The World According To David Stern

As his eyes adjust to the half-light, Stern turns on his BlackBerry. It brings bad news: an account of the arrest of Pacers swingman Stephen Jackson for firing a gun outside an Indianapolis strip club. (One week later Jackson would plead not guilty to charges of battery, disorderly conduct and felony criminal recklessness.) The commissioner shakes his head as he scrolls. "I wish we could legally ban players from carrying guns," he says. "But we can't." (On a conference call with journalists three weeks later Stern would issue a plea to players to leave their guns at home.)

Stern smiles as he reads an invitation from the Charlotte Bobcats to attend their first home game. "Guess I'll have to do the car wash," he says. Car wash is his term for a full day of activities: breakfast speech, lunch with owners, perhaps an afternoon sit-down with local movers and shakers, then the game. Immediately ahead, as the plane descends, lies the intimidating Moscow car wash, beginning at 10:30 a.m.: sponsor meetings, interviews, a photo shoot at Red Square, a wreath-laying at the grave of legendary Soviet coach Aleksandr Gomelsky, a game between the Los Angeles Clippers and CSKA Moscow and a reception at the home of U.S. ambassador William Burns--and that's all followed by a midnight flight to Paris.

But Stern is energized. He is eager to see his old friends in Russia, which he first visited as commissioner in 1988 (when the national anthem still mentioned Lenin), and he isn't even bothered when fog forces the plane to divert to an airport farther from downtown Moscow, complicating a schedule that already seemed impossible. Stern enjoys the thought that he will be taxed to the maximum and chuckles when he imagines his staff on the ground racing from Sheremetyevo Airport to pick him up at the more remote Domodedovo.

"We could just fly straight to Paris," says Messick, half joking.

Stern shakes his head and smiles. "No matter what," he says, "we are going to this freaking game."

The commissioner is in the middle of a 17,000-mile airborne whistle-stop tour that will enable him to monitor his league's latest ambitious international venture, officially called NBA Europe Live Presented by EA Sports. (In the NBA something is always presented by something.) Stern sent four of his teams (the Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, San Antonio Spurs and Clippers) to hold a week of training camp in four cities ( Barcelona; Treviso, Italy; Lyon, France; and Moscow, respectively) and play games in three others ( Rome, Paris and Cologne, Germany). The teams and locales were carefully matched: The Sixers' Allen Iverson is extremely popular in Spain, where they apparently like antiestablishment figures; Suns coach Mike D'Antoni was a prominent player and coach in Italy; and Spurs guard Tony Parker is a Frenchman. As for the Clippers in Moscow, well, somebody had to go--it's a burgeoning market.

For someone who has been in the public eye for so long--he was named commissioner in 1984, 14 years before Major League Baseball's Bud Selig, 11 before the NHL's Gary Bettman and five before the NFL's Paul Tagliabue, who was recently succeeded by Roger Goodell--Stern has been remarkably successful in deflecting requests to participate in behind-the-scenes profiles. He has agreed to this one only after some negotiation and on the understanding that the NBA's international business (page 63) will play a prominent role in the story. (Stern will no doubt think it's not prominent enough and will make his feelings known.) Over the course of the trip, pieces of his personal life slip out, though rarely does he offer them.

For example, Stern loved the musical Jersey Boys, the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. He thinks of himself as a cross between a Manhattanite (Stern's Delicatessen was in Chelsea) and a Jersey boy (he moved to Teaneck at age 12 and attended Rutgers). He was, he says, 114th in a class of 530 at Teaneck High; he still remembers the stats.

Unlike his close friend and former assistant general counsel Bettman--they talk every week--Stern is not a big hockey fan. He "sort of" follows the New York Mets, he says, because he and his sons, Andy and Eric, used to watch them together when the boys were growing up. (Andy, 40, is a managing director of an international real estate development company; Eric, 38, is senior counselor to the governor of Montana.) Stern occasionally takes in New York Yankees games with George Steinbrenner in the owner's box. "But if I'm going to watch anything besides the NBA, it's probably pro football," he says. "I'm a Giants fan."

In the past five years Stern has had a few arthroscopic knee surgeries and sometimes limps slightly. But he played recreational hoops as a youth and looks to be, and says he is, in excellent shape. He watches his diet and drinks alcohol sparingly, though on busy days he does ladle in the caffeine. He also has an incurable sweet tooth. (On the plane he tears into the disgusting-looking confection known as Swedish Fish.) He plays tennis regularly, often with his wife of 43 years, Dianne, a freelance writer. (They met through family friends in Teaneck and married during Stern's first year at Columbia Law School.) The two also enjoy taking long walks and hikes; on David's only real day off during the European tour, the couple legged it for hours through the streets of Paris.