Warriors’ president remembers Stern
Welts viewed commissioner as good boss, better friend
When the NBA decided to hold its 1995 league meetings in Palm Desert (Riverside County), Rick Welts was ecstatic: He’d get to show his boss his new vacation home.
As soon as NBA Commissioner David Stern arrived at the modest house with gaudy shag carpets and seven colors of wallpaper, he began to point out everything Welts needed to change. After listening to Stern for a halfhour, Welts, demoralized, said goodbye to his colleague and slumped into his livingroom sofa.
As was often the case with Stern, Welts knew that his detailed critiques — as hurtful as they might be — were sound. Earlier this month, during a rare visit to the house he remodeled to Stern’s liking, Welts received word that Stern had died three weeks after undergoing emergency surgery to address a brain hemorrhage. He was 77.
A couple of days later, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called to ask Welts — now president of the Warriors — to speak at Stern’s memorial service, which takes place Tuesday at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Over the past two weeks, Welts has jotted down memories in a small notebook, searching for the proper anecdotes to memorialize a man he had come to view as a second father.
During his 30year tenure as commissioner of the NBA, Stern transformed the league into a multibilliondollar industry and global brand. One of the founders of modern sports marketing, Stern used an autocratic management style to increase television revenue more than 40fold, putting it on a platform rivaled only by the NFL in national interest.
“With all due respect to Michael Jordan, LeBron ( James), Bill Russell or Steph Curry, I think David’s the most important person in NBA history,” Welts said. “Without him, we would not have anything that resembles the NBA today.”
In November 1982, Welts arrived at his office at Bob Walsh & Associates — a Seattlearea sportsmarketing firm — to find a note on his desk telling him to call an NBA executive named David Stern. As the league’s executive vice president for business and legal affairs, Stern was spearheading a licensing and sponsorship division, which the NBA then lacked.
He wanted Welts, who had worked as his hometown Seattle SuperSonics’ publicrelations director before joining Bob Walsh & Associates, to attract corporate sponsors to a league that had recently had Finals games relegated to tapedelayed telecasts. Welts agreed to meet with Stern in New York, but was reluctant to return to the NBA.
All of his family and friends lived in Seattle. After sevenday work weeks with the SuperSonics, Welts appreciated the slower pace of his sportsmarketing firm.
But after what was supposed to be a 30minute conversation became a threehour sitdown with Stern at the league offices in Manhattan, Welts moved crosscountry to make $42,000 a year as the president of NBA properties. Stern had sold him on using the league’s history and the beauty of basketball to make the NBA an appealing business investment.
“That meeting was incredibly enjoyable,” Welts said. “The energy and vision he had for what the NBA could be someday was spellbinding.”
After a couple of months struggling to even get meetings with potential sponsors, Welts and Stern made a dream list of partners: McDonald’s, CocaCola, Budweiser and others. Whenever Welts was on the verge of signing a company, Stern joined him at the meeting, convincing executives to ignore what the NBA was and believe in what it could become.
Finally, after about four years of traveling the country to sign secondtier partners, Welts and Stern began checking sponsors off that dream list. Along the way, Welts became keenly aware of Stern’s domineering ways. Though Stern seldom yelled at Welts, he was a master at making Welts feel like the dumbest person on Earth.
Around 10 o’clock many nights, after Welts returned home from work, Stern called him and talked for more than an hour about what they were about to accomplish together. By the time Welts hung up the phone, he felt rejuvenated.
This was perhaps Stern’s greatest skill: As a micromanager, he knew how to get the best out of his employees. Those who worked closely with him understood that he cared about them — even if he wasn’t always comfortable showing it.
In March 1994, Welts’ longtime partner, Arnie Chinn, fell ill on a Saturday from an AIDSrelated issue and died four days later. Welts, who wasn’t openly gay at the time, didn’t think he could tell any of his coworkers — especially his boss — about his personal loss.
After asking for a couple of days off from work, Welts took out an advertisement in the Seattle Times announcing Chinn’s death and encouraging those close to him to send donations to a newly created scholarship fund at Chinn’s alma mater, the University of Washington. While opening the donations on his flight back to New York, Welts was surprised to find an envelope from Scarsdale, N.Y.
It contained a $10,000 check from David and Dianne Stern. To this day, Welts doesn’t know how the Sterns found out about his late partner.
“That was probably the most amazing thing that he could’ve ever done,” Welts said, fighting back tears in his Chase Center office last week. “I tear up whenever I talk about it because it was such a significant thing at the time.”
With Stern’s help, Welts created NBA AllStar Weekend in 1984, came up with the marketing behind the 1992 Olympic “Dream Team,” and organized NBA offices in Australia, Asia, Europe, Mexico and Canada. What most resonates with Welts, however, are the times Stern showed he was much more than an entrepreneurial genius.
In 2011, when Welts became the first prominent American sports executive to come out as gay, Stern hugged Welts for the first time in their nearly three decades working together. Though Stern — a pioneer for equality in sports — didn’t understand why so many people cared about Welts’ sexuality, he appreciated how difficult it had been for his friend.
After Stern retired from the NBA in 2014, he still had access to the league’s business reports. From time to time, Stern called Welts to say, “Hey, despite all odds, I think you’re doing a pretty good job with the Warriors.”
In November, while on a work trip to New York, Welts had lunch with Stern at Stern’s favorite restaurant in Manhattan, Brasserie 8½. For more than an hour, Stern spoke in excited tones, telling Welts how pleased he was with his latest business ventures and how proud he was of how Silver handled the muchpublicized China conflict.
About a month later, Stern was at Brasserie 8½ when he had his brain hemorrhage.
“He was just sarcastic, funny and excited about everything that was happening in his life, and excited for the Warriors’ success,” Welts said of his final meeting with Stern. “He was just like he’d always been, you know? And that’s how I’ll always remember him.”