The World According To David Stern

Though Stern's inner compass in leading the NBA has been largely unerring, he has trouble finding his way back from somewhere if his wife is not along. As he enters hotels, for example, he invariably makes the wrong turn to get to the elevator, though he makes it decisively. "He has no sense of direction," says Dianne, "yet he always knows where he's going."

Had the client list of Proksauer Rose, the Manhattan firm at which Stern began working immediately after graduating from law school in 1966, not included the NBA, the commissioner believes he would have remained, quite happily, "an intense litigator," one active in the New York State Bar Association. Instead the young Stern was assigned to NBA matters and eventually left Proksauer Rose, in '78, to become the league's general counsel. He was named executive vice president in '80 and the league's fourth commissioner in '84, succeeding Larry O'Brien.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan helped Stern overcome the league's severe financial and image problems and usher in an era of unprecedented popularity. As they began to retire, there was talk that the commissioner would exit as well. But while Stern says he has had "myriad opportunities" to run companies and write his memoirs, he insists that he has never come close to leaving the hot seat.

"Sure, July Fourth comes and, man, you're really tired," he says. "But [in the NBA] there is always something to challenge you, always something to keep you young. I'm being completely honest when I say I'm not even thinking about retiring." The consensus among his employees is that he's telling the truth.

Outspoken though he often is, in public Stern stays away from politics. The wellspring of his power, after all, is the NBA owners, some of whom have blue-state views and some red-state. But in private the commissioner leans to the left. As he sits in the drab Domodedovo Airport lobby, waiting for his documents to be checked and his harried caravan of drivers to arrive, he sees Vice President Dick Cheney scowling on a Russian TV station. Stern lets out a hoot of derision.

"With our leadership," he says, "we are in as big a trouble in this country right now as I can ever remember." As he and Dianne make their way through the New York Times each morning, they swap sections, compare notes and generally commiserate about the Administration in Washington.

Over the past months the NBA drafted a mission statement of which Stern is exceedingly proud. It talks about values and social responsibility, and it pledges that NBA employees will "conduct ourselves in accordance with the highest standards of honesty, truthfulness, ethics and fair dealing." Stern's most satisfying recent business relationship has been with Adidas, which also espouses a make-the-world-better philosophy.

Now, there is plenty of room for cynicism when bottom-liners start talking altruism. And the many NBA haters in the U.S. would suggest that players such as Stephen Jackson are living repudiations of the league's mission statement. But Stern holds that the document has had a "profound effect" on him and on those who work for him. He hardly gets through a day without mentioning the NBA's Basketball Without Borders program, which each summer sends dozens of players to conduct clinics in far-flung and often impoverished parts of the world, and he fumes when the league is criticized for too often airing its NBA Cares spots. "We're going to keep right on showing them," the commissioner says pugnaciously, "because social responsibility is extremely important to us."

It troubles him, then, that the league is increasingly doing business in countries with abhorrent or at least questionable government policies. Three days after Burns welcomes the NBA delegation to Spaso House following the Clippers' 94--75 loss to CSKA (formerly known as the Red Army team), the ambassador stands in the rain among other mourners at the funeral of Anna Politkovskaya, the 13th journalist killed since Russian president Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. Politkovskaya, like the others, was critical of Putin's government. (Her killer or killers had not been apprehended at week's end.) Stern is intimately familiar with the details of the murder and decries it--suspecting, as many do, that government officials had a hand in it. Yet Russia, now fertile ground for capitalists, is a prime NBA business target. "We have to think about opening an office here," Stern says as he rides through the streets of Moscow with Rob Millman, an NBA International vice president.

China presents an even greater conflict for Stern because it has both colossal business potential and a terrible human rights record. The commissioner has traveled throughout the country, both for business and to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, and there is no doubt that China is critical to the global future of the NBA. Yet its repressive policies fly in the face of the league's mission statement.