In reading over countless David Stern newspaper clippings and seeing how many different ways he could rephrase his origin myths and get reporters to credulously repeat them I was struck by this one little nugget from 1988. The story, of course, is titled “Stern visions of NBA / Commissioner is an innovator.” Down around paragraph nine there’s this Stern anecdote (emphasis mine):
“I remember the days when I used to call the sports editors of papers in NBA cities and ask them why their papers didn’t cover the finals, Stern said. “After they got off the floor from having the commissioner of a sport call them, we had good discussions. It all started in the days when we used to put our ties on when a reporter came into our offices just so we could get him to write some positive news about the league.”
by Mike Kahn, The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) Nov 9, 1988
David Stern had to “put on” a tie! To the best of my knowledge David Stern was never photographed without a suit and tie in his entire career. Having looked through The Gettyimages Archives, newspapers.com and the Sports Illustrated Vault, I find it hard to believe he stepped outside his house before retirement without a tie unless it was to play tennis. What made ties slip into this version of a spiel he’d given reporters probably a hundred times by that point in 1988?
It’s a truism that every cult of personality ubermensch and would-be ubermensch must have his signature visuals. (I’ll spare you a list but just fill in the blanks. Please don’t make me compare Stern to another one of history’s tyrants.) Suits, ties and the iconography of formal dress were a special part of the Stern boss cult. I have a theory of why.
The Gangster movie
Consider the 20th century gangster movie: tough guy talk, white ethnic gangs in teeming streets, guns, hats, impoverished childhoods, riches, women and bloody finales. The films introduced a very compelling visual power trope that informs the Stern era. There’s one particular gangster movie above all but let’s get to that later.
What are the important elements of the gangster visual?
- The boss is small in stature but he’s the iron-willed leader, the real brains of the outfit
- He commands an army of real big tough guys
- Everyone is wearing extremely sharp suits
This visual cliche of “smart small guy who bosses around big dumb guys all dressed in suits” was there from the start in Little Caesar. (Edward G. Robinson was 5′ 5″.) It was so well established by the mid-20th century that a stereotypical duo of a smart little boss and his big dumb henchman was added to the Looney Tunes canon with Rocky and Mugsy in the 1950s:
The Godfather
It’s not something subtle. The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) are titanic high-art gangster movies that won Oscars, ran forever in the theaters and dominated the culture in the mid-1970s. They have fascinating uses of fashion imagery and introduce a third stock type character that is particularly interesting for us.
In the opening scene of the first film, Michael is wearing his military service uniform, in stark contrast to every other male there who is wearing normal non-military coats and ties. He sits with Kay as a couple. He’s not in the gangster life: no sharp suit, no male company.
In the famous final shot he’s now wearing a striped tie, suspenders and suit pants. He’s framed receiving homage from other suited heavies who appear taller and bigger than him. (Al Pacino is 5′ 6″.) He’s literally become the stereotype: little guy, brains of the outfit, wearing a sharp suit, surrounded by other brawnier men dressed in suits that he commands.
A new kind of suit
Godfather I uses existing gangster mythoimagery and launches a new charismatic operatic hero. And let’s be honest about the “hero vs anti-hero” thing. Of course talented filmmakers have been able to create interesting meditations on identity, family, America, work, and immigration in the medium of gangster films. And of course (most) of the filmmakers understand that the protagonists are truly evil and take pains to show the tragedy inherent in building a life on crime and hurting people. And of course the most famous film gangsters end up in a hell of their own creation, true tragic figures laid low by a litany of flaws despite their best efforts. But, let’s be honest, these characters play as straight “hero” to a huge segment of their viewership. Michael Corleone is cool, Tony Soprano is cool. There’s a reason you can buy about 1000 versions of this terrible type of fan art, and it isn’t because buyers want to remind themselves that crime poisons the soul:
In Godfather II the creators take one component of the classic gangster tale missing from Godfather I and put it on screen note-for-note: the up-from-the-streets origin story of Michael’s father Vito. (In part one the family is already established so they had to leave that part of the cliche out.) Interlocking with the flashback is the “modern” storyline which plays up Michael’s conflicts with a different class of antagonist: the political suit.
Senator Pat Geary is the epitome: his public image is clean, he’s got all the credit in the straight world, but behind the scenes he’s enmeshed in bribery and vice. (In addition to the Senator there are the CEOs in Cuba who have a smaller but similar function.) The “straight world suit” is great archetype that future gangster stories like Millers Crossing and The Sopranos also have a lot of fun with. (Robocop is not exactly a gangster picture but Clarence Boddicker’s dealings with his gang and the corrupt C-suite exec are another perfect example of the trope.) Everyone is corrupt, everyone is wielding the power they have in their quest to extract the maximum for themselves. The gangsters’ suits are just a little shinier.
So there you have the height of gangster imagery as we head into the late 1970s: Michael Corleone as the small-in-stature master strategist, commanding an army of brawny toughs on one hand and manipulating a cast of smiling civilian suits he doesn’t quite control on the other. Does this not have an echo in the NBA world?
It’s in this timeframe that David Stern leaves the cocoon of his law firm and takes ever more public roles as the NBA’s counsel, negotiator and ultimately commissioner.
Stern as Corleone
I think you see where I’m going here with the image mapping: Stern is the gangster boss, the owners are the straight world suits and the players are the street-level heavies.
Did anyone consciously set out to play this up? Probably not. But did reporters slip into this image vocabulary time and again with Stern’s not-so-tacit encouragement? Of course. As we detailed in part 5, the stock Stern myth is the kid from humble origins who rose to power, equally at home threatening the room of players as he is cajoling network execs and foreign leaders. Players as thugs writes itself. Same for owners as Armani-clad swells smiling as they collect millions in shady backroom deals.
Describing how tough and mean David Stern could be was a well-trod subgenre of the Stern Hagiography. (And of course the well-timed volcanic temper of the normally-calm gangster boss is a staple of that story.) Here’s a David Aldridge piece entitled “He made the lamps rattle: Remembering David Stern, in all his momentous bluster.”
You haven’t lived until you’ve been cussed out by David Stern. […]
He would start slowly, evenly, as if he was your internist, going over the results of your blood work. Gradually, his cadence and intensity would rise, as he continued building to the crescendo, the point of his call— which was, almost always, profanely challenging something I’d written or said. The point would be accompanied by a withering sarcasm, unlike any I’d encountered before or since.
“It’s just a shame that the standards at ESPN (or, TNT) have fallen so low,” he’d shout/scream, or words to that effect. “Maybe if you’d bothered to get off your fat ass and actually call someone who knew what the fuck was going on, you wouldn’t have gotten it so wrong!” he’d yell.
And a story we’ve highlighted before from Woj, relishing in Stern’s gangsterish bombast to the players at the height of a labor battle:
Everyone could see the anger rising within him, but no one expected the words that tumbled out of his mouth.
Stern told the room he knows where “the bodies are buried” in the NBA, witnesses recounted, because he had buried some of them himself.
“It was shocking,” [said] Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose…
Recounting what a berating asshole the great man was is kind of a self-fulfilling cycle of abuse: “He must have been great for us to put up with that!” The null hypothesis is clear as day: abuse is bad, and Stern’s contributions above “replacement value” were minimal at best. You don’t actually need to be a gangster to be the caretaker CEO of an established major league sport. You really, really don’t.
Where do image, dress, and Stern’s arbitrary imperial decisions intersect?
The Dress Code
The NBA Dress Code was introduced in October 2005. It was Stern’s big innovation to address whatever problems were lurking that lead to the Pistons/Pacers brawl of November 19, 2004. This seems like sarcastic hyperbole but it absolutely isn’t: “The dress code was announced as a direct consequence of the Malice at the Palace, as the NBA sought to undo its image problems, which were hurting its business.”
As we touched on in part 4, the biggest antecedent of the brawl was the terrible state of NBA officiating. Tim Donaghy was on the floor that night, as well as two other even less qualified nepotism hires. Over the previous few years the swelling Donaghy fix had players smelling a rat with every suspect call. (One of the other “incidents” around that time was when Rasheed Wallace confronted a ref in the tunnel after a game-deciding terrible call in January 2003. That ref was Tim Donaghy. ‘Sheed was on the floor the night of the Malice as well.) In the moment, the ill-prepared refs did nothing to defuse the tension as they huddled while the fight exploded.
After eleven months David Stern’s response was to cure the ills with “business casual.” Here is how the initial dress code was reported in the Fort Worth Star Telegram of November 1, 2005:
Players at league functions are required to wear collared dress shirts or turtlenecks; dress slacks, khaki pants or dress jeans; and dress shoes or boots or “other presentable shoes” with socks.
Players on the team bench but not in uniform must wear a sport coat.
Prohibited attire:
Sneakers, sandals, flip-flops, work boots, headgear, T-shirts, jerseys, chains, pendants, medallions.
Sunglasses while indoors.
Headphones, except on the team bus or plane or in the locker room.
This move alone should have been grounds for his dismissal and institution of commissioner term limits. It felt then and reads now like the twilight outburst of a mad king, spilling private obsessions into policy. When he was faced with a public embarrassment and loss of discipline in the ranks, David Stern’s instinct was to reach into the image bank and align further with the library of Godfather clips always playing in his head. Getting the street-level guys dressed better would solve the problem. It was time to “put our ties on.”
Conclusion
This whole thing may seem like a stretch, but what about the Dress Code episode makes sense anyway? Everything about the Stern mythos and its cultic distortions is steeped in a New York-centered late-20th-century milieu of (the first) urban crimewave and machine politics, daily paper columnists thirsty for a quote, tough guy bosses wielding favor banks, union beefs and analog entertainment. That world grows farther away every day. It’s our job here to put some of those pictures up on the conspiracy corkboard and try to see all the hype and shadow games for what it really is.
In case you don’t believe how imaginative and curatorial David Stern could be with his public image, I was reminded of one episode while looking through old clippings. During the lockout dispute of 1998 the normally clean-shaven Stern grew a very performative beard as the stoppage wore on and the negotiating got more and more bitter. Here’s the image that accompanied an AP Story headlined “In millionaires vs. billionaires, the billionaires win” published December 25, 1998:
So butch! The wartime general. He’s “gone to the mattresses” for real, boys. As soon as the billionaires did indeed win the beard was shaved off, never to return.