Jersey guys

Sporting News, The, July 13, 1998 by Dave D'Alessandro

David Stern and Billy Hunter, two of the Garden State's finest, are well-matched opponents in the NBA's labor battle

Sometimes the importance of the occasion, like its drama, centers on the human equation: the essential factor of personality. Two people sometimes can learn more about each other's mind in a single, face-to-face discussion than in months of indirect correspondence.

And, for the most part, that's all that has transpired between David Stern and Billy Hunter so far-tepid rhetoric issued in the media, a few perfunctory encounters to lay out their agendas, a nodding acquaintance with' each other's formidability.

Now, with the circus closed for repairs, the NBA commissioner and the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association take center stage for the next few months and decide what kind of system they're all to be enslaved under for the next three-to-six seasons.

The pending negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement, conducted under the contentious shroud of an owner lockout, will do more than that, however. Though there are numerous players in this high-stakes game (deputy commissioner Russ Granik and chief legal eagle Jeff Mishkin on the league side, and antitrust lawyer Jeff Kessler and general counsel Bob Lanza on the union side) this summer essentially Will test the financial and moral imaginations of the leaders: two guys from New Jersey, both 55, both with exquisitely logical minds, both immensely skilled at persuasion, both with more substance than their natural gift of rhetoric would suggest. Two men with nothing--and everything--in common.

Stern you are familiar with. He is admired and he is feared. Everybody who knows him has stones, though few are brave enough to share them. Stern, however, is often hard for the rest of us to truly know: Despite his obvious gifts and considerable intelligence, he gracefully avoids self-promotion. The real David Stern is a mover, a driver, a charmer, a bully and a salesman par excellence.

But the real measure of a leader is what he gets done. Before Stern, the NBA was essentially a minor league: A majority of the 23 teams lost money the season (1983-84) before he took the job, and the inequality among them was threatening to tear it apart. Before Stern NBA Properties was a few guys in a back room trying to move a few T-shirts. And before Stern nobody had conceived of the salary cap, the draft lottery, All-Star Weekend and expansion into the global market.

Granik says: "The day David stopped being a lawyer and became a businessman was the day the NBA started turning around."

The man who will sit across from Stern at the bargaining table is a lawyer whose talent for handling complex cases earned him an appointment as a U.S. attorney during the Carter administration. Hunter was as comfortable sending a group of Hell's Angels to prison as he was with the decision to grant clemency for Patty Hearst just two of his actions as northern California's leading law-enforcement official

Before Hunter, the union, once led so skillfully by Larry Fleisher, had deteriorated into a babel of discordant viewpoints: Decertification movements threatened its very existence, and the competition among players and agents alike seemed destined to render it moot. Before Hunter, there was no hint of the solidarity the players show now, no voice to elucidate their commonality, and no foresight to build a strike fund or solicit the financial support of other player unions. And before Hunter, there was no leader that the players could trust since Charlie Grantham was fired over an expense-account dispute and Simon Gourdine sold out the middle-income veteran.

But which direction Hunter takes his constituency remains ambiguous, Inequities are inherent in any association that includes among its membership--from Tim Duncan to Tim Kempton--the interests of marquee players favored overwhelmingly over those of the average player. "He tried to that wedge between two before," Hunter of Stern.

As Stern says of Hunter, "He understands the issues extraordinarily well, and he is firmly devoted to his clients."

There will be times when Hunter feels like the hunted. Stern excels in turning confrontations did should be akin to Darrow-Bryan into something resembling Ali-Frazier.

"Beneath the veneer, David can be gruff and vicious," says Marc Fleisher, an agent who attended an occasional collective bargaining negotiation when his father ran the union. "... He always had a terrible temper."

Granik concedes that point but insists that a Sternian outburst is contrived for effect. "Temper describes someone who loses his cool. Alien David gives you a hard time, it's calculated."

Hunter has yet to shape his own image as a negotiator. But those who have worked with him during his two-year tenure describe him as unflappable, a man of agreeable countenance, and better informed than the World Almanac. From the moment he was interviewed, he won them over with his insistence that he would serve every player, and his argument was so convincing that even the Johnny Come Latelys to union business recognized why they all needed his representation and his message of solidarity.