I say that he was one of Us because I really believe he felt the best part of his job was the privilege of attending any pro basketball game he wished, anywhere, any time. He was, after all, just another kid who had grown up in Manhattan. He was a son of a deli owner and, yes, a Knicks fan.
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“In my mind, I made the most of it,” he told me in a podcast we did in the summer of 2017, three years into his retirement from the job he had held since 1984. “I love the fans. It was fun to experience the different arenas and different reaction to the fans and to see all the passion people have.”
Boston, of course, was a frequent and favored stop.
“It was fun,” he said. “They might be booing me when I was escorted out of the building. The cops would say, ‘That’s nothing. You should see the hard time they give the hockey commissioner.’ ”
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For the last 27 years, that target has been Gary Bettman, a one-time Stern deputy NBA commissioner.
Like the rest of us, he looked back on the 1980s with pleasure, if only because he knew where he was going to be every spring.
“I thought the nature of June was that we would start in Boston or LA and go from there,” he explained.
It would never have been in his best interest to identify any particular players as his favorites. But I can tell you he pretty much worshipped at the shrine of Bill Russell. And he was properly grateful to Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan — the Holy Trinity of 1980s basketball — for being the key vehicles as the NBA was growing from what had been a glorified mom-and-pop enterprise when he became commissioner to the international conglomerate it is today.
The NBA masthead when I started covering the league in 1969 consisted of eight names, three of whom were secretaries. When Stern was hired as the league’s general counsel in 1978, he was its 24th employee. By 2000, his league masthead was up to 589.
And that’s before getting into such entities as the NBA Store Merchandising Group, NBA Entertainment, International Television & Business Development, or the myriad other offshoots. And offices in London, Taipei, and Hong Kong, among others.
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David Stern didn’t create the modern NBA by himself, but he was its driving force. He didn’t claim to have all the answers. What he did best, he told me long ago, was ask questions, and among those people whose minds he probed were fellow commissioners, starting with Pete Rozelle.
“Smoked too much, and lousy at tennis,” he joked. “But the most gracious of commissioners. Ask a question, and ‘open sesame.’ He’d send you to the right man on his staff.”
Stern had relationships with all nine fellow commissioners during his three-decade tenure. Who knew?
What he did know back in 1984 was that the NBA was not being properly appreciated.
“We always thought we were sitting on a vein of gold,” he said. “We felt basketball would travel, and would travel better than any sport except soccer, and that we have to do it justice.”
Before long, he would find himself with the Milwaukee Bucks in Milan for a game. The Italian team captain was Mike D’Antoni, with, as Stern recalls “his shorty-shorts.” The seed had been planted.
There was another moment informing Stern that he had been on the right path. The 1986 league meetings were in Phoenix. The big thing on the agenda was listening to expansion proposals from seven cities. Stern and the Board of Governors were absolutely blown away by the quality and fervor of the proposals.
Stern emerged to meet with the assembled media, myself included. Alluding to the famous Groucho Marx remark that “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member,” Stern announced, “I feel the reverse of Groucho — I think if these many people want to join the club, we should let them in.”
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Within three years, Charlotte, Miami, Orlando, and Minnesota were all paid-up members of David’s Club.
But the first international “eureka!” came in what was then the Soviet Union state of Georgia. The year was 1988. The Cold War was very much alive.
“We go to Georgia and the crowd is rooting for the Hawks,” Stern said. “And they especially liked Spud Webb. The fans in Soviet Georgia had seen Spud Webb win the Slam Dunk championship on pirated Turkish television.”
The ultimate breakthrough was the 1992 Olympics and the unveiling of the Dream Team, a concept he had nothing to do with.
“Boris Stankovic was the head of FIBA, the international governing body,” Stern explained. “He came to see me and [deputy] Russ Granik, and he said, ‘I’m in charge of world basketball, except for the best 350 players in the world, who are in the NBA. Do us the honor of playing in the Olympics so we can get better by playing against the best.’ And we said, ‘OK.’ ”
Implementation was a bit more complicated, but when it was over and the Dream Team had accomplished the Boris Stankovic mission, there was no turning back. There are now more than 100 international players in the NBA in a given year.
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“People think it was revenge for losing the 1988 gold in Seoul,” Stern said. “Nothing was further from the truth.”
His association with the NBA began in 1966 when he was hired out of Columbia Law School by the firm of Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn, which just happened to represent the NBA. As such, he took depositions from the likes of Red Auerbach, Eddie Gottlieb, Ben Kerner, and Fred Zollner, all early NBA pioneers.
He would preside over an NBA in which every ownership had come in under his watch.
“You could say I’m sort of the connective tissue of the NBA,” he pointed out.
Look, you can access the many Stern accomplishments from the voluminous tributes that are out there. You can also annotate the failings and complaints. Nobody’s perfect, and David Stern did not claim to be.
I am here to mourn the loss of a clever, witty, and charming man who always showed respect and appreciation for the work we do, or try to do. It is a fact that one of his first moves as commissioner was to hire Brian McIntyre, someone we scribes all knew and respected, as his chief PR director. That told us something right away.
You know what one of his last acts as NBA commissioner was? He went on David Letterman’s show and did a “Top 10 Things I Learned” list (No. 7: “When international diplomacy is required, call Dennis Rodman”). I can’t quite see Rozelle, Tagliabue, Selig, or, God forbid, Goodell doing that.
We stood next to each other at Red Auerbach’s burial site, pouring handfuls of dirt on the casket.
“The rabbis always say the best part of the graveside ceremonies is the throwing of the dirt,” he explained, “because that’s the one favor you can’t return.”
Now it’s his turn. So long, Commish.
Bob Ryan’s column appears regularly in the Globe. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.
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