When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [54]
Stern had already developed a cordial relationship with both Johnson and Bird, although his initial instinct was to keep a respectful distance. Bird, who insisted on calling the commissioner Mr. Stern, liked him immediately. Stern found Bird to be a man of few wants and even fewer words, but he said, "I was good at reading grunts, so I was pretty sure I knew what he meant."
Magic was more vocal and proactive. He regularly presented Stern with a flurry of ideas on how he could better exploit the growing rivalry between the Celtics and the Lakers, as well as the tantalizing subplot of Larry versus Magic.
Stern genuinely loved the game of basketball and made it a priority to attend every NBA Finals game. Through 2009, he had missed only one in his tenure—to attend the 80th birthday celebration of his wife Diane's Uncle Martin.
In the earlier playoff rounds, Stern traversed the country in an attempt to drop in on every postseason team. When a team fell behind 2–0 in a best-of-five series, Stern would fly in on the chance a franchise was about to be eliminated, earning him the moniker "Grim Reaper."
His first Finals as commissioner was the 1984 series between Los Angeles and Boston. The Celtics were up 3–2 in games when Stern, riding in an elevator before Game 6, struck up a conversation with a group of men wearing number 33 Celtics jerseys.
"So where are you from?" Stern asked.
"We're from Indiana—we're friends of Larry," one of them answered.
"Jeez, tell Larry to take it easy on us," Stern cracked. "We need this series to go seven games."
It was an offhand joke, but when the Celtics lost Game 6, Bird publicly berated the new NBA boss.
"He's the commissioner. He shouldn't be saying anything like that," Bird declared. "The NBA wanted a seventh game because they wanted to make more money, and they got their wish. There's no reason to lie. He said it. He's a man and he'll live up to it.
"He may have said it in jest. But I'm out here trying to make a living and win a championship."
Bird's attack on Stern instantly became headline news. The comment threatened to derail the commissioner's tenure in its infancy, and he was mortified. For the first time in his life, he shut off his phone and locked himself in his hotel room. "What have I done?" he asked himself as the messages piled up.
With a pivotal Game 7 looming, Stern correctly assumed his misstep would quickly fade into the background. It did. Bird and the Celtics prevailed, and Stern's first minor controversy receded from view.
Nearly 25 years after he called out Stern, Bird recalled the incident with regret.
"I was wrong," Bird said. "I never should have said it, but that's how I felt at the time. Stern shouldn't have been joking about something so important either, but two wrongs don't make a right.
"If you have never been in that situation, if you've never laced them up, then you don't know what the players are thinking. It's so intense, so big, and it was my first time to play Magic [in the Finals] since college, so it was stress city."
Buoyed by the star power of Bird, Magic, and later Jordan, Stern realized he needed to shore up his marketing coffers. He reached out to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and sat in on their meetings, asked questions, took notes, and formulated a strategy for his own league based on the success of two of America's favorite sports.
Stern canvassed his own NBA franchises and identified who was having the most success generating income for their teams. Billy Marshall, a retail buyer for the department store Jordan Marsh, had been selling Bird jerseys in his shop and had accounted for almost 10 percent of NBA merchandising sales at the time. Stern offered Marshall a job, and within two years he had placed merchandise in 18 of the league's 23 cities.
In 1984 the NBA's retail merchandise generated $44 million. By 2007 that number had jumped to a staggering $3 billion under Stern's watchful eye. In the mid-eighties, the two most popular team jerseys were easily identifiable: Magic's