newjerseynewsroom.com

BY EVAN WEINER

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

About 120 days ago, National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern was taken to task by the “bad” Gumbel, Bryant – as opposed to the “good” Gumbel, Greg Gumbel – for his leadership during the NBA lockout as the industry's chief negotiator. Things were apparently not going well for the players in the talks, and Gumbel went on a rant as part of his closing remarks on his HBO show. (It is a bit amazing that Time Warner allowed Gumbel to rip Stern considering that Time Warner owns Turner Broadcasting and is a television partner of the NBA).

Gumbel evoked the days of slavery by saying Stern was “modern plantation overseer” and “treating NBA men like they were his boys.” The NBA Lockout eventually ended, and the season started on Christmas Day. Stern did what HIS owners wanted him to do: get concessions from the players and a better money deal for the owners - what he's paid to do. He is not a warm, fuzzy character that plays Santa Claus or even Walt Disney for basketball fans or the sports media. (Stern had remarked to this reporter in the 1990s that he wanted all of his 27 NBA arenas to be like Disneyland).

But games returned, and the vitriol against Stern has disappeared. Amnesia has set in as the charges by Gumbel, which were repeated by various sportswriters, have mysteriously vanished. The bad Gumbel's statement exists on video and can be accessed on devices globally, but Stern has seemingly been forgiven by sportswriters, who like a junkie, could not live without their candy of choice---NBA games.

So the NBA came back to good TV ratings, filled buildings and caught a real break because the Knicks, not Charlotte or Utah, signed Jeremy Lin, and he dazzled the New York media and a Knicks fan base hungry for winning basketball. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was right that Jeremy Lin's performances would have gone unnoticed in Charlotte. But Lin was in the right place at the right time with the right tabloids proclaiming "Lin-sanity" on both the front and back pages of two wretched newspapers, Mort Zuckerman's Daily News and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as well as a monkey-see, monkey-do TV and radio group that cannot figure out what stories to cover until they look at the New York tabloids.

Now it is the All Star Game break, and all eyes turn to Orlando where the league is celebrating a festival weekend. Stern's covenant with the fans’ doctrine survived the lockout, and it is a great weekend.

There is no shock that the league is in Orlando for the big cultural event. Orlando was a troubled franchise owned by the billionaire Rick DeVos, whose family fortune came from the sale of Amway products. Rick DeVos is one of those billionaires who thinks he knows best and aims to change public education in Florida and elsewhere, to put it politely.

Apparently DeVos is of the thinking that too many public dollars go to fund schools and pay professional salaries including those of teachers. So the very right wing, conservative DeVos should be against all sorts of public financing, including the taxpayers funding an arena whose main tenant is a private business---like DeVos’s Orlando Magic basketball team.

Surely billionaire DeVos has enough money to fund building a plant for his product, and yet he is on record in wanting to change public education funding. So DeVos no doubt would not want taxpayers in an area loaded with foreclosures and high unemployment not to reach in their collective pockets and fund a public building for a private enterprise?

Of course not.