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NBA players were the toast of the Continent and the league was flooding Europe and Asia with sneakers, T-shirts, and hoodies. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Stern, to his credit, has never claimed otherwise. It wasn’t that the idea of NBA players in the Olympics slipped onto the NBA’s back burner; it wasn’t even on the stove. Yes, Stern saw the hypocrisy in the rules against competition—Germany’s Detlef Schrempf, who played in the NBA for about $500,000 a year, was considered a professional, while Brazil’s Oscar Schmidt, who played in Italy for about $1 million a year, was considered an amateur and eligible for Olympic play. Everyone saw the hypocrisy except the empty suits who ran the Olympics. But the commissioner couldn’t imagine adding the Olympics to an already full plate.
    “David and I thought that global basketball came with as many burdens as benefits,” says Granik today, “and that’s what we told Boris.”
    However, when Stankovic suggested a competition that would include an NBA team and a couple of FIBA teams, a kind of first step, Stern said yes. “We’ll host it,” he said immediately. It was out of that meeting that the first McDonald’s Open, which was eventually held in Milwaukee in 1987, was born. But it was never Stern’s plan to get his players into the Olympics, in large part because he faced far more pressing issues.
    The tide was beginning to turn by the time of Stankovic’s visit, but the NBA was still on relatively shaky ground. The popularhow-bad-was-the-NBA? nugget to offer is the 1980 NBA Finals, which was on tape delay even though it pitted the Los Angeles Lakers (rookie Magic Johnson, superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) against the Philadelphia 76ers (Julius Erving). But there are other ways to measure the NBA’s low-water marks. When Rick Welts was hired in 1982 to head up sponsorship—“Like all of David’s guys back then, I was perfect for the job because I was young, dumb, and poor,” Welts says today—the NBA literally had no business plan. It sold nothing to no one. Welts and the other young, dumb, and poor soldiers found a nation that not only didn’t care about the NBA but downright loathed it.
    “The perception was that the NBA was mismanaged, too many African Americans, too many drug accusations, too many teams going out of business,” Welts told me in 2011. “I’d call advertising agencies, and to get a return call was remarkable if you had NBA attached to your name. The priority was NFL, Major League Baseball, and college sports. The NHL would get the calls before they’d even think of investing in the NBA.”
    As his young band of committed warriors tried to chip away at the NBA’s image, it was always Stern cajoling, conniving, caterwauling. “The power of everybody saying the same thing over and over again is pretty significant,” says Welts. “I’d come home beaten and battered after twelve hours of rejection, and the phone would ring in my room at the Summit Hotel on Lexington Avenue at ten o’clock. It would be David, and after fifteen minutes I’d be charged up and ready to go again.”
    Stern is so commonly called the best sports commissioner ever that he has all but retired the term, but there was certainly a bit of serendipity in his rise. It was under his watch, after all, that Michael/Magic/Larry descended from the heavens, and at the end of the day, the only thing a marketing man can do is shine a brighter light on the stage. If the people don’t like what they see, nothing is going to happen. But Stern and others in his office figured out how to maximize the appeal of these players and leverage their popularity.
    And while he didn’t see the full road ahead of him, the commissioner always kept an ear open to the sermons by the Inspector of Meat, who thought that great things would happen if the United States was able to put its stars together, bundle them up in red, white, and blue packaging, and send them off to