Looking back, the turning point for the explosive growth of the National Basketball Association was almost certainly the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing, still amateurs, led Team USA to an 8–0 record and a gold medal. The Americans showed off a swaggering, dynamic style of play that would lift the NBA out of years of decline. 

At the time, few people seemed to care. “We had the best players who ever lived,” Peter Ueberroth, who organized the 1984 Games, says now. “But people were more interested in other sports.” The exploits of gymnast Mary Lou Retton and sprinter Carl Lewis attracted the media and the fans. 

More important for basketball, the 1984 Games changed the financial model of the Olympics—and of all sports, everywhere—forever. The NBA has applied the lessons of Los Angeles better than any other sports organization in the world. Today’s NBA operates on Version 2.0 of Peter Ueberroth’s business plan. 

For years, the Olympics had hemorrhaged money. The 1976 Montreal Games lost $1 billion. But Ueberroth aggressively auctioned TV rights to ABC for $225 million, almost three times the pre­vious fee. Then he offered different tiers of Olympic sponsorship to a select crowd of corporations, yielding $127 million, compared to less than $10 million paid by corporate sponsors at the previous U.S.-based Games. Far higher ticket prices produced six times as much revenue as the earlier Olympics. In the end, the Games had a $232 mil­lion surplus, which Ueberroth gave to youth sports programs. 

Among the spectators in Los Angeles was Ueberroth’s daugh­ter Heidi, who had just finished her freshman year at Vanderbilt. 

A decade later, after working in sports television and promotion in Europe, she took a job with the NBA to help expand the league worldwide. The Olympic summer had provided a basic curricu­lum in the modern science of sports marketing and management, and, as the NBA’s top official for global growth, she has shown she got the per­fect education. 

The first lesson of the 1984 Games for Heidi Ueberroth was to build relation­ships aggressively. When the Soviet Union announced in May 1984 that it would boycott the Olympics—in retaliation for President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, which was a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—Heidi’s father lobbied governments vigorously to come to Los Angeles. He met face to face with foreign officials and told them: We need you to come. The direct approach worked. In the end, only 14 Iron Curtain nations joined the Soviet boycott, and they had little choice. 

A second lesson came from the Chinese, whose decision to participate gave cover to other Communist states that wanted to come. China saw sports as a way to rebrand itself in the years after Mao died. The Chinese Olympics slogan—“Break Out of Asia and Advance on the World”—cap­tured the growing importance of global audiences and markets. When a crowd of 93,000 at the Los Angeles Coliseum cheered the Chinese, Heidi Ueberroth remembers, “It was deafening, the kind of thing that gives you chills.” 

The third lesson came from Li Ning, the Chinese gymnast who won three gold medals and six med­als overall. Li dominated the floor exercises with his breathtaking leaps, three feet higher than other gymnasts, and twisting once more than other gymnasts as he somersaulted through the air. It was one of the most daring perfor­mances at the 1984 Games. 

Now Heidi Ueberroth has one of the most daring jobs in all sports—to make basketball the most popular game in the world, surpassing soccer, and to make the NBA the most powerful global athletic league. 

Beat soccer? To most experts, the idea sounds quixotic. Soccer is more popular than basketball practically everywhere in the world outside the United States. According to the Gaskins Company, in any given year three billion fans view soccer games on TV or in person. But soccer’s capacity for growth may not be as broad as basketball’s.

The 1984 Olympics changed the financial model of sports forever. The NBA has applied those lessons better than any other sports organization in the world.

Sitting in a conference room sur­rounded by huge wall posters of the biggest names in basketball—Yao Ming, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James of the NBA, and Diana Taurasi and Swin Cash of the Women’s NBA—Heidi Ueberroth uses corporate jargon to explain her strategy. 

The key, says the NBA’s 42-year-old president for International Business Operations, is “touch points.” 

To supplant soccer as the top global sport, the NBA needs to “touch” fans wherever they go in the world—from the rural communities of China to the urban playgrounds of London, from the bar­rios of Latin America to the suburban schools of the Midwest. There must be constant promotion of the NBA’s stamp, its corporate partners, and its larger-than-life players. The NBA brand must become as recognizable as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s. 

“The goal is to be in every point where our fans can interact with the game,” she says. “Sure, you want them playing the game. But if they’re going to watch TV, you want them watching an NBA game. If they’re going to be playing a video game after watching the game, we want them playing [an NBA game]. Then if they’re going out and buy­ing apparel, you want it to be our apparel. It’s an integrated approach.” Add to that list cell phones beeping with game updates and iPods with video highlights, restaurants and bars beaming NBA games, hundreds of clinics and tournaments for rising and established stars, Coke cans and McDonald’s restaurants celebrating NBA stars, training camps staged all over the world, and an NBA “Jam Van” hitting the road for 25,000 miles. Like fast food, PCs, mutual funds, hip-hop, and Hollywood movies, basketball—the quintessential American sport, invented by a phys-ed instructor at a YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts—is going global. 

How is the strategy working? Consider China, the land of Yao Ming, the 7-foot, 6-inch Shanghai-born star of the Houston Rockets who was chosen number one in the 2002 draft. Sina.com, China’s premier sports website, estimates that one-tenth of all Chinese are soccer fans. That’s 130 million people. By contrast, the NBA reckons that 300 million Chinese watch NBA games on TV or the Internet. That’s roughly the entire U.S. popula­tion. Eighty-nine percent of Chinese aged 15 to 54 are aware of the NBA, according to a survey by the European research firm TNS of 11 major urban markets in China. Every year, thousands of basketball courts are constructed, even in the most remote provinces. 

The NBA is also gaining huge popularity in other parts of Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and it is starting to make inroads in Africa. In the summer of 2007, the NBA held 262 international events in 162 cities spanning five continents—nearly dou­ble the 135 events in 87 cities in 2006. In October, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic played exhibition games in Shanghai and Macao. Four other teams—the Boston Celtics, Toronto Raptors, Memphis Grizzlies, and Minnesota Timberwolves—held training camps and played exhibition games in Europe. NBA Commissioner David Stern has announced that his goal is to hold regular-season games in major European cities. 

More than 900 NBA games and 45,000 hours of NBA programming are seen in 215 countries in 41 languages with 188 TV partners. NBATV, the first cable/satellite station owned by a major league, distributes programming across the world. ESPN International brings NBA content to more than 25 million households in 97 countries and territo­ries outside the United States, according to NBA and ESPN officials. After a 2006 buyout, ESPN has begun operation of NASN, a pan-European network for North American sports. NBA apparel is sold in 100,000 stores in 100 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Sponsors promote their own goods—shirts, shorts, sneakers, drinks, balls, cell phones, even washing machines—with the images of NBA stars. 

Chinese leaders saw sports as a way to rebrand the country in the years after Mao died.

The signs of basketball’s boom are everywhere. Visitors to Shanghai overhear conversations about Vince Carter. Shaquille O’Neal, dressed in emperor’s garb at the Great Wall of China, attracts a throng of press and tourists. At a café in Bhutan, fans look up stats on Kobe Bryant. An English businessman, commuting to work, notices backboards sprouting alongside satellite dishes on the outskirts of London. Expatriates in Botswana follow the Chicago Bulls. American students go to rural China for public service and cap their week with an intense game against the kids from a local vocational school. “Touch points,” everywhere in the world.  

No one—except maybe David Stern—thought basketball would grow so fast. “I certainly did not,” Peter Ueberroth says. “I felt that [basketball] was as North American as baseball. I never expected this kind of worldwide growth.” 

Stern, says Ueberroth père, “understood the possibilities of [television] satellites and the dynamics of global markets before anyone else.” But the NBA’s rise to global prominence is the result of a wide range of factors, including the need for new markets in a fragmented media, a keen understanding of the consumer experi­ence, and plain luck. 

When James Naismith invented the game—hanging a peach basket on a YMCA wall in 1891—basketball experienced its first great stroke of fortune. The Y’s missionaries spread the sport globally and nationally. They brought basketball to France, India, and China, and the game came to dominate the gyms in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and other cities. One critic feared the sport was getting to be a “Frankenstein-type monster that was now creating havoc in certain quarters.” 

Basketball’s simplicity—a big-ball game with a goal comprising a simple hoop—made for an easy sell. Anyone can learn to play within minutes, with any combination of players: one-on-one, three-on-three, or five-on-five on a full court. Or you can just dribble and shoot alone in a driveway. 

Early showmanship lent the game pizzazz and boosted its appeal overseas. When Abe Saperstein created the Harlem Globetrotters in 1926, he not only put a talented African-American team on the floor—good enough to beat George Mikan’s Minneapolis Lakers in 1948 and 1949—he also dazzled fans with the players’ exuberance. The Globetrotters juggled the ball, spun it, drib­bled around and over opponents, and shot from every odd angle. “Abe was the ultimate hus­tler,” says Irving Rein, whose family knew him. “The Globetrotters were wonderful emissar­ies. It was almost like a circus. I don’t think you could talk about the NBA and its success without the Globetrotters.” 

When, in 1950, the NBA finally allowed blacks to play, it quickly became one of the Big Three spec­tator sports. The game appealed to fans every­where, from Harlem to French Lick to Westwood. Players such as Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan brought the game to its peak. 

But when Jordan retired in 2003, the world of American sports had become fragmented. Audiences had so many choices—TV, DVD, the Internet, new spectator sports like NASCAR, new participation sports like soccer and lacrosse—that most fans would not loyally follow teams the same way they used to. Only three events—the Super Bowl, the NCAA basketball tournament, and “Monday Night Football” (which itself has faded)—could still draw huge audiences around the TV. NBA ratings suffered. With the absence of a figure like Jordan, casual fans drifted away. 

David Stern’s genius was to embrace the frag­mentation. For starters, he put more games on cable. The move caused some controversy, but hardcore fans were happy to pay cable fees, buy NBA video games and merchandise, and play in fantasy leagues. Basketball was not just about watching the game anymore. It was about connecting to anything that could be sold as a commodity. “It’s just vertical growth,” says Rick Horrow, chief executive of Horrow Sports Ventures, who helped bring an NBA expansion team to Miami in 1988. 

‘There is no artificial ceIling on growth... The sky is really the limit for the worldwide marketing company called the NBA, both before and after the 2008 Beijing Games.’

Most important, Stern continued his long-term efforts to make the NBA a global game. The International Basketball Federation (FIBA) had been created in 1932, years before the NBA’s formation, and the sport was first played in the Olympics in 1936. Few American fans were aware that basketball was steadily expanding overseas. Now, as the NBA approached its limit for growth in the United States, a vast world outside beck­oned. “There is no artificial ceiling on growth,” says Horrow. “The sky is really the limit for the worldwide marketing company called the NBA, both before and after the 2008 Beijing Games.” 

As TV began showcasing the NBA, foreign interest soared. Europe and China now identify gifted players at young ages and channel them into schools and “farms” for development. (The best-known camp is run by the Benetton family in Italy.) European players sign professional con­tracts as teenagers. The first foreign player ever drafted by the NBA, in 1984, was Oscar Schmidt of Brazil, who once scored 46 points at the Pan-American Games in a victory over the U.S. team. But Schmidt lacked confidence in his ability to play in the NBA. “I know my limitations, my defects,” he said, turning down the entreaties of the New Jersey Nets. In 1985, the NBA had ten interna­tional players from eight countries; by the end of the 2006–07 season, there were 76 foreign players (out of a total league roster of 450). These play­ers often brought a different tempo to the game, reviving the beauty of hardboard fundamentals. 

How many people play and watch the sport? A survey by Roper Starch Worldwide concludes that about one-ninth of the world plays basketball on teams or in pick-up games. FIBA estimates that 450 million play the game. Despite the com­plexity of measuring basketball’s global reach (different studies use different methodologies), there’s no question that Naismith’s game has grown enormously. 

The NBA now has emissaries all over the world. Players like Yao Ming in China, Tony Parker in France, Dirk Nowitzki in Germany, Mehmet Okur in Turkey, and Pau Gasol in Spain all generate excitement in their home coun­tries. “Having big stars is like an invitation to be interested in the NBA, and then it’s a member­ship in the club,” says Russell Wolff, executive vice president and managing director of ESPN International. “People say, ‘I’m going to be a Rockets fan because of Yao.’ And then they get interested in other players.” Even abroad, how­ever, American players typically attract the most fans. Yao’s teammate, Tracy McGrady, sells more jerseys in China than Yao or anyone else. 

Irving Rein, coauthor of The Elusive Fan, a study of marketing and branding strategies in big-time athletics, says the rise and fall of other sports offers important lessons for the NBA. “Back in the 1940s and 1950s, boxing and baseball were the big sports. Football had not discovered TV yet, and basketball was nothing. And then boxing made all kinds of mistakes, and now it’s in the trash heap of sports. It never found a new [market] niche. The average fan doesn’t pay any attention to it. Everything is very frag­ile…. But there’s always opportunity.” 

Right now, NASCAR is up in the United States. Baseball and football are strong but lack strate­gies for overseas growth. Hockey is down. Horse racing is down. And basketball is up.

Television drives the growth. Ever since the 1958 Colts-Giants NFL champion­ship game, football has been considered the ideal TV sport. But basketball has its own virtues as a TV game: a smaller playing space, fewer players, explosive action throughout the game, and colorful characters on vivid display. 

The modern TV revolution began with the deregulation of broadcasting and has continued with the explosive growth of new media since the late 1980s. The number of households connected to cable or satellite TV in Europe jumped from 25 million in 1991 to 126 million in 2005. “The ability to deliver broader pipes has created huge demand for quality content,” says Wolff. “Sports and mov­ies have always been on the high end of appeal.” 

‘You want them playing the game. If they’re going to watch TV, you want them watching an NBA game... If they’re buying apparel, you want it to be [NBA] apparel.’

Peter Ueberroth, who ran Major League Baseball during Stern’s early years as NBA com­missioner, says, “The big change happened 15 or 20 years ago with satellites. There were plenty of sports that never took advantage of it. In fact, basketball was the only one that really, really did. They made it very, very, very affordable. They seized an opportunity.” 

To establish the NBA’s first TV deal over­seas, Andrea Bassani, now the head of TV for Euroleague Basketball, flew from New York to Rome with tapes of games in the United States. Foreign broadcasting now accounts for a growing portion—approaching 10 percent—of the NBA’s TV revenue stream. But the fees the NBA derives from selling the rights to its games abroad are almost beside the point. TV is free advertising. TV makes basketball part of the cultural wallpaper. TV turns players into icons. It also provides a vehicle for promoting the NBA’s corporate partners, who then put the league’s logo and images on their products. Piggybacking on the NBA almost always means better market share for Western corporations. 

NBA products also sell briskly. Overseas sales account for $430 million, or 20 percent, of NBA merchandising revenues. Just months ago, the NBA, in partnership with Adidas, opened a huge store in Istanbul, Turkey. Close to half of all fans who log on to the NBA’s Internet sites come from outside the United States.

“We want the best players in the world aspiring to play in a single league,” Heidi Ueberroth says. Right now, the NBA controls the game globally. But at some point, this situation might change—as, for example, the world’s stock trading has become less New York–centric. 

The NBA already has sparred with foreign leagues and governments over the rights to player contracts. The most notorious case involved Wang Zhizhi, the first NBA player from China. After coming to the United States under a complex deal with the Chinese Basketball Association, Wang refused to play in China’s 2002 summer training camp, and the Chinese authorities dismissed him from the national team. The Dallas Mavericks subsequently traded Wang to the Los Angeles Clippers to avoid souring relations with Beijing. The Clippers released him in 2003 when China banned telecasts of games with Wang. After Wang publicly apologized for his behavior, the Chinese waived a four-year suspension in 2006. 

For now, the NBA will continue to attract top international talent. “The giant players in any sport tend to go where money is and the population [of fans] is,” says Peter Ueberroth. “Volleyball players go to Europe and play for the professional teams. The same in soccer and water polo. And then they come back and represent their country in the Olympics and other international events. In ice hockey, the best players are from Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and Scandinavian countries, and they play in the U.S. and Canada.” 

But the wealth of the European market is about the same as that of the U.S. market. China is likely to rival the United States soon for consumer power. Japan, South Korea, and the more developed parts of Asia already do. 

What happens when basketball associations overseas decide they want to keep their players at home rather than letting them flock to America? 

Expansion offers the best way to head off a rival league. The NBA has considered adding teams or even another division or conference in Europe. Already, European cities are building arenas, organizing potential ownership groups, stoking fan interest in exhibitions and TV. Heidi Ueberroth praises the new O2 arena in London, built as part of the city’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. 

Horrow, the sports business consultant, is more blunt. “It is just a question of when, how, and where—not if. Every other league wants to capture as many global dollars as [it] can. But at this point, the NBA has more potential to break out and have a full-fledged league overseas.” 

In September, the NBA announced the creation of a Chinese subsidiary. Timothy Chen, a former Microsoft official who heads the new entity, will focus right away on two jobs. First, he will lobby provincial and local governments to allow NBA games to be broadcast on their television outlets as well as the national networks. Second, he will push for the construction of NBA-quality arenas to host NBA exhibitions and even regular-season games. 

The NBA will own 90 percent of the subsidiary and sell 5 percent to a U.S. media company and the other 5 percent to Chinese investors. Can the NBA maintain that kind of control over basketball in China, and the rest of the world, in the next generation? That question alone could determine the future of basketball everywhere. 

Charles Euchner is a lecturer in the English Department at Yale University.