System works for everyone, and everyone works

Yoo-hoo, Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow: Are you guys paying attention?

David Stern and Billy Hunter have made a deal. The NBA will operate next season, and the season after that. But if one of your fans wishes to satisfy his or her hockey fix, I think they still need to hop on a bus to Chicoutimi.

Have I come to bash you hockey guys? Sure. It's my pundit's duty. But that doesn't mean I've necessarily come to praise the NBA, unless someone thinks these people deserve credit merely for exercising a little common sense.

See, I don't care much about the details. I just see two leagues with a certain amount of revenue to whack up needing to find a fair way to do it in a manner that reflects the specific realities of the respective enterprises. With the exception of one burp in 1998-99, the NBA has historically been able to do this.

If you're like me, you have little patience for major sports negotiation sagas to begin with. There was a time when management was utterly dictatorial and the hired hands were made to feel grateful for displays of paternalism (i.e. '30s, '40s, and '50s Yawkey Red Sox). Players and young fans alike have no conception of what that world was like, of how a Joe DiMaggio could hit in 56 straight games and put up 30 HRs and 125 RBIs and, incidentally, win the MVP and then be asked to take a $5,000 pay cut because his figures were slightly below his stats of the year before. Or how Ralph Kiner could lead the National League in homers for the seventh straight year and be told by Branch Rickey, ''We finished last with you, so we can finish last without you." For decades upon decades, players had no essential rights or benefits and were held hostage by the reserve clause that bound them to one club for as long as that team wished.

When he was first asked to become executive director of the Major League Players Association, Marvin Miller said something to the effect that the baseball players were the most exploited workers he had ever seen. It was a rather hyperbolic statement, to be sure, but there is no doubt that the players had been mistreated by imperial owners for decades. The baseball players deserved legitimate representation, and so did their football, hockey, and basketball brethren.

The players in each sport had to fight their own battles. In the NBA, the watershed moment was Jan. 14, 1964, the night of the 14th All-Star Game, which was being played at Boston Garden. The players had been trying to establish their union rights, but the owners were paying scant attention. With Tom Heinsohn as the leader, the players threatened to boycott the game unless the owners agreed to sit down for serious negotiation. They were 100 percent serious. They had the leverage of a nationally televised showcase for their sport, which then had nowhere near the cachet it has now. The players made it clear they were serious about not playing, and the owners capitulated. An enraged Walter Brown called Heinsohn a ''heel."

It's a long way from that circumstance to today. All the players wanted then were elementary benefits such as a decent minimum salary, a per diem, and rudimentary health benefits. Reduction in permissible length of long-term contracts? A minimum age? Hard (salary) cap vs. soft (salary) cap? Utter abstracts.

In those days, a player needed an offseason job to keep food on the table. Playoff shares were extremely meaningful, even to the stars. Ancillary income didn't exist.

Here's where we are now: The minimum NBA salary is $385,277 (not $385,276). Digest that. The 12th man darn near makes 400 large. Shaq makes $30 mill, give or take. Isn't all the rest conversation? I mean, come on. The big battles have already been fought.

The thing that was scary in all this was the way David Stern was acting. In his earlier incarnation, he was a consummate deal-maker. He once told me about his relationship with former Players Association head Larry Fleisher, who was in charge of the union during the crucial juncture when the league was addressing its needs by the implementation of a salary cap. ''There would be late-night phone calls which might end with one or the other of us hanging up," Stern said. ''But we could never stay angry with each other for long."

Theirs was a unique management-labor relationship. I have always believed that Stern could have comfortably switched hats to represent the players and Fleisher could likewise have switched his headgear to speak on behalf of the owners. The important thing was this: Each man's goal was not to ''win" anything. It was to make a deal.

That's why Stern's personal behavior last week was unusually and disturbingly combative. After accusing current Players Association head Billy Hunter of caving in to individual player agents and pulling previously negotiated items that might prove harmful to the agents' interests off the table (a charge Hunter vigorously denied), Stern grew very testy. If the players and their reps don't accept the deal at hand, he said, somberly, they would be making a mistake of ''epic proportions."

That sounded unnecessarily personal in a way he never was when Larry Fleisher was alive. I'm starting to worry that David Stern, a man I've known, liked, and admired for nearly 30 years, has perhaps stayed too long at the fair. But that's a story for another day.

The story today is that a deal has been made. Unlike another league we know (hint: the players wear skates), the people running professional basketball decided that life was still pretty good, and, in any event, it was certainly a better alternative than suicide.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.