The league was in trouble. National news organizations said so. Sports Illustrated put their lead writer for the sport on the case and he delivered a six-page “straits are dire” story. It ran in no less than the the season preview issue. Labor troubles, declining ratings and player misbehavior were all covered. It was during a time of transition between commissioners and a new decade was looming. The hands were wrung:
There’s no agreement on how to control salaries or drugs. The NFL is a mess.
Time To Light A Fire by Paul Zimmerman. Sports Illustrated, September 11, 1989
Yes, that NFL: The most popular sport in the USA then, now and probably forever. Ratings had dipped a little and the league was in a lame-duck period when longtime commissioner Pete Rozelle was hanging around before they hired a replacement. Sports Illustrated sent Dr Z himself to unload on his meal ticket:
Now, on the eve of a new decade, the question is, will pro football return to glory or will it continue to decline? Rozelle’s successor, if the league’s owners ever figure out how to choose one, will have three major problems to resolve: how to keep the league solvent, how to resolve the impasse between management and labor and how to reunite the league’s bickering owners.
Paul Tagliabue would start on November 5 of that year, so he was probably all but hired when the issue hit print.
Leagues, like companies or any entity in the public eye, have ups and downs and there is always a trend somewhere if you look hard enough. The media has to write stories and sometimes they pick a few datapoints and write that you’re a rising star or in concerning spiral. But does that really make it so? And in the long run what does “down” really mean?
I am old enough to remember the 1989 story in print but just in looking back briefly through SI I found this 1984 cover story:
(More drug and labor stuff in that one.) And of course there was the CTE crisis of the early 2010s when they sent number one guy Peter King out on the trail:
As you are no doubt aware the NFL is still fine. The bickering owners were united, impasses were resolved, the trends continued up and to the right, CTE worries were hand-waved away. The NFL is stronger than ever and even the draft gets higher ratings than most other sports’ games.
The biggest pushback I get to these Stern pieces is some form of “Yes, but wasn’t there a real problem in the early 80s? Wasn’t the NBA really in trouble? There were so many trend stories. And I hear it over and over. The NBA was in trouble.”
Maybe a little. But as we’ve discussed (here, here, and here) the main issues were growing pains after a rare period of free-market explosive growth combined with a TV environment that doesn’t exist anymore and the external structural problems of a bad economy and warring media titans. The massive monetization era for all sports hadn’t begun yet and that makes it hard to judge the past. The future of the NBA was never really dire (in fact it was the stunning success of the 1965-75 period that created a dizzying wake), just as the NFL was never seriously at risk of “decline” in 1989.
Paul Tagliabue was the comissioner of the NFL for 17 years and as far as I know he never mentioned the Zimmerman “NFL in trouble” narrative that greeted the beginning of his tenure. He definitely didn’t bring it up at every opportunity even decades later. Nobody today says that Tagliabue “saved” the NFL or even remembers the 1989 “crisis.”
Yet that’s exactly what Stern did time after time in countless interviews. In the classic Stern-cult bootlicking column we already dissected Stern started out with reference to “the crises of the eighties.” (And of course that made it into print.)
He always managed to find a way to “run” against the previous regime, even when decades had passed. Think how strange it would be if Jack Welch (GE CEO from 1981 to 2001) had opened a 1999 earnings call by talking about how tough the 1981-82 recession was for everyone and how far they’ve come since then.
And of course the media abetted him by snowballing the narrative of how the NBA was in the toilet when he took over.
In one of the last interviews he ever gave watch him talk about race-baiting with a twinkle in his eye (3:16)
Race is always an issue. That’s just the way it is and the NBA has always been on the edge of discussions of race… In every collective bargaining negotiation I was accused of having a plantation mentality.
(We did our best to demolish the “too black” canard in part 2.) Then he played the same old bottom-to-top song: (9:49)
When I took over the NBA our players’ reputations were I would say in the basement of the pyramid of celebrity and now they’re at the tippy top of the celebrity pyramid. They’re the most listened to the most beloved in some ways and the most important athletes in all of sports.
So why did the Stern cult persist and why did we all keep letting him get away with it? Why did the “NBA in trouble” narrative get so entrenched that it’s basically cultural shorthand too-good-to-check received wisdom? That’s the big question. Just because I’ve found some good datapoints to counteract some of the myths I don’t have any one Rosebud-style reason why the cult was so successful.
Reading through 40 years of clips though I am continually struck by Stern’s incredible willingness to talk with reporters. Searching for the keywords “David Stern” and “Stern said” through endless newspaper.com combinations of years and cities it truly is remarkable.
In addition to the stories I’ve clipped before here are a couple of exemplary ones:
This is Stern talking to a local San Antonio reporter about San Antonio issues on April 29, 1990. It’s early in the playoffs, Stern’s in San Antonio and he gives a local guy long, detailed quotes about the Spurs’ chances to be on network TV more next season. (This wasn’t even San Antonio’s top paper, it was a second-tier daily, bleeding out in a losing battle with a Murdoch-owned rival. According to wikipedia The San Antonio Light was defunct by 1993.)
This is Stern doing a huge interview with a New Rochelle (Westchester County NY) newspaper about local and NBA issues. These are not wire stories. Creating content is hard, and Stern knew that some of the most valuable content he could create was putting fresh meat in the hands of writers who would naturally be grateful to him for all the material he was providing. (The Standard-Star ceased publication in 1998 in case you were wondering.)
Look at the sheer volume of quotation marks. That’s all pure gold for writers and editors desperate to fill space on a dreary February Sunday between the Superbowl and Opening Day.
When I started writing these posts in 2022 I was anticipating ever more Stern worship, culminating in an official biography that set the myths in stone. But instead there have been fewer stories and no biography that I have seen. Some cults get bigger after death, but Stern is no Jim Morrison. A bosscult is not like an artist cult. The lifeblood of the media’s infatuation was that volubility and willingness to pick up the phone. Stern worship seems to be dying without the constant stream of content.
What does that mean for other personality cults? And for Stern’s legacy?
I think I’m at the end of the road here. I’ve got too much real work to do to let online haterism take up more of my time, even with such a worthy target as David Joel Stern.
It’s clear that Adam Silver has corrected some of the abuses and the NBA is in a better place, at least with refereeing and overall fairness. I doubt Stern would have brooked the rise of The Warriors or championship runs in “small market” cities like Milwaukee or Toronto. I doubt Adam Silver would have done the 2002 Kings the way Stern did. The Sonics might yet be restored to Seattle. (The gambling stuff, though: yikes.) There is no Silver cult that I’ve seen, at least just yet.
The big piece that’s left to write is how Stern’s NBA fumbled the USA’s domestic basketball talent funnel and let institutions like AAU take over youth basketball to the detriment of literally everyone.
As we move more toward a world where youth participation is down, the only players the US can produce are children of former athletes and foreigners dominate the MVP race and stats leaderboards it is clear that something is deeply wrong. Unfortunately that story is hard to write without 1000s of hours of research and some very cautious tip-toeing around questions of race and class identity.
My suspicion is that Stern, like most people, never foresaw a world where kids wouldn’t try for athletic glory and coach-like figures wouldn’t exist to exploit that urge. Where the raw number of kids would be declining. Where visible and invisible barriers to playing a ballgame would spring up so quickly. Where the other sports competing for kids’ time would be so nimble and so alluring. As with many sectors we’ve identified he wasn’t really a visionary, just a man of his times reacting to the waves of culture that washed over him.
Sports don’t really matter. That’s part of why it’s so fun and fascinating to go way too deep on them. I started this blog for the glorious absurdity of over-examining something that barely exists. (College football in California.) Sports are an excellent toy model, a microcosm, a simulation or whatever you want to call it.
My amusement and frustration at the fallout of the Stern cult is nothing in comparison to the real destruction we’re living through as a result of the personality cults that have risen and enmeshed people around us. And I’m not just talking about Trump. Look at whatever terrible health trend is spreading through whatever crop of Instagram influencers.
Stern succeeded in the media of his time by insisting on certain parts of the narrative and then spending a lot of time being extremely generous with the currency of his attention and using his voice to tell people what they wanted to hear. It becomes a trade that you (the public) make with the leadership figure: as long as you agree on a few things their way, they’ll throw a few bones your way. As long as you get it straight that the NBA was in trouble when Stern started he’ll tell you your team is looking great and deserves more network television. As long as you agree that there was a race and drugs problem in the early 80s that only he could solve, he’ll tell you you’re right that players these days are overpaid, and fans deserve for things to be just like they were. Everyone agrees not to look too hard at the actual truth. It feels good to have someone agree with you and to know that you agree with them on some core shared myth.
That long 20th century that he fully occupied is finally really dying. The newspapers are going, the sports columnist is an endangered species. The network news desk and the ESPN standup might last another generation. But there are people exploiting personality cult playbooks with all the new media we’re soaking up every day. It’s been a commonplace joke for the last decade that someday a youtuber will be president.
It’s worth asking what parasocial figure today is in our own lives that we’re layering the same trade on: There’s some channel where they’re feeding you the combination of doctrine and indulgence in exchange for the implicit stakeholder vote to stay in whatever position of political or financial power they have. (And unlike Stern who needed the clout to stay in his actual job, a new media personality might be sustained simply on the attention. But the downstream affects can be even more deleterious.)
Can we learn from the weird cult status we attached to Stern?
My sincere hope in writing this is that maybe we can, since it was “just sports.” It was just a toy and it’s not really political or a question of anyone’s core identity. Can we say “Huh that was weird and emotional and unjustified on factual grounds, it’s worth looking into what part of my self was so satisfied there?”
Or will we all just roll it up and put it away and move onto the next? “There’ll never be another one like him!” we say with a chuckle, as we frantically search for a figure to occupy the hole in our psyche with that same exact shape.