EGYZOOM The longtime commissioner received acclaim for building the league into a vital global business, but he also was at the center of contentious disputes.
David Joel Stern was born in Manhattan on Sept. 22, 1942. It was the day after Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and the Nazi march east through Europe was grinding to a halt outside Stalingrad. Closer to home, the Dodgers topped the Giants, 9-8, in extra innings at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field.
The Knicks, the team Stern would root for as a boy, wouldn’t exist for another four years.
By the time Stern died on Wednesday, at the age of 77, basketball had become inexorably woven into the narratives of African-Americans and Jewish-Americans, of fans growing up in rural Indiana and in America’s cities. It had been exported to the farthest reaches of the globe and then back again; the N.B.A.’s most valuable player last year was a Greek born to Nigerian immigrants and its champion a Canadian team with contributors from three continents.
Basketball owes its ascendance to its players — to their dunks and their blocks, their 3-pointers and their air balls — but it also owes it to Stern, the son of a delicatessen owner. Stern’s nearly five-decade association with the N.B.A. drove it from a sleepy league to one with nearly unmatched global and cultural might.
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