The Two Lives of Larry O'Brien, NBA Commissioner and Political Mastermind

This is probably the only championship trophy named after someone involved with the Watergate scandal.

Photo by Florida Memory on Unsplash

Modern pro sports commissioners tend to be products of the machines they control. Roger Goodell started with the NFL as an intern in 1982 and has worked there, save for one quick internship with the Jets, ever since. Rob Manfred was outside counsel for Major League Baseball before taking on a full-time role in 1998. While Gary Bettman didn’t have a hockey background when he got the NHL job in 1992, he had risen up the ranks at the NBA for over a decade. And though Cathy Engelbert made her name as the CEO of Deloitte before the WNBA brought her on as their commissioner, she also played college basketball at Lehigh under Muffet McGraw. 

Larry O’Brien, the man for whom the NBA’s championship trophy is named, served as the league’s commissioner from 1975 to 1984. But he traveled a much more indirect path to that role. His Basketball Hall of Fame profile notes that O’Brien served as “a former postmaster general, a special assistant to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, [and] the national chairman of the Democratic Party” before taking the NBA job. 

That wildly abbreviates the life of Larry O’Brien, Political Operative. 

When you combine everything O’Brien saw and did in that part of his career with the variety of changes he brought to pro basketball, I submit he is one of the most interesting people in recent American history. (Which is why I’m a little surprised I only know his name from “the trophy Matthew Dellavedova got to pose with.”)

We’ll get to the basketball, but let’s unpack Politics Larry first. I’m just gonna bombard you with some facts and events from that period.

• O’Brien was in the Dealey Plaza motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. At 1:48 of the video below, that’s O’Brien talking about the experience.

At the time, O’Brien was serving as Kennedy’s legislative aide, but he’d been part of JFK’s political team for a long while, originally brought on to work in Kennedy’s Senate campaigns in 1952 and 1958 (both of which he won).

• As his Hall of Fame profile notes, he also served under President Lyndon Johnson, who asked O’Brien to stay as part of the White House team shortly after Kennedy’s funeral. Under that administration, O’Brien helped usher in major legislative victories including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, and the creation of the Peace Corps and Medicare.

• Johnson then appointed O’Brien to the position of Postmaster General, where he had to deal with a postal system that was snarled by problems like “the time millions of pieces of mail got stuck in a Chicago logjam.” By the end of this three-year term leading the Postal Service, O’Brien had moved a significant portion of interstate mail transport away from trains and onto air carriers; the nation went from 14 cities connected to the air mail network to more than 500. Railways saw postal contracts, which they’d relied upon to supplement their business running passenger trains, disappear in the process.

• After Johnson decided not to run in the 1968 Presidential Election, O’Brien started working on Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign. (I promise this newsletter is not just looking for Kennedy topics.) When RFK was assassinated shortly after the California Democratic Primary, O’Brien, as you probably guessed, was there. He wound up agreeing to work on Hubert Humphrey’s campaign, putting O’Brien at the scene of another violent moment in 1968: the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where he was designated chairman of the Democratic National Committee. 

I would understand if Larry O’Brien had decided to give politics a break after Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon that November. He’d helped run several successful campaigns and brokered significant pieces of landmark legislation, and he’d also experienced incredible tragedy. And O’Brien did step out of the party machine, starting a consulting company that wound up securing Howard Hughes as its primary client.

But, well, there is one more major bullet point to add to the Politics Larry list before we move on to Basketball Larry.

• The 1972 Watergate break-in that led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974? O’Brien’s office was right in the middle of the space and evidence pointed to an attempt by Nixon’s cronies to wiretap his phone. One theory said O’Brien was targeted because of his work with Howard Hughes; the Watergate conspirators wanted to know if O’Brien had information on possibly illegal campaign contributions Hughes had made to Nixon. In front of the Senate Watergate committee, Jeb Magruder admitted that compromising O’Brien as a political operative had been one of the conspiracy’s goals.

All of that – the tragic proximity to two assassinations, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, becoming a victim in Watergate, changing the future for the mail and rail systems, and so on – represents the bulk of Larry O’Brien’s career. Theoretically, when the NBA Finals logo shows up with the O’Brien Trophy prominently featured, some part of our national consciousness should think “oh right, the political operative who helped put Kennedy in the White House and drive Nixon out of it.” 

But that’s not what happens, at least not for me. (I’m going to do my best not to speak for you; maybe you do think OH YEAH WATERGATE every time Mike Breen welcomes you to Game 1 of the Finals.)

You may have also noticed that none of O’Brien’s political life really touched on sports at all. After looking through newspaper archives, the closest things I could find in that area were O’Brien serving as a pallbearer when Dan Reeves, the owner of the L.A. Rams, died in 1971, and a public plea for the Postal Service to design a commemorative golf stamp while O’Brien was postmaster general.

So when Larry O’Brien got the job of NBA Commissioner in 1975, some of the reaction was “um, has this guy ever talked about basketball?” (Larry’s sister came to his defense in this regard, insisting he’d been a very intense player and fan.) But people understood that Larry’s value was his political savvy, which the league desperately needed in the face of an antitrust lawsuit from the American Basketball Association and a separate court date with the Players Association challenging the league’s option clause, which prevented players from ever leaving a team of their own volition.

Basketball Larry solved both of those problems. The NBA and its rival league merged in 1976, with four ABA teams (the Nuggets, Pacers, Nets, and Spurs) surviving the combination. That same year, the NBA settled with the players and began to take major steps towards true free agency. 

This was not all O’Brien accomplished as commissioner. He helped the league negotiate better TV deals and break into cable, he was the top dog when the NBA instituted the three-point line in 1979, he oversaw the expansion effort that created the Dallas Mavericks, he negotiated a salary cap (which the league hadn’t used in four decades), he saw the league enter its modern era with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and, oh, he was also in charge when the league redesigned the championship trophy into the earliest form of its current design.

So when O’Brien stepped down from his post after the 1984 All-Star Game, it wasn’t entirely surprising that the league named the trophy in his honor. David Stern, who succeeded O’Brien, put it best in a quote after O’Brien passed away in 1990: “He deserves complete credit for taking this league from the mishmash it was in 1978 and setting its course so it could grow to where it is today.”

When you combine Politics Larry and Basketball Larry, you get an absurd amount of American history and significance packed into one life. It’s almost strange to have that life compressed into a gold trophy that Warriors owner Joe Lacob got to spoon after one of Golden State’s titles.