Did current NBA commissioner David Stern make the difference? What was the turning point?
BS: It was more a turning point of perception, which is what I try to lay out in the book. There’s this fairy tale now that [Larry] Bird and Magic [Johnson] rode in on their white horses and saved the league, and it definitely helped, but I don’t think that was really the case. In their first year, almost half the conference finals games were tape-delayed. I think a much bigger issue was cable TV, and the fact that more and more games were being shown on cable, and people could actually see the teams. There was one season where they only showed four regular-season games. So it’s like, “How is a league going to catch on when four regular season games are on TV?” And that really helped. Also, SportsCenter really helped, just being able to see highlights of games—all of a sudden now you’re seeing the best pieces of games, and you’re seeing the best dunk in a game, and I think that kind of swayed people a little bit. And the ad campaigns that started running in 1982, where they started doi
