He is allowed to be a fan again, which makes David Stern’s sacred task Friday night so enjoyable. Always, hidden beneath the professional veneer and the formal burden of the commissioner’s office was the kid who used to sit in the balcony seats, those 50-cent tickets acquired via the G.O. card that served as a Garden gateway for so many city kids.
His years helming the NBA, he was forced to take up other rooting interests.
“I would go to games and root for the referees, rooting that the game wasn’t determined by a missed call,” Stern says. “I would root that there were no fights, or that nobody would sustain an injury. I would root for the proper rotation of the [advertising] signage.”
He laughs at the absurdity of it.
“Being a fan of the games, and the teams and the players,” he says, “is much more fun.”
And that’s where it started for Stern, all the way up in the blues, inside the Old Garden at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, a die-hard Knicks fan in the middle and late ’50s, when hope was as tenuous then as it is now, when it didn’t matter because this was his team and these were his players. Especially No. 4 for the home team.
That was Carl Braun. He’d gone from Garden City High to Colgate, drank a cup of coffee in the Yankees’ farm system before hurting his arm, missed two NBA seasons to military duty, then returned to the Knicks in 1952 to become a perennial All-Star on a perennial also-ran.
And captured a permanent place inside the imagination of young David Joel Stern.
“I didn’t just root for Carl Braun,” Stern says. “I wanted to be Carl Braun,”
Friday night, inside Springfield Symphony Hall, Stern will pay Braun back for a childhood overstocked with warm memories in the most appropriate way possible: He will serve as Braun’s presenter when the ex-Knicks great, who died at 82 in 2010, will formally be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
For Stern, who entered the Hall himself five years ago, it is just the latest surreal turn he has enjoyed in a full basketball lifetime. He has had the pleasure of shaking hands with many of his boyhood heroes on their special night. He presented Dikembe Mutombo in 2015. But this one is different. This one is special.
“Have you ever seen the way Carl would shoot the basketball?” Stern asks. “I wanted to shoot like Carl. Exactly like him. Jimmy Baechtold [a teammate for five years on the Knicks], he had the jump shot, the classic, sweet jumper. But Carl’s was something else entirely.”
Most of the time, Braun’s outside shot began with a running start, and with both hands over his head, culminating in an uncanny two-handed set shot. In most of the clips you can find on YouTube — and just about all of the clips available in David Stern’s memory — he makes a good 90 or 95 percent of those shots.
Stern was a sports fan beyond the Garden. He became a big fan of the baseball Giants for practical reasons. In those days, Ballantine was the beer that sponsored the Yankees, Schaefer backed the Dodgers. Rheingold was the Giants’ beer. And when the Rheingold salesman came to call on Stern’s Delicatessen at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, he made a smart play.
“He was very forthcoming with Giants’ tickets,” Stern says.
Still, the Giants bailed on New York when Stern was 15. The Knicks stayed. The Stern family moved west, too, but only as far as Teaneck, N.J. His fiercest loyalty remained.
“The Knicks were my team,” he says. “Harry ‘The Horse’ Gallatin was my center. And Carl Braun was my scorer.”
As the years passed following Braun’s 1962 retirement (in which he won a title in his only year as a Celtic), though, he would confide in Stern — by now a trusted friend, one of the platinum perks of the commissioner’s office — that he had but one regret in his career.
“He saw a lot of other guys who got the call from the Hall of Fame,” Stern said, “and he said he often asked himself, wistfully, ‘Maybe I should have shot the ball more?’ ”
Braun averaged 14.1 points for his Knicks career and he led the Knicks in scoring his first six years with the club before Gallatin and Richie Guerin and Kenny Sears took over more of the scoring burden. He made five All-Star teams.
And in the same way Derek Jeter’s most unique legacy was bequeathing to million of kids in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut his signature batting stance, Braun would do the same for an awful lot of kids who, like Stern, couldn’t get enough of the way he launched his shot. None of that, Braun feared, would land him a spot in Springfield. On April 6, the Hall’s Veterans Committee proved him wrong. Friday night, that becomes official.
And Braun’s biggest fan will enjoy it every bit as much as his family will.
“He deserves it,” Stern says. “Carl Braun is finally getting his due. It’s bittersweet that he isn’t here to enjoy it, but I’m so happy for his family and when his daughter, Susan, asked me to accompany them Friday night it was an honor to say yes.”
The words will be delivered on stage at the Springfield Symphony Hall. But they were hatched a long time ago, up in the balcony seats, by a kid with stars in his eyes, a Nedick’s in one hand and a G.O. card in the other.