Globetrotter for the ages

The world's most powerful sports commissioner died on the first day of a new decade, so I suppose we should assign some symbolism to that. Something about how a fresh decade mirrors the fresh start that began 35 years ago. four years into a different decade -- the 1980s.

That's when David Stern walked into the mess that was the National Basketball Association, and commenced wielding an iron fist that only occasionally was cloaked in a velvet glove. You perhaps have to go back to the relentlessly grim Kenesaw Mountain Landis to find an overseer who consolidated and wielded power as ruthlessly as Stern, and was as feared by owners, players and management alike for doing so.

Along the way, of course, he grabbed a floundering concern by its ear and dragged it yowling into the future. If his sneer-and-snarl style of governance rendered him famously unlikeable at times, his vision for what an athletic league could be was the far more enduring legacy.

To begin with, he rebooted a league groping for an identity and overshadowed by the college game -- it wasn't all that long before Stern assumed command that NBA Finals games were aired on tape delay -- into a league driven by its stars. Recognizing what he had in the Larry Birds and Magic Johnsons and Michael Jordans of his domain, he turned the NBA into the Larry 'n' Magic 'n' MJ 'n' them show.

Then he took it global, selling inexpensive NBA highlight packages to places such as Argentina, where young boys such as Manu Ginobili saw them and began to dream of something besides soccer. Pretty soon Yao Ming arrived from China, and Dirk Nowitzki from Germany, and Toni Kukoc from Croatia. And then there was Vlade Divac from Serbia and Drazen Petrovic from Croatia and the game was everywhere, the game was in Rome and Paris and Split and Belgrade and Beijing and Rio de Janeiro.

But if all of that is David Stern's legacy, so, too, is this: Irony.

Because what the iron fist created was a world in which the iron fist couldn't rule anymore. The league went from top-down to down-top, with the players Stern used to sell his brand wielding the power that gave them to market their own brands and cut their own deals with their employers. And so there is a direct thread that leads from Larry 'n' Magic 'n' MJ 'n' them to LeBron arranging a bro-fest with Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade in Miami. And to Kevin Durant chasing rings with Golden State, and Paul George and Kawhi Leonard joining forces with the Clippers in L.A., and on and on.

Thanks to David Stern, all of that happened. And thanks to David Stern, the Autocrat Who Must Be Obeyed, we got that disgraceful episode in China a few months back, when the NBA Stern created was humiliated on its Chinese goodwill tour by a Beijing government miffed because an NBA general manager had expressed mild support for anti-China demonstrators in Hong Kong.

The league's craven submission to that -- led by LeBron -- is perhaps the greatest irony of all. It was, after all, trying desperately to expand its Chinese market, an instinct of which Stern not only would have approved but himself instilled.

And so the man who bowed to no one taught the league he ruled like a pasha how to bow. The world is full of wonders.