Remembering David Stern

As I’ve said before, I’m a big sports fan. Name a sport and I probably can you more than you care to know about it. However, I recently realized that as much as I love baseball, football and soccer, my first love was basketball of the NBA variety.

On Jan. 1, former NBA commissioner Davis Stern died. With his passing, the sports world lost a person who shaped what we know today as modern professional basketball.

Stern was led the NBA from February 1, 1984 to February 1, 2014. I was born in the second half of 1984 and have been a basketball fan for about as long, so I feel a connection to the departed.

I’m originally from the Salt Lake City area and remember buying my first piece of sports memorabilia in 1990. I purchased a team set of 1990 NBA Hoops Basketball Cards Utah Jazz from a shop in a Salt Lake City-area mall.

The year before Stern and the NBA agreed to a massive $600 million contract with NBC that see the network air 46 games in the 1990-1991 season. Two years before that, the league agreed to have more games aired on TNT.

Simultaneously, I was able to watch the Jazz on either local stations KSTU-TV 13 (Fox) or KSL-TV 5 (CBS).

While I still enjoyed time spent playing with my GI Joes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was slowly

falling in love with sports specifically basketball.

My guess is that I loved the fast pace of the game played in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

It was at that time, I saw the action of Karl Malone and John Stockton, a pair of future Hall of Famers. My family moved to Oklahoma City in 1992. The sports landscape changed a bit because I was no longer in the land of Brigham Young but instead near the home of the Sooners and not one, but two different kinds of Cowboys.

I guess it could have been three kinds of Cowboys if you count the folks two-steppin’ to the sounds of Boot Scootin’ Boogie by Brooks & Dunn.

Even living in a new land I was able to keep watching my Jazz because as a perennial playoff participant they were always on one of the national TV channels that showed NBA games.

Sometime in between 1989 and 1998 I heard the name David Stern. Eventually, I knew him as commissioner of the NBA. This knowledge was due in no small part to daily consumption of ESPN’s SportsCenter and the sports section of The Daily Oklahoman.

My initial thought was, “this is some old guy who was in charge of the NBA.”

He would appear on TV or in articles to weigh in on a topic or share some sort of news.

Stern always appeared calm, cool and collected. He didn’t come across as a guy who was mean, spiteful or selfish.

What I most knew from him at the time was the annual NBA Draft. There was a time that I watched the draft and NBA All Star Game religiously.

I can still hear the words, “and with the first pick ____ selects ____ from the university of ___” and so on. Now, it probably helps that I was a long-time player of the NBA Live and NBA 2K video games.

This unassuming character took the NBA from a league whose games were on played on tape delay in the early 80s to a global phenomenon.

His work made it easy for kids like me with limited athletic ability to fall in love with a game and larger than life personalities.

Stern’s vision was to make basketball more than a game but entertainment and mustwatch television.

This vision came to fruition in so many ways.

By marketing star players like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, the league exploded into homes in ways beyond television.

Yes, there were televised battles between the great Celtics teams and the Showtime Lakers, but there were also Wheaties boxes and sneakers galore.

Then, there McDonald’s commercials, an animated film (Space Jam) and more.

Whereas I know David Stern was a human with warts and all, I simply knew him as someone was on a mission to share a game to the masses. I know now as an adult that he was a businessman and probably made choices I would not agree with.

However, those are not the things I remember him for. I would rather focus on the simple joys of a game that has now reached millions if not billions.

Think about it, right now there are kids on a playground or playgrounds here in Oklahoma playing the same game as kids on playgrounds across Europe, South America, Africa and Asia.

There is something heartwarming about that thought. While I love soccer (or football as it is known outside of our borders), I wonder if because of David Stern maybe basketball has become the world’s game.