O'Donnell: David Stern's handling of 'The Michael Jordan Crisis of 1993' might have been his greatest feat
IF NOTHING ELSE, David Stern departed to join celestial company.
When the longtime commissioner of the NBA died Wednesday, he was immediately hailed as a peer of the most impacting overseers in the history of professional sports in America.
The existing exacta box had been no less than Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Pete Rozelle.
Stern is a worthy contender as the greatest of them all.
Landis was a theatrical federal judge from Chicago best known for his thoroughly extrajudicial handling of the 1919-21 MLB imaging problem forever designated as "The Black Sox Scandal."
Rozelle was the boy wonder who brought the NFL into an age of massive TV revenue sharing and was a critical operative in the 1966 merger of the NFL and the menacingly well-resourced AFL.
Both were extraordinarily facile men of their times.
But did either so efficiently manage such a vast array of challenges and visions as Stern?
"His legacy is so wide-ranging," said Brian McIntyre - the accomplished Chicago native who was at Stern's side from tipoff to buzzer as the NBA's executive VP of communications.
"He grew the game and the NBA to unimaginable heights," McIntyre told The Daily Herald.
"He leaves a league with a solid conscience and an unlimited future, a far cry from the league he inherited."
At the time of his ascendancy to commissioner in 1984, Stern also inherited a transcendent force who would bring both acclaim and agita to his basket-based branch of show business.
That would be Michael Jordan, the wild hare from Wilmington, North Carolina.
There is no question that Jordan's inspirational talent and aura allowed Stern's NBA to put its off-court excesses of the 1980s behind and greatly accelerate its global growth.
But there is also little doubt that aspects of Jordan's personal excesses brought the league to the precipice of unprecedented scandal in 1993.
That was the sordid spring when tales of Jordan's gambling and gaming debts spun into a strange summer that bottomed with the murder of James Jordan, Michael's father.
Two months later, moments after throwing out the first pitch of the White Sox's ALCS vs. Toronto, Jordan - at the absolute peak of his basketball mastery - suddenly "retired."
Many questions were asked but none of the right ones were fully answered or investigated.
In December 1993, Jordan began his distractingly quixotic dalliance with baseball.
A neat 15 months later, he was back with the Bulls, to bookend three more championships.
Whimsical pursuit of his father's diamond dream or a remarkably creative suspension imagineered by such brilliant thinkers as Stern, Nike's Phil Knight, Jerry Reinsdorf and David Falk, Jordan's agent?
Think any who know the full facts are ever going to talk?
As All-America spook Allen Dulles once said: "The best covert operations stay just that from inception to infinity."
Stern's genius for consensus and thinking above the rim now belong to the mythology of the NBA.
But his most compelling feat may have been the summer when Jordan was saved from himself.
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• Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com.