David Stern, erstwhile über-commissioner of the NBA, is no friend of the game of basketball, or the NBA player. I know there was a time when common wisdom held that he was indeed a player’s best friend—instrumental in building the NBA into a financial juggernaut and therefore making a lot of money for a number of players who otherwise would have had middling careers. And so he was thought to be a friend, a godsend, rescuing a league in dire trouble financially, and transforming it into one of America’s most beloved and lucrative sports.
Stern may well be a friend of the NBA, but in retrospect he has been no friend of the game of basketball itself, or of its players. And here’s why: The golden years of the NBA were during the 1970s, before Stern got his hands on the league. Yes, that’s what I said. More so than the Bird/Magic ‘80s or the Jordon ‘90s, the time before Stern wove his marketing “genius” on the league was the last real golden age of the NBA. Why? Because before the money came in—the TV deals, Nike contracts, the reaching out to “ middle America” —the game was purer. It was more “this thing of ours”—players ballin’ and loving the game. These were skilled athletes bridging the way to our modern game, and outside of teams in major markets most were fairly anonymous souls making modest money—the average player salary in 1970 was $35,000 according to David Friedman in Bob Batchelor’s anthology Basketball In America.
The ‘70s were not about the business of basketball, though with the merging of the ABA and the NBA in 1976 the age of sports agent conglomerates, endorsement deals, international marketing schemes, multi-million dollar coaches and power bottom-line owners was soon to come. If the NBA has problems these days it has less to do with the attitude of the modern NBA player than the philosophical changes enacted by David Stern when he became commissioner, taking basketball from the realm of sport, to business, never to return.
In the 1970s players like World B. Free, Pete Maravich, Clyde Frazier, Bob McAdoo, Dave Cowens, and Julius “Dr. J” Erving crafted a league that had progressed from the Boston Celtic monarchy of the sixties to an urban democracy where superstars from inner-cities gave America its first team sport rooted in the spirit of the streets. This was a good thing. The game had become more complex in the sixties with the likes of the incredible Oscar Robertson and defensive guru Bill Russell, and now urban America breathed even more spirit into the game and the results were fabulous. This wasn’t a black and white thing—no one was flashier than “Pistol” Pete, and no player as fundamentally sound as Earl Monroe. Yes, a lot of the stadiums were empty, but any kid or family could afford to go.
And if you loved basketball it was a wonderful time—David Thompson, Calvin Murphy, Bob Lanier, all showcased a new jack ability to score, execute fantastic passes, and block shots in a manner the league had never seen. Between 1974 and 1979 five different teams won NBA titles, two of them recent expansion teams, and college basketball superstars like Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton (yes, him) made the leap from touted NCAA prospects to NBA championship leaders. The league embraced fur coat wearing, pimp hat-donning, long hair hippy, weed smoking players because they played the game phenomenally and had style in tune with the cultural Zeitgeist of the day. The game was sexy, hip, and a wonder to behold. You have to go back to the 70s to find a time when players played the game not because they’d get rich (most of them wouldn’t) but because basketball was what they loved. Can you imagine a Sean Bradley in the NBA of the 70s? Why would he play? One could imagine the infamous Harold “baby Jordan” Miner or Ron Artest actually thriving in the NBA of the 70s because the distractions and pressures facing today’s players were simply not there.
This was the golden age of basketball because it was the last time the game on the court trumped everything else. Then Stern came along, latched onto Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, surely two of the greatest players to ever play the game, and eventually a kid named Jordan, and marketed them into “entertainers” and “role models.” Quick, name a team who won a championship in the 1980s other than the Celtics or Lakers? Or a player that led that team? The fact that most fans probably can’t cannot possibly have been good for the game of basketball.
I am speaking of basketball, not the corporation known as the NBA. I am talking about summer New York street ball and Chicago high school tournaments, not ESPN announcers bemoaning Lebron James’ move from high school to the pros while simultaneously blanketing said move with an unprecedented level of exploitative coverage. I speak of the 2004 U.S. Olympic Team playing under more vicious attack from home critics than any Lithuanian zone could ever throw at them, yet playing on with an intensity and heart that no one seemed to notice. One wonders what Allen Iverson and Argentinean superstar Manu Ginóbili, both ballers to the core, talk about when they cross paths. I bet it’s about how much they respect and are exhausted by each other’s game, and probably not those fake “NBA Cares” commercials the league orchestrates.
David Stern does not care about basketball players because to him they are tools through which the NBA, a true corporation, makes money. Jordan, Bird, and Magic were loved by Stern because they made a lot of money for him. If they had jeopardized the making of that money he would have tossed them to the wind, as he was more than prepared to do with Kobe. The league eventually disposed of Dennis Rodman when his tiresome antics ceased being great TV theater.
Just as there is an attempt to turn Rucker Park basketball into a corporate entity and therefore rob it of any semblance of true basketball spirit, the NBA as basketball is constantly under attack. It’s there, if you watch Tuesday night games (you have to have cable), you will catch Michael Redd and the Bucks versus Elton Brand and the Clippers, two great young teams that might as well not exist as far as the NBA and its ABC TV deal is concerned—no marketable entities, or so we are told. And this is where I find fault with Stern because he inaugurated this heretical view of the game. I love Michael Jordan as much as the next b-ball junkie. But wouldn’t our understanding of the game rest on more solid ground if we had an awareness of the competitive passions of Sidney Moncrief, Chris Mullin, Chuck Person, Mark Price, and Bobby Jones, in addition to the superstars?
I hold no delusions that the NBA was a paradise before David Stern came along. I cringe imagining what drug tests after Saturday night games might have looked like in the mid-70s. Money has always, and always will be, part of the game. But with the exception of a few superstar players the NBA was without “ego” then, and the competitive game of basketball itself was the entity sold. Stern changed all that. Present pariah poster boy Barry Bonds was once quoted as saying that he ceased playing baseball in college, that what he did for Major League Baseball was something else altogether, a bastard form of entertainment. I’m sure Stern is a nice guy, his heart in what he thinks is the right place with all his dress codes and incessant attempts at idol building. And he may indeed be a marketing genius. He simply has no respect, or love, for the game of basketball. This love is what the blackballed Sprewell, demonized Artest, and Iverson possess aplenty- a passionate love of the game—just as Havlicek did. And it is this intense love that Stern will never understand. To some of us basketball is more than a business. As this year’s phenomenal NBA playoffs have demonstrated, let players play and the game stands on its own—Nash, Jason Terry, Chauncey Billups, Anderson Varejão—the NBA is good stuff, even in 2006. God bless Lebron and Carmelo—but the NBA does not need more hype and noise and superstars—it just needs game. The Game. Because to many of us, to quote KRS-One (in alas, a Nike commercial), “Basketball is life.”
Douglas Singleton writes film and theater criticism for The Brooklyn Rail and L Magazine, in addition to art reviews for WBAI radio in New York. He has written for Independent magazine and New York Foundation for the Arts Current. His website, www.dispactke.com, features photography, prose, and multi-media.