined, reminds us that Hamzehloui wasn’t just stupid, but unlucky to boot.

He can apologize until he’s blue in the face. But the ink was still drying on the refund check the Magic made out to Hamzehloui by the time Stern declared him persona non grata in the NBA’s 29 other buildings. Call it a dangerous precedent if you want. In Stern’s mind, this is a test case.

He may be a lawyer by training, but he’s a judge by instinct. His approach to discipline has always been no-nonsense and sometimes downright imperial. He makes decisions swiftly and often unilaterally, which explains the “King David” nickname occasionally applied behind his back.

People who thought Stern would be too distracted, or too busy quashing dissent about the controversial new basketball, counting the players’ wristbands and measuring the length of their shorts surely forgot who they were dealing with. To him, this is all cut from the same cloth.

Think back to the “Malice at the Palace,” the basketbrawl in Detroit not quite two years ago and remember what he did at the time. Stern didn’t take a vote, didn’t worry about how the players’ union would respond or appoint a commission and wait for the findings. He went right after the troublemakers he could identify, sitting them down for a combined 128 games and $12 million in salary.

No sooner had Stern finished reading the sentences than he added this is “about something more profound.”

Because the brawl was spectacular and captured on video, what Stern said during the rest of the news conference got wrapped into a few paragraphs and buried at the bottom of most stories. He talked about how the gulf between the players and paying customers was growing in every sport, how too many fans believe too many athletes with too little devotion to their craft are making way too much money. And how, way too often, the athletes live down to those expectations.

Stern said his league “didn’t ask to be at the epicenter of this discussion,” but he acknowledged it was the one where the gulf was the widest at that moment.

Understanding that fans are likely to give as much respect as they get, he came up with a dress code covering both the court and the bench that gets more restrictive by the day. Because his powers of persuasion over the paying customers is much more limited, Stern mentioned the “social contracts” and “covenants” that fans make when they buy a ticket to watch a sporting event.

He knows better than most how those were crumpled up long ago and thrown on the floors in stadiums and arenas, alongside the spilled beers, and won’t be retrieved without some serious effort.

“I completely support the Magic’s actions and, personally, I think the NBA office has the best handle on these types of issues,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said in an e-mail Tuesday, “and we should just let them decide.”

Cuban would rather empty his wallet than agree with the NBA office on most issues, and he’s got the check stubs from a dozen or so charitable deductions to prove it. And he’ll almost certainly collect a few more soon after Stern’s rumored code of conduct for owners becomes the law of the league.

But Cuban has sat in the maelstrom of most arenas and been insulted enough to know that what Stern is doing is right. The NBA has a problem controlling fans and so does every other sports league and anybody else who thinks the only people who’ve lost their grip on the importance of these games are the ones who play them.

The provocative few in every crowd are more inventive, more abusive and more menacing. Sticks and stones -- not to mention beer bottles and whatever else fans can get their hands -- still break bones, but those don’t begin flying until the name-calling stops. What Stern intends to do is make sure that never starts. Best of luck on that one, commissioner.