I thought I’d highlight one particular column I found in my David Stern research. As time passes and memories recede of the fawning Stern journalism that prevailed for three decades, let’s open the time capsule and see what oozes out. This particular column has a poignant resonance here in October 2025.
I’m going to include the full clipping as a pdf and then go through it quoting directly, FJM-style. Let me present Dave Perkins in the Toronto Star, January 22, 1992 with “Why NBA puts other pro leagues to shame.”
Seventy-one years ago yesterday, the troubled game of baseball hired the commanding presence of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as it commissioner.
Baseball has progressed all the way to Dagwood Bumstead Vincent since the wild-eyed Gibraltar-jawed Landis became the first of a mostly dreary line of men who have “led” their pro sports leagues on this continent in this century.
Opening with a nostalgia toast to Judge Landis is a great grumpy white guy take. Hey kids, remember the son of a Civil War veteran who kept blacks out of baseball? How many people was this really landing for even in 1992? The “Dagwood Bumstead” figure he’s making fun of is then-current baseball commissioner Fay Vincent. Let’s just hold onto that comparison for a second.
Which brings us to David Stern, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, who runs the most successful pro sports endeavor in history by being (it seems) as much a part of the next century as of this one.
The NBA is miles ahead of the other professional sports leagues in almost every way. Name an area – marketing, merchandising, labor-management relations, drug policies – and the NBA is the model for the others’ operations.
As we’ve shown, the NBA’s merchandising started behind baseball and as of 1992 was well behind football.
Stern always talks about the “we,” but he clearly is the driving force behind most of the league’s projects. So good is Stern at his job that he is working on a Tartabull of a contract, a five-year, $27.5 million package. He makes more money than all but a handful of the superstars that populate his league, but no one seems to mind; when he took over, 13 of 18 teams lost money. Now, 27 of 27 teams make a profit, sometimes a very large profit.
The profit and loss stuff is, of course, ludicrous. (See our The Cap discussion for understanding the dimensions of the space circa 1983.) The NBA would suffer work stoppage within 10 years while the NFL never would. The snarky reference to Danny Tartabull belongs to winter ’92 along with Color Me Badd and Right Said Fred. Tartabull had recently signed the richest free agent contract to that point, $25mm over 5 years to leave the Mariners for the Yankees. (It was not an overwhelming success, although he was probably the best hitter on that 1992 team.) It’s also a classic columnist ingo-bingo. Stern is celebrated for a large contract, whereas the same raw info would be cause for disdain about anyone else. Columnists have made plenty of hay over large player and exec salaries since ink was first put on paper.
Stern was in Toronto yesterday as the featured part of the enRoute Universal Speaker Forum. He followed the fresh-fruit tarts for about 800 businessmen (including a few hockey executives) with a charming little half-hour of ain’t-we-great.
He wasn’t giving away anything to the Friends of Bruce McNall, as the association might have been called. (The Argo semi-owner, leading the dreamy plumping for a Toronto NBA franchise, sat within a bounce-pass of Stern all day, perhaps reminding the man that there were a few hundred prospective corporate-box buyers in the room).
Ok now we’re getting to the meat of it. Toronto did not yet have an NBA team. The Raptors expansion franchise began in 1995. Clearly this visit and this obsequious column are all part of the civic push to get the NBA to bless their city. Roll out the newsprint with the boilerplate Stern hagiography. So in that sense we have an “excuse” for the tone here.
The fact that it’s Toronto 1992 should resonate with baseball fans. The Blue Jays MLB franchise, which had been in Toronto since 1977, (and indeed MLB had been international since 1969) was coming off an American League East division title in 1991 and on the verge of two consecutive World Series championships. More importantly, for this money-obsessed column, the Blue Jays had just opened Skydome, the first retractable roof domed stadium, and drawn over four million fans for the season that just ended. That was the first time any team had ever drawn 4mm, a number they would hit again and again in their championship seasons.
Yes, baseball, under its good old “Dagwood Bumstead” commish had just built the 8th wonder of the world and put four million butts in seats in this guy’s very town! But of course, no matter what baseball does well its commissioner is just a shambling suit who doesn’t get the credit in the press. Which is probably the correct take! It’s just funny to consider it in contrast to the Stern coverage where he is hailed as the Founder of the Feast for any occasion where dollars are exchanged for basketball.
Here in October 2025, the Blue Jays are about to enter another ALCS with Skydome still going strong under a new corporate name. Attendance raw totals are down after the recent generation remodels (in line with all modern baseball stadiums) but they are still close to capacity and were second in total attendance in the American League this year.
Stern wasn’t revealing the marketing miracles of the NBA. He wasn’t telling the crowd exactly how the NBA’s cable TV deal went from $400,000 to $75 million a season, or how the league went from 58 percent of capacity to 91 per cent, or how labor and management settled on a salary cap that is the envy of the rest of the major sports world.
Yes indeed. There is nothing to “reveal” because the TV thing was a sea change that started in baseball and lifted the boats of all sports. I have no idea where that 58 percent number comes from because as we discussed there were “NBA attendance up everywhere and crushing hockey” stories in 1978, before history was rewritten by Sternistas.
What he was doing was being David Stern, being glib and entertaining and demonstrating that he is on top of whatever situation the NBA faces at this particular moment.
Stern seems equally at home discussing fibre optics, referees, high-definition television, slam dunks, drug-testing programs – or Magic Johnson and AIDS.
This is the other meat of the matter. David Stern wasn’t afraid to provide copy. Journalists always bias toward that. You can tell when an executive is on top of the situation because they’re “glib and entertaining.” You learn that on the metro desk, sonny.
First time through I missed the fact that “referees” are included on the list here. Good stuff. At the time this column was written Dick Bavetta was a ref, Tim Donaghy was two years away and and the IRS and DOJ were starting their plane ticket fraud investigation. (Our ref bit is here.)
The NHL is a lemonade stand compared to the NBA anyway, but it’s fitting that a number of hockey-puck types were on hand to hear Stern. Only a few days ago, the NHL went through the embarrassment of having its AlI-Star Game – its mid-season showcase – shown right after the Saturday morning cartoons on a U.S. network.The NHL couldn’t get another deal and hardly anybody outside of the true believers would have known about the game’s existence.
I went down the newspapers.com rabbit hole looking for information on this. The 1992 NHL All-Star game was played at 1 PM Eastern on the Saturday between the NFL conference championships and the Superbowl. Seems like a decent slot. It was shown on NBC. True, that was the only US network exposure for hockey that year. The Philadelphia Daily News reported later that its rating was a “dismal 2.3.” So, not great, but it seems like a reach to say that a national deal with Marv Albert calling the game was some kind of burial in the cartoons. And as we have detailed, the “lemonade stand” of the NHL with its terrible commissioner was still fetching franchise values in the 50-80% range of NBA teams. Basketball passed hockey in the 1970s in US popularity. It’s been that way ever since but hockey is hardly dead.
Now here was Stern talking about how the NBA has tied its past couple of all-star games to a school-attendance program for kids at some inner-city schools and how 32,000 school kids in one Miami district got perfect attendance marks because of the NBA project that merely was a sidelight to its showcase game.
Perfect attendance at inner-city schools! I was willing to believe a columnist would give Stern credit for anything and I still could not have predicted this. Give me a break. I would love a where-are-they-now on the 32,000 Miami kids who turned their lives around thanks to David Stern.
Stern, who became NBA commissioner in 1984 after more than a decade of legal work for the league, says there was no master plan for the 1980s that made the league rise to the top. He says there is no master plan for the ’90s, either. No plan, except to react to whatever situations arise.
“What we are today is the sum total of how we reacted to the crises (of the 1980s),” he said. The major crisis, the one baseball will face soon if it isn’t already, had to do with labor-management disputes regarding money.
I will grant him this, baseball did have a catastrophic work stoppage in 1995. The NBA’s major stoppage in 1998 was not as bad. But it still happened.
The NBA, under Stern’s guidance, worked out a salary cap, an idea still in effect.
“The salary cap (led to) our confidence to deal with the drug issue, to put a workable drug plan in place,” Stern said. It also “allowed prospective owners to look at the business as a business.”
A business in which everybody makes money now, he could have added, and a business going increasingly global.
Yes. Just like every other major sport.
European and Asian interests have approached the league about using NBA stars to do public-service and anti-drug messages. Meanwhile, NBA merchandising, which has grown from $107 million to more than $1 billion annually in sales, stretches around the world.
Stern told a story about being in China and a woman approaching him to say she was a great fan of the “red oxen.” Think of logos that would translate that way and, sure, she meant the Chicago Bulls. They’re the champions of the league that simply operates in a different world from the rest of pro sports.
It simply did and does not. It was all the same world. The fact that the NFL is never mentioned in this column is particularly silly. The NFL is the 1000 pound gorilla; then, now and always.
As I reflect on good old fuddy-duddy baseball and Stern’s shining futuristic excellence I am reminded once again of one of the most profitable streaming media companies created in this country: MLB Advanced Media.
MLBAM was started in 2000, just 8 years after this column appeared. Incubated entirely within MLB and with its money, it created the streaming live sports tech universe. It was cash flow positive within a year and a half of its first live season. The last confirmed revenue numbers were $600mm in 2012. It’s so secretive and so profitable that there are no publicly released stats since then.
You must read the MLBAM wiki:
MLBAM also runs and/or owns the official web sites of the National Hockey League and Minor League Baseball, YES Network (the television broadcaster of the New York Yankees), SportsNet New York (the television broadcaster of the New York Mets). It has also provided the backend infrastructure for WWE Network, WatchESPN, ESPN3, HBO Now, and PGA Tour Live.
They’re printing billions in pure profit. It’s the kind of far-sighted world-devouring miracle of sports and commerce that would have spawned an ESPN docu-series if it were hatched by David Stern. (Well, if it weren’t a competitor to ESPN that Disney had to invest in because it was eating everyone’s lunch.) The somewhat-sinister reason the numbers are all so secret is that the money machine is in all likelihood being hidden from the players.
Somewhere on that horizon in 1992 of “high definition television” and “fibre optics” there was another video tech revolution lurking that would unlock yet more billions in revenue and franchise values. If you only read newspaper columns and had to predict which sport and which commissioner would have spearheaded it you would have said David Stern 100 times out of 100. But of course that’s not how the real world works. An aging executive coasting in his 20th-odd year in power is not necessarily going to always see the next thing. Stern was playing catchup in network, cable, merchandising, stadium subsidies and soon would be in streaming as well.
The person who did lead the MLBAM push was Fay Vincent’s successor Bud Selig. Bud Selig is much maligned. I myself have maligned him. Much. But he found a truffle on that one. It goes like that sometimes.
No one has a monopoly on good ideas. Market trends function like ocean waves and are largely out of the control of any one actor. The best you can do is ride them correctly. Bud is one of those “mostly-dreary men who lead pro sports.” But in the end so was David Stern. All the backwards-looking cult stuff is just fluff and column inches.