When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [48]
"The only time we ever made 60 Minutes was when Rudy Tomjanovich got punched by Kermit Washington, or when they showed a bunch of empty seats and Rick Barry sitting on the bench as the only white player," Stern said. "It was always something negative."
In an attempt to capitalize on the anticipated arrival of Magic and Bird in the NBA, the public relations department took the highly unusual step of putting the rookies on the cover of the NBA Register and Guide. The cover was mildly unsettling to Stern, who oversaw the league's marketing department and felt it would be a slight to proven stars such as Abdul-Jabbar, George Gervin, and Julius Erving. He consulted his marketing team, which consisted of one person—himself—and ultimately gave in to the recommendations of the PR staff.
Prior to the arrival of Bird and Magic, securing sponsorships for the league was a daunting challenge. In May 1982, Stern hired Rick Welts to create new marketing partnerships for the NBA. Welts, an avid basketball fan and former ball boy for the Seattle SuperSonics, had been working for Bob Walsh & Associates, one of the first sports marketing firms in the country. Once in the employ of the NBA, he put on his best suit and called on McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and General Motors. He never got past the lobby. He suffered similar indignities when he tried to tap smaller, less prestigious companies.
"Most of them wouldn't even see me," Welts said. "And those who did just laughed at me. The NBA had such a bad reputation in the business community."
As one gifted player after another fell prey to substance abuse in the late seventies and early eighties, the NBA tried to debunk the damaging perception that their league was flush with drug users.
David Thompson, a three-time college All-American with a 44-inch vertical leap, should have been an NBA superstar. Instead, the former North Carolina State star developed drug and alcohol problems and was out of the league by the time he was 30 years old. John Lucas, a superb athlete who played in the U.S. (Tennis) Open when he was 13 years old and was the number-one pick in the 1976 NBA draft, developed cocaine and alcohol problems and entered drug rehabilitation. He later opened his own drug treatment facility in Houston designed specifically to assist troubled athletes like himself. Sly Williams, a promising young talent with the New York Knicks, became notorious for binges of abuse and once called in to say he was going to miss a game because "there was a slight death in the family."
Four participants in the 1980 All-Star Game—Phoenix star Walter Davis, New York guard Micheal Ray Richardson, Atlanta guard John Drew, and Atlanta swingman Eddie "Fast Eddie" Johnson—ended up battling addiction.
Fast Eddie managed to amass more than 10,000 career points in spite of his cocaine habit. His teammate Drew scored more than 15,000 points, even as he started freebasing. Drew entered drug rehab in 1983, returned as the league's Comeback Player of the Year in 1984, then relapsed again two years later and became one of the first players to be banned for life by the NBA.
Coaches and general managers tried to navigate the landscape of the drug culture with few resources and no set guidelines. Former Atlanta Hawks coach Hubie Brown recognized that drug use was rampant, both in professional sports and in the entertainment industry, but the NBA bore the brunt of the criticism because of the high profiles of the players who got caught. Brown tried to educate himself on how to assist his troubled players, including consulting a psychologist, but conceded, "What did I know about cocaine or freeba sing?"
The league's security office reached out to law enforcement officials in each NBA city so they could identify who sold the drugs, then tried to limit the flow of activity between their players and the dealers. Stern invited