Kieran Shannon: The summer of 1984 changed sport forever
Picture: Match Michael Images Games Basketball Olympic A Spain Against Jordan Usa 1984 Via Player Getty During Afp
Sport, as a writer once observed, is unscripted, unchoreographed, played out in real time. Its plot points, “the great pivotal moments that echo for decades”, can transpire at any time.
But sometimes a heap of them come along at once. In the one year. Or even the one summer. Like the one we had 40 years ago.
Many decades after that particular summer had passed, that writer, L. John Wertheim, met with the former NBA commissioner David Stern in an office in midtown Manhattan. He was writing a book which for its cover would feature images of some of the icons of that summer and indeed the entire decade it landed smack in the middle of: Springsteen, Prince, Gretzy, Magic and Bird, and dwarfing them all, Michael Jordan.
At 76, Stern was five years retired from the post he’d made his own and a year later he would die. But that afternoon his intellect was as sharp as ever, challenging Wertheim to defend the premise of his book.
Eventually Stern succumbed. The more and more he thought of it, it was remarkable how sport had changed so much since 1984 – in large part because the summer of ’84 changed sport so much. They weren’t merely Glory Days as Wertheim’s book would be entitled. As it subtitle spelt out, those ’90 days changed sports and culture forever’.
Central to that transformation was the man Stern famously announced as the Chicago Bulls pick at that year’s NBA draft, and it is with Jordan that the book starts.
In the early days of that summer Wertheim was just a 13-year-old kid while Jordan himself was still something of a secret too, but as fate would have it their paths would beautifully, if briefly, converge. The US Olympic basketball team was hosting its trials and practice sessions at the home campus of its head coach, Bobby Knight, and it so happened Wertheim was a native of that same sleepy, midwest town of Bloomington, Indiana.
And so he and other locals for a couple of months would mix with these extraordinary tall, athletic young men, some of them destined to be millionaires. Those natives who could drive would give Patrick Ewing a lift back from him catching a screening of The Karate Kid at the local mall.
Wertheim couldn’t drive but he could go into the same store where Jordan would buy a smoothie. Even then there was a magnetism and likeable confidence about him, the way he’d joke easily and quickly dispense nicknames. One day he spotted Wertheim carrying a tennis racket. “Hey, John McEnroe!” he said, miming tennis strokes. “When are we gonna play?!”
A few days later Wertheim and his friends devised a sophisticated plan to sneak into team practice only to realise it was unnecessary: in an innocent age unimaginable now, every door was unlocked. And so they sat in the bleachers, watching in awed silence. Later that evening Wertheim met Jordan around the town and mentioned a fierce dunk in which he’d blown past Ewing. “You know what, John McEnroe?” Jordan said, smiling as usual. “That wasn’t even my best dunk!”
That was all before the Olympics. So was the NBA draft. If the Olympics had been before the draft, there’s no way the Portland Trailblazers would have picked Sam Bowie ahead of Jordan. In Los Angeles a teammate of Jordan’s noted his athleticism and star power was the equal of as any athlete in any event, even Carl Lewis.
After that the days of Michael Jordan being to amble carefree around a provincial town were dwindling. A sports agency called Spot-Bilt, with a Hall of Fame footballer on its payroll to help recruit talent, was hovering. “This kid at North Carolina, he’s the next me,” that Hall of Fame footballer, OJ Simpson, would observe. “We should go for him.” Nike were thinking the same.
Jordan’s shoe deal was only one of numerous events that made the summer of ’84 a watershed in the commerce of sport. Two months out from the start of the LA Olympics, the cover of Newsweek ran the headline: Are The Games Dead? The only other city to bid for the 1984 games had been Tehran; everyone else had been frightened by the debt Montreal ran up and would only clear in 2006. But for Los Angelese, a local business man called Peter Ueberroth was identified to run it at a profit and he in turn identified two ways that could possibly happen: by relying heavily on sponsorship and on television rights.
The previous winter Olympics in Lake Placid had over 400 sponsors but raised only $10 million. Ueberroth went with far fewer sponsors who would have to offer far more money. And so Coke, for the price of $12.6 million became the official soft-drink sponsor of the LA Games, a model used by every major sports event since.
That same summer ESPN, the only sports-dedicated network in the world and operating at a $80 million loss, decided to charge its affiliates a modest fee of 19 cents per subscriber per month. By the end of that summer it was bought by ABC for $200 miillon and today is worth over $40 billion, making it the most profitable media organisation in history.
That’s in large part because it bought television rights. Before the summer of ’84 college football TV deals were exclusively owned and negotiated by the NCAA. But a Supreme Court ruling ended that monopoly. Individual colleges and conferences could negotiate their own deals. Soon some of them were making more than the entire NCAA contract had.
That summer of ’84 was also the first time we’d hear the words ‘Super Saturday’. Only back then it wasn’t football of either the American or association kind. Instead it was reserved for tennis and its US Open: a five-setter semi-final between John McEnroe against Jimmy Connors and a final Martina Navratilova against Chris Evert. What CBS rolled out that day was the longest continuous coverage of a sporting competition in US television history. Tennis would soon lose that honour and prestige but it provided that template.
It also produced probably the most impressive sportsperson of that summer and in Wertheim’s book, even more than Jordan. In 1984 Martina Navratilova was virtually unbeatable – and derided. For hiring a nutritionist and cutting out meat. For working with a bodybuilding coach. For using analytics to study her own game and that of opponents. “In the eyes of jealous opponents, sceptical media and ungenerous fans,” Wertheim notes, “it all bordered on cheating.” And then there was the fact she was so open about her sexuality and in her viewpoints. TV might not have liked that – NBC would avoid covering her early-round games.
She was, of course, way ahead of her time. In 2013 when Jason Collins in his last season as an NBA player let it be known he was gay he referenced Navratilova as an inspiration. The Williams sisters would use and display power and strength without apology. Every elite individual or team sport athlete now has a team of experts. Some of them are even happy to talk about social issues, regardless whether Republicans will still buy their shoes.
Back in ’84 though she was out there alone. And undeterred. “She went about her business wearing a carefree smile,” as Wertheim notes. Just as he’d see a pre-fame Jordan amble the streets of his hometown in Bloomington that same pivotal summer.