Anyway, long about midnight, commissioner David Stern came down, grabbed a beer, sat down on the couch, and gabbed with whoever wandered by — and there was a lot of wandering going on at this point in the evening. Someone — I don’t recall who, but I suspect it was a member of the NBA’s PR crew — ordered up a whole raft of those single-serving pizzas for which America’s finer chain hotels regularly overcharge the guests who need a snack at two in the morning. At which point, someone winged one of the pizzas across the room, over the commissioner’s head, and smack into the wall above him. Someone else then put a hat on the bar, and thus was declared open the first (and, as far as I know, only) “Hit the Commissioner With a Pizza for a Buck” contest. If you put a dollar in the hat — all the money went to charity — you could scale one of the pizzas at the league’s boss, as long as you didn’t hit him, because the someones involved all liked and wanted to keep their jobs. A respectable fusillade erupted. Stern sat there with remarkable aplomb as cheese and tomato shrapnel exploded over his head until he finally stood up. “The hell with this,” he said, and left the room to raucous applause.
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