Patrick Baumann, the long-time secretary-general of FIBA, the international basketball federation, died of a heart attack yesterday (October 14) while attending the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires. He was 51.
"Nobody was more dedicated to the growth of basketball than Patrick,” said NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “He loved the game and recognized its power to transform people's lives."
As secretary-general of FIBA, Baumann presided over the world governing body for basketball from the organization’s Geneva headquarters. Founded in 1932, the nonprofit FIBA comprised 212 national federations and is recognized by the International Olympic Committee, as the authority in the sport. Baumann, who had been a player, coach, and referee in Switzerland and Italy, joined FIBA in 1994 and was appointed secretary-general in 2002.
I spoke with Baumann when he stopped in New York in July 2005. Here is that interview:
Q. What is FIBA’s mission?
Baumann: To promote the game of basketball worldwide and to create opportunities for everybody to play internationally.
Q. What’s new at FIBA?
Baumann: We have entered into a new era with the results on the court, which indicates to us that the game has truly grown globally. We have South Americans and Europeans at the same level as the USA, and that is really a new chapter in the history of basketball. FIBA is a 73-year-old baby, and it’s grown. The membership is more than 200 countries, and now we can say that we have 10 or 12 countries that are able to compete at the same level.
Q. That was certainly proved at the last Olympics, and in the disappointing show by the U.S. team.
Baumann: I don’t think it’s disappointing. From the perspective of FIBA, it’s the natural result of a 10- or 12-year coming together of the best players playing with the rest of the world. It’s the natural course of things, and I think that’s what makes sports exciting.
Q. Tell me about “FIBA World Basketball,” a 26-minute weekly basketball magazine television show.
Baumann: We will start that in October. We would like to educate the world that basketball is played every week around the globe. And the best way to do this is through a weekly television show. We found a very good partner in Australia that is willing to take the investment because he believes in our sport and he believes in the opportunity for such a show, and I think this will be a perfect promotional vehicle for our sport. The key point for us is that an African country or an Asian country can see it and can start comparing where it stands with the rest of the world.
Q. You also have a new referee program to deal with different interpretations and styles of officiating throughout the world.
Baumann: It’s very difficult to have a standard uniformity to refereeing. The referee on the court is every much an individual as any player and has his way of looking at the game, of looking at how to apply the rules of the game. Our national federations are creating referees every year. For example, there are more than 9,000 referees in France. Out of them are about 20-25 international referees at the top level. We need to evaluate them, make sure that they find the right common language so when they go to international competitions, there is a uniform standard of refereeing.
Q. How do you assess the state and health of the game today?
Baumann: I think it’s one of the healthiest sports in the world. It has not reached the excesses of some other sports.
Q. What do you mean by excesses?
Baumann: I think that when there’s too much money, there are a lot of scandals, a lot of problems with refereeing that suddenly come along. Betting is behind the scenes. Clubs go bankrupt. We’ve seen this unfortunately. It is a European problem. I think that our sport is growing slowly but surely.
We haven’t had too many doping problems. We do not have economic or financial scandals. We see the people keep investing, and grow their investment, in our sport, whether it’s in Asia, South America, Europe or here in the United States. We are really a healthy game and a healthy sport. We have also achieved in the Olympics with spectatorship and audience, which prove that our sport is well loved by the fans.
Q. What is the biggest challenge in your position?
Baumann: To keep the world together. In the basketball world there are a lot of people that have different interests and a lot of organizations that do not have exactly the same interests. For sure you have those who have purely economic interests and use basketball as a tool for that. And then you have those who just do it on a voluntary basis, and that’s the majority of those that are practicing basketball around the world.
We have to take care somehow that these very large groups of volunteers, of people who just love the game and are every day on the court and are forming young players, that they still get motivated in spite of the fact that maybe others are earning millions from the game and may like to go around and say it’s their game. That’s the difficult part. And we’re a political organization at the same time, so it’s a tricky thing to keep the world together.
Q. You have said, “Rather than speaking about achievements, we should speak about the challenges which are ahead of us,” one of which you identified as “finding the right balance between basketball as a business and the integrity of the sport.” Is that a delicate balance?
Baumann: That balance depends on the people. I think that it’s very much something that depends on the human beings driving the game. And if they’re able to maintain their passion for the game and not overcommercialize it and look for the last cent out of everything, I think that balance can be achieved.
Q. You identified another challenge as “the development programs for high-level competition without neglecting the promotion of grass-roots basketball.” How do you address that challenge? One criticism of the game in the U.S. is that there has been a depreciation of fundamental skills.
Baumann: It’s very tempting for a young coach in a small country. He’s got 12 kids and his goal is to win. So, the first thing he will try to do it set those kids on a court and simply play a zone. These poor little kids have a feeling that they know how to play basketball, but when they go to the next level, they realize that they are missing everything. In the key basketball schools, in Europe mainly or in countries like Serbia Montenegro and Lithuania, at 14 years old, either you have the skills or you’re gone.
It’s extremely important for coaches to raise their quality standards so that they understand that the fundamentals are key and that the tactics, which they usually use when they are not so skilled as coaches, are for a later stage in the development of the players. Our role is to try to make a transfer of that knowhow that is in certain countries and move it around to other countries.
Q. The last Olympics revealed a fundamental excellence in skills and teamwork from a number of countries.
Baumann: I think it has changed. The U.S. player — I like to see him play. He still is, because of his athleticism, the quickest in execution of fundamentals. The difficulty is to put it together into a team. There is still a very good school of fundamentals in the U.S. Of course, it has probably declined a little bit. You see that now suddenly there are equal levels of skills or maybe there are more players in Europe that are more skillful than athletic. But 10 years ago, it was different. You can see it now with the three-point shooting.
Q. Marty Blake, director of scouting for the NBA, talked about “Basketball Without Borders,” in which the NBA goes into different countries and tries to help young people with basketball and non-basketball topics. FIBA is also involved with that program.
Baumann: That’s a life experience. It’s a way of going into areas which will have difficulty in entering into the big world of basketball and giving the kids a feel for what the opportunity is in our sport. And at the same time having the opportunity for those kids in a more difficult situation to see that there is a level that they can reach and at the same time they can learn something from that experience.
At the camps are drills and technical things, but at the same time it’s a life experience for them to be together with kids from other countries, to integrate different cultures, different mentalities and learn matters of life, whether it’s learning to read or learning matters on health and prevention. It’s a combination of a pure basketball camp with also an educational environment and integration.
Q. You have been with FIBA since 1994. How have the game and the business changed since then?
Baumann: The players have become more performers and so the game has become more interesting. With the play, level to level, a bit more equal, it makes the competition more interesting at the international level and therefore the interest has grown. Certainly the introduction of professionals in the Olympic movement helped very much.
On the business side I would say we’ve grown in popularity and we’ve grown in generating revenues, from the club side in particular. It has become very much a business in Europe. And we see now that the investments of both broadcasters and sponsors is growing in our sport, maybe not at the same level as soccer is, but it’s definitely growing.
The achievements of a league like the NBA helped us very much. There’s a will to emulate around the world the league mechanisms or systems like the NBA, and that helps grow our sport. It brings other investors into it. The economics of a league in Europe compared with the United States are still a little different. You do not yet have a purely business approach in Europe.
So, you don’t find too many owners of teams in Europe who have the same kind of business approach as owners have here [in the U.S.]. Many times the owners in Europe feel that their personal investments and the promotion that they take from that investment turn up being on the first side of a newspaper all the time
Q. You mentioned soccer. Are you making inroads, if that’s the right word, on soccer?
Baumann: It’s an interesting question. We compare ourselves to soccer in the sense of how are we managing our sports. Everybody does, whether it’s a league or a club or the international federation. But we compare ourselves to them in order to see whether the business courses that we are putting in place are similar to those that soccer puts in place and whether we are managing our sports in the same professional way. And I think this is the biggest change in the past 5-6 years: that we are getting more and more professional. Are we learning from the soccer experience how to become more professional?
Now, from there, to generate the same kind of revenues, I think that there is a big difference in the rest of the world. In the U.S. I understand that soccer has a different position in the ranking of the sports. You have 80,000-spectator arenas for soccer while basketball we have 10,000. So the relationship between 1 to 8 is something we will never be able to match.
Q. You mentioned management of the sport and learning from soccer. Do you take some of the best practices from soccer and think that might work for FIBA?
Baumann: We do. We have a good relationship with FIFA, whether it’s on the commercial side or the political side. We learn from each other. We have gone probably further than them in branding our own federation, which is an exercise we did two years back. We have a new brand identity. We’ve given it a different look, and we’ve changed it into something unique in international sports families. There is a global mark [logo], and each one of the continental governing bodies has a [logo] across the family of branding.
Q. The New York Times reported that the number of international players on opening-day rosters in the NBA increased from 29 in 1997 to 81 this past season. A record seven international players competed in the NBA Finals. That points to the global growth of the sport.
Baumann: This is for us the best for the promotion of the game. At the same time, my European colleagues say, “Well, all those players are leaving from Europe to go to North America to play in the NBA. That’s bad. We’re losing the best talent.” But at the end it demonstrates a system of organized leagues and the possibility of creating a competition which generates consistent revenues.
Most important is that the players performed well in the finals of the NBA. This was viewed all over the world and is excellent because the NBA is doing a great job in making sure that the rest of the world sees what’s happening in the United States and at the same time these same players go now in September to play for the European championship to qualify for the world championship. This is a perfect complement. If Tony Parker goes back and plays with a shirt “France,” it’s for the whole country, and that’s a big difference between any other country and the U.S.
Q. The national pride in the team.
Baumann: The national team is so important. The Spain/USA game last summer in Athens was not a very nice experience for Spain. But you had half of the population of Spain watching that game. That is a huge number.
Q. Nobody got much work done that day.
Baumann: (laughing) That national pride is wonderful. You enter a gym with a venue of 12,000 spectators to see Greece against Turkey. Or you go to see Uruguay vs. Argentina. It’s amazing. The emotions are so high. It’s just great.
Q. Peter Holt of the San Antonio Spurs said the biggest crisis facing sports today is the image issue: “the image of [the] players, the image of the league itself, the image of professional sports.” Is image an international concern?
Baumann: Yes, it is. As an international federation, we have to be a guardian for the integrity of our sport. We are the guardian to our players worldwide, to the international community, and we have to make sure that our sport is not involved in any scandals, does not have any doping issues, violence on the court, or any other troubles and that we do not have an exaggeration or overcommercialization of our sport. That is our daily role. We are extremely happy that there is no threat any more of a lockout in the U.S. A lockout in the U.S. may be seen purely as a domestic issue, but it has an impact on our sport and the rest of the world.
Q. What’s been the best new idea in basketball?
Baumann: Giving a new look to the ball.
Q. Jerry West said that what he would not miss in the game if they were eliminated were the dunk and the three-point shot.
Baumann: I would not disagree with him. The dunk is a nice part of the game, but for a purist and for those who have really grown up with the game, this is kind of the cherry on top of the pie. And the international [three-point] line is not as far away from the basket as in the NBA, so we see that it is actually getting too easy to shoot three-pointers. Teams tend to change their tactics. You drive to the basket and then pass the ball out. It’s almost against the spirit of the game. The spirit of the game is to drive to the basket and make a basket. It’s not to pas the ball out. It’s not a shooting contest.
Q. Does the game need any rule changes?
Baumann: Not any major changes. The international rules are flexible enough to accommodate the philosophy of any coach. We are moving away from ball-control games with low scores and are now playing with more fast breaks and trying to be more athletic. And this is with the same set of rules.
Of course, we’ve changed [the possession clock] from 30 seconds to 24 seconds, and that has increased the pace. In the women’s game we’ve moved to a smaller ball. We’ve made some adaptations in order to improve the game itself and the speed of the game. But at the end of the day, I think it’s in the hands of the coach and the players. They are the driving force on how our game is played.
The beauty of the global game is that, for example, the Japanese team, small but extremely quick players who try to shoot from outside, for one game they can beat a [superior] team.
Q. The different matchups and the strategic moves and countermoves hold a special fascination.
Baumann: Right. Of course, coaches have their big influence. Where we have to be very careful is when the coaches tend to control a little bit too much of the game and leave less freedom to the players. There must be the right balance. I think we have this. The Athens games were a perfect example of how one coach may outcoach his opponent and at the same time leave the freedom to his players.
Q. The U.S. finished sixth in the 2002 World Championship and third in the 2004 Olympics. USA Basketball has made Jerry Colangelo its first managing director of the senior national team. He will oversee the selection of the coaches and players and his first team will compete in the 2006 World Championships in Japan. What’s your opinion on the hiring and what his mission will be?
Baumann: I have a lot of respect for him and I think it’s a great step forward for USA Basketball. But it’s going to be very difficult. It’s an honor to be in charge of this and to represent the country, but it’s also a big challenge because that’s not going to be sufficient to hire Jerry Colangelo in that position.
There will definitely need to be good scouting and advice coming from the rest of the world, wherever it can be taken, in order to really adapt to what will be the opponents’ plays and styles. It’s also going to be very difficult for him to convince players to really commit for three summers in a row. This is probably the biggest challenge that he will be facing.
This is not something specific to the United State; this is a challenge that everybody faces. In general, you see that today Argentine is Olympic champion. And if you look at the history of those players, you’ll see that have gone through a school since their junior times and you see that they have grown up in a national team at the various age levels. It’s going to be very hard for the United States to match that.
Q. You referred earlier to the individual speed and athleticism of the U.S. players, but it’s the gap at the national team level that has been reduced if not eliminated, correct?
Baumann: There is no more gap between the top national teams. I’m certain the U.S. will have the right coach for the national team, but it will be facing talented coaches and talented teams on the other side. But I think the key thing is that people have lost the respect, in a sense of fear, of playing against the United States, so people are now free to play their game. And that’s good for the game, from our perspective.
Q. You have been a player, coach, and official. I would imagine that all of that has been valuable to you in your decision-making nowadays.
Baumann: All of that, yes. It still helps to keep the contact with the grassroots level — and that’s something I miss because I don’t have the time anymore to be there — because that’s where basketball is being created, at the very lowest levels. But now I’m seeing [the game] from the other side. I can see the finals of the Olympic games, the finals of the NBA and the European championship. It’s interesting to see how all that movement at the grassroots level actually can lead to those big plays of those great players.
Personal:
Date and Place of Birth: 8/5/67 in Zurich, Switzerland
Education: MBA, University of Chicago; master’s degree in sports administration management, University of Lyon; law degree, University of Lausanne
Q. How would you describe your management philosophy?
Baumann: Basketball is a team sport. It’s all about the team: the right people, the right environment, the skill people and particularly motivated people that really like what they do.
Q. What’s the best call you have made in your position?
Baumann: To be able to rebrand FIBA.
Q. Greatest competitors?
Baumann: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Drazen Petrovic
Q. Smartest players?
Baumann: Maria Powell of Brazil and Tim Duncan
Q. What are you reading?
Baumann: Winning, by Jack Welch and The Empire of Shame, by Jean Ziegler
Q. What’s a typical day off like?
Baumann: To play with my kids and try to help out my wife, who’s basically taking care 364 days for the rest of the house.
Favorites:
Piece of music: The music of Vangelis
Author: Dante
Movie: The Godfather
Vacation spot: Barcelona
Quote: “To be or not to be.”
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