I waited a couple of years before I dared tell Walter that quaint story; even then, he blanched.
And now, but a generation later, and a successor of Walter’s, a lawyer named David Stern, the inspired son of delicatessen proprietors, stands, indisputably, as the lord of the realm of basketball, secure in the faith that it is only a matter of time before hoops, of all things, passes soccer as the No. 1 game on the face of the earth. There’s a wonderful irony to this, too, as supercilious foreigners have always carried on about what agnostic sporting primitives Americans are, failing to fall down before the great god futbol. And here, in the end, it will be the humble YMCA peach-basket game that will prevail upon the globe.
There are a number of reasons to account for this. Not the least is that while soccer is wonderful exercise, it has been exposed for the boring cotillion it is, now that it must actually compete for young sight-bite minds against more antic modern attractions like basketball-as well as hockey and American football. Basketball thrives on its full-throated Americanism. “Talk about the decline of America, the balance of payments, all that,” Stern says, “and the fact is that the world still loves our culture.”
Moreover, like baseball, soccer is still run more by defenders of the faith than by entrepreneurs. The NBA, though, means business; it even made a happy marriage of convenience with FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, blithely ceding the rules of the game in international competition, so long as the NBA can control the ballyhoo. As Stern characterizes this, with only some smirks: “We are exploitative purists.” And so, now we find the NBA on TV in 90 countries–even Armenia, Greenland, Kuwait, Zimbabwe-as the league’s product catalog has swelled to a glossy 248 pages. “The NBA is now a venerable brand on a global basis,” Stern says. “We’re the Hard Rock Cafe, we’re Burberry and Polo.”
The shrine itself travels, too. While Stern avows he has no designs to “plant the flag” with franchises abroad, regular season games are scheduled in Japan, preseason tournaments in Europe. It is maintained that when Larry Bird signed autographs for two hours straight in Madrid in 1990 he thereby broke the Iberian Open autograph record previously held by Sophia Loren. To go with the NBA Olympics, which NBC baldly asserts will be the most-watched event in the history of our of the NBA will also start playing in the FIBA World Championships in ‘94. Stern can get a bit precious sometimes. He likes to call NBA arenas “our 27 theme parks,” and the NBA coaches who run X-and-O clinics about the world are sharing “our technology” with a grateful humankind.
Soccer isn’t grateful. The world-soccer juggernaut, FIFA, has not only scheduled the World Cup in the heathen United States in ‘94, but after a return to the more faithful precincts of Europe in ‘98, the cup is almost certain to be assigned to Japan in ‘02-as soccer tries desperately to mine what rare growth markets it has left. But that sport suffers from an aging fandom with the wrong demographics, and families are put off by hooligans and wretched old arenas. Meanwhile, glitzy basketball looks at Asia and sees more than 50 percent of the population under 25-and all of them comfortable using their hands, as God intended, both to play games and to reach into their pockets for money.
All of this has kind of sneaked up. It was hardly a decade ago when the NBA was on its back. Several teams were in imminent danger of folding, and the public generally sneered at the NBA as too many overpaid black guys strung out on drugs. As recently as 1984, McDonald’s wouldn’t even touch Michael Jordan for a local Chicago commercial, lest any association with a black basketball player tarnish the pristine Mickey D image.
There was much that turned the NBA around and propelled it into the world Walter Kennedy always knew was waiting out there. The earlier simultaneous arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as some sort of hick and slick Americana checkerboard was as important to starting basketball back to acceptance as Babe Ruth’s home runs had been to baseball after the Black Sox scandal. Nevertheless, Stern was the tour guide. Those scorned pituitary freaks were suddenly acclaimed the most graceful, exciting performers in the world; and black became beautiful. In a very real sense, the NBA merely distilled the Stepin Fetchit comedy out of the Globetrotters and showcased the spontaneous, thrilling basketball that the Globies had always wowed the world with.
“We’re up to 92 percent capacity of attendance now,” Stern says. We’re running out of space here. “The American century may be over, but the American showtime is just beginning.
