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By day, David Stern is a quiet, unassuming sports commissioner, by day pulling down an eight-figure salary while driving the National Basketball Association to places like Oklahoma City and, eventually, New York City in a lushly carpeted and upholstered 1,300-square-foot uber-cubicle in a Manhattan office building.
By night, though, he is the masked crusader, crime fighter and superhero, The Old Coot. His power: the ability to cloud men's minds by pretending to dodder, wobble and occasionally forget where he has just been.
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| Is this really necessary? David Stern says no. (Getty Images) |
Stern's plan: the sound of crickets, the gentle roll of tumbleweeds, and the banning of fire accelerants, so that nobody loses their hearing, eyesight or skin during pregame pyrotechnic displays.
To his credit, The Old Coot admits that he is, in fact, an old coot, but that's what he wants you to think. It is how he gets you to do his bidding.
"I think that the noise, the fire, the smoke is a kind of assault that we should seriously consider reviewing whether it's really necessary given the quality of our game," he told Koreen.
"It may be that these are the maniacal rantings of a fan from a different era, and I recognize that. But I'm sitting there, waiting for the next cannon to go off and then the fire heats up the arena, so the temperature in the arena raises by 15 degrees. That's if you can see it, because you're still waiting for the smoke, which is chemical, to clear, which invariably isn't done until the end of the half."
Koreen did not indicate that he tried to interrupt at any point, but he might have already lost the will to resist the insidious power of persuasion of The Coot.
"I always bite my tongue because I say, 'I'm not the demographic that likes to be assaulted by loud rap, smoke, pyrotechnics and chemicals.' I'm outdated," The Coot said, as a gentle amnesiac fog began to leak from his gray pinstriped cowl. "But I think it's time for us to say, 'Hey guys, let's look at it one more time.' And then we can talk about entertainment as well, but that's a subject for another day."
Koreen then regained his powers of sentience to ask about in-game music. It was an earnest but feeble attempt to regain his equilibrium, as The Coot's powers are not to be mocked or trifled.
"How do you spell Simon and Garfunkel?" The Coot said, knowing full well that while Koreen tried to mentally spell Simon, his guard would be down for the rest of the soliloquy. "Or Billy Joel? Or The Beach Boys? I'm lost. But that's OK. I appreciate it is their new-age music, the hip-hop, the rap. It's fine.
"The reality is I think that what has happened is that very well-intentioned people feel that it's their obligation to root their team on to victory, to urge them. What they do is that they think if you turn up the loud speaker, it's going to help them perform better, even though there are babies in the building."
Aha! The Coot was saving infants, as any good superhero should. Nobody could object to his plan to Sinatra-ize basketball any longer. It was For The Children!
