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Nothing was quite like interviewing
David Stern. It was like trying to
do the New York Times crossword
while he shouted insults at you.MY RELATIONSHIP with David Stern can
be visualized as a Venn diagram, circles
intersecting in one small area, large
portions of our lives never touching.
Stern was a towering figure who met
Nelson Mandela, dined with prime
ministers and pressed the flesh of every
president since Ronald Reagan, while I
was/am a sloppily attired journalist who
stood at lockers with a notebook. He
never let me forget who was who. As the
photo that accompanies this story was
being taken in 2006 in Red Square, Stern
turned to me and said: “McCallum, did
you find that tie at Goodwill?”
Stern died at 77 on New Year’s Day,
three weeks after suffering a brain
hemorrhage. When he retired in 2014,
he had been commissioner for 30 years,
but, as outside counsel, then in-house
counsel, then executive vice president,
he had influenced the NBA for even
longer. I did not break down upon
hearing the news of his death. He was
I brought a friend to an All-Star
Weekend party. I was wearing a
sport coat and what I thought was a
passable T-shirt underneath. “Hey,
McCallum!” David Stern hollered at
me from across the room. “Way to
wear an undershirt to a party.” From
then on, my friend loved Stern.STERN AND I were never allies but we
were aligned. Obviously he wanted a
league that prospered, but in our own
way so did the journalists who covered
the NBA. We just didn’t realize it.
We had endless sniping matches
with Stern as we wrote about the
problems the league was trying to put
in its rearview mirror—cocaine, white
fan flight, uninterested advertisers—
and he insisted that we were missing
the bigger story of a league on the rise.
Sometimes we were right, but in the
long run he was righter, and though
we might not have liked to admit it,
that was good for us. We became the
cool guys on the journalistic block,
not because we were cool but because
the NBA was. That was primarily
the result of Michael/Magic/Larry, of
course, but it also had a lot to do with
the decisions made by a squat 5'7"
man who took to power like a moth
to light, a macher, to use one of the
Yiddish phrases that Stern loved.
There were those who sharply
criticized Stern after his death for his
arrogance and some of his heavy-
handed decisions, and there were
those who thought my tweetstorm
was too positive, even sentimental.
I get that. But all I know is that his
death hit me hard, and both affection
and selfishness were layered into that
feeling. For in that small Venn space
where Stern and I intersected reside
not only memories but also so much of
my professional identity. ±FAREWELL TO DAVID STERN,
THE IRASCIBLE LEADER
WHO GREW THE NBA
WE HAD
A BALL
BY JACK MCCALLUM
strictly a professional acquaintance, not
a drinking buddy, though we did once
share a pitcher of highly questionable
tomato juice in a Moscow airport.
But then, as I began doing what a
modern-day journalist does—writing a
tweetstorm—another feeling came over
me. It wasn’t exactly grief but more like
a powerful melancholy.
To a large extent in the journalism
game, you are what and who you cover.
Dallas newsmen made their careers
when JFK was assassinated, and my
own was jump-started when Sports
Illustrated handed me the NBA
beat in 1985, at a time when Magic
and Larry flourished and Jordan had
just burst upon the scene. But it was
also a time when the league was small,
boutiquey and led by a big-brained,
forward-thinking bulldog of a lawyer.The late Paul Allen stopped by the
NBA offices about 30 years ago to
tell David Stern about this thing
called the internet and how he was
going to use it to publicize his Trail
Blazers. “No, you’re not,” said Stern.
“The whole league is going to use it.”Sports Illustrated (ISSN 0038-822X) IS PUBLISHED MONTHLY WITH FOUR EX TRA ISSUES THROUGHOUT THE YE AR BY MAVEN MEDIA BRANDS, LLC. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: 225 LIBERT Y ST, NEW YORK , NY 10281-1008. OWNED BY ABG-SI LLC. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: 1411
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