Given the Pandora's box he has chosen to open, it's worth wondering why David Stern could have possibly believed it was worth it.
What external forces are demanding that National Basketball Association players conform to a dress code when they're not actually playing the game? Who is really offended/repelled/surprised to see the same clothes on professional athletes that are on view in thousands of music videos, or inside any high school in North America?
Who's afraid of basketball players looking like who they are?
Those are all loaded questions because they play to issues of race and class and culture -- and those issues, in the early days of the 21st century, show absolutely no sign of abating. (Consider the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, when the great divide was temporarily laid bare.)
Basketball, more than any other sport, has been shaped by black Americans, not just in terms of its player base, which is 80-per-cent black, but also its style, its language, the very essence of the game. A sport of two-handed set shots evolved into its current, flamboyant form thanks to the improvisational skills of a series of breakout talents, the vast majority of whom were black.
That, almost everyone would agree, has been a very good thing for basketball, and historically a very good thing for the business of the NBA. The game's ability to appeal to the young, to exude hipness, to cross every cultural barrier, is what allowed it to evolve into the second true world sport. For years, those in charge of professional football, baseball and hockey dreamed of having that kind of sizzle, dreamed of being able to create their own Jordan, their own Magic or Shaq, and now, their own LeBron.
The influence of black American culture was a positive. And the veneer of black American street cred was a powerful marketing tool.
Stern would argue that what he's trying to do now is simply bring a sense of neatness, decorum and seriousness to his business -- a request no different than what so many other employers demand of their employees.
These aren't merely employees, though. They aren't popcorn vendors or bookkeepers. They're also the product, the value in the economic system. And this will inevitably be perceived, through that race/class/culture filter, as an effort to whiten up the NBA, to dilute its hip-hop aspect, to appeal to a white audience that might otherwise be scared off by the image of young, black men in street fashions.
The fact that the league last spring hired Matthew Dowd, a Republican campaign strategist who worked alongside Karl Rove, to collect data on the NBA's image problem in "red states," is pretty compelling evidence on that point. Not hard to imagine what kind of conclusions he might have drawn.
And maybe Allen Iverson's wardrobe, and his tattoos (no rules against those -- yet), carry with them a kind of thug symbolism that makes some people uncomfortable. But it's no more laden with implicit messages than the good old suit-and-tie, and given that this is a golden age for corporate criminals, who says a half Windsor is any more comforting than a great big fat gold chain?
There are practical considerations here. You wonder how Stern can simply impose a dress code from on high, since he isn't a franchise owner, he isn't responsible for anyone's paycheque. Hard to believe, to cite the obvious example, that Mark Cuban is on side with this.
Also notable is the silence of the basketball players' association, and its head, Billy Hunter. If hockey players can collectively resist being forced to wear visors during games, surely basketball players could collectively resist being told what clothes they have to wear while boarding the team bus.
But the larger issue is the perception that the NBA, a league largely run by white businessmen, and desperately in need of white, corporate customers, is trying to distance itself from the dominant culture of its stars. Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson said as much this week. "To a majority of these young men," he said to the L.A. Daily News, "the rap stars, hip-hop guys are really kind of like heroes or colleagues. And it's not the same audience. Our audience is corporate businessmen and businesswomen and kids. So it's a different audience that you're dealing with, and these players should be aware of that."
Consider the history of black Americans, and specifically of black American professional athletes -- first barred from big-league sports, then allowed in just as long as they deferred and "knew their place," then slowly emancipated because brave, tough folks like Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell and Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown and John Carlos were willing to fight back.
Thanks to those pioneers, this generation of black athletes has never had to think twice about the right to play, the right to share the enormous wealth or the right to be who they are. Now you're going to force them to put on a disguise so that white ticket buyers won't be offended?
Imagine how that's going to play.