The former NBA commissioner's inaction has led to a dilemma for the new one.
Racial remarks attributed to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling shocked the sports world and handed NBA commissioner Adam Silver the challenge of a lifetime.
It comes three months after Silver replaced David Stern, who has been called the best commissioner in the history of sports, with the possible exception of Pete Rozelle.
But Stern's own version of the no-look pass regarding Sterling is getting closer scrutiny. As this horror show unfolds, Stern may draw comparisons not to Rozelle but to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who saved baseball from game-fixers in the 1920s and was elected to Cooperstown in 1944.
Similarly, Stern is coming to Springfield in August. He has been held in such high regard that upon retiring in February, he was immediately elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
In Landis' case, debate over whether he helped keep blacks out of baseball has only recently been given much attention. In one very important respect, the comparison is unfair because Stern is the anti-Landis on race.
Stern earned his reputation as a hard-boiled businessman but also a man of decency, an open-minded and progressive individual whose own views fit perfectly with the modern, diversified NBA.
In 2005, when Stern pushed for a dress code that some saw as culturally biased, others said he was simply trying to make the NBA more appealing to greater masses so that everyone, including the players, could get richer.
Nonetheless, Stern's blind eye toward Sterling means that what Sacramento Mayor and former NBA player Kevin Johnson calls a "a defining moment'' in NBA history - will have to be defined by a rookie commissioner, not the man who ran the league with unparalleled clout since 1984.
What could Stern have done? I confess not to know, just as we don't yet know what legal or punitive influence is within Silver's power.
It's still hard not to wonder if a man with Stern's influence could have acted sooner instead of stuffing all those red flags into the closet.
Stern wrestled with moral values all the time. But he never forgot that his mission, as he saw it, was to make the NBA a booming business - which is why he's going to the Hall of Fame.
That's why he expanded the NBA's involvement with China, even as that nation with its huge market was besieged by human rights questions. The NBA fined players, coaches and owners huge sums for saying a ref blew a call, because that did not reflect well on the product.
Neither did any recognition that one of his teams was owned by guy who didn't respect black people. So, Stern never took on Sterling, and other than Elgin Baylor, neither did anyone else - not even players like Baron Davis, a Clippers guard from 2008-2011 who tweeted on Saturday that Sterling's attitudes have been known for some time.
For most of the 33 years since Sterling bought the team, the Clippers were so bad that nobody paid much attention to them. Their boss was considered a kooky wacko but not a menace to society.
Sterling's track record, though, was no secret. In 2006, he paid $2.725 million but avoided admission of liability on charges he refused to rent apartment complexes to blacks.
In 2009, he was sued by Baylor, a longtime Clippers executive and one of the pioneers of black superstardom in the NBA. Baylor reported examples of what he called the owner's "plantation mentality,'' but eventually lost the wrongful termination suit.
And just in case we think Sterling has soured with age, there are published reports of Rollie Massimino's contention that in 1983 (a year before Stern became commissioner), the Clippers owner used the N-word in an interview regarding the coaching position.
Massimino walked away from the job, saying he could never work for Sterling. But a coach or a player needs a job, and the NBA has only a limited number of them, so no one else walked away.
Once they finally became a good team - better, even, than the Lakers - coaches and players became interested in joining them.
Doc Rivers, who is one of the finest human beings in sports, played for the Clippers for one year (1991-92). He left the Celtics in 2013 to coach in LA, because the Celtics were rebuilding and the Clippers were contending.
He couldn't have known, could he? Countless players, black and white, either didn't know or, like Davis, chose not to let it affect their personal career decisions.
Many of them - Golden State coach Mark Jackson sounds like one of them - are probably now wrestling with their own consciences over being involved with this guy.
Stern is going to the Hall of Fame. Silver is going for the Tylenol. We don't know what will happen to Sterling, but hindsight tells us we should have known for years this was coming.
That still makes it Sterling's fault, and no one else's, but the most surprising part of it is that so many people seem so surprised. We are left to wonder if such a decent, perceptive and brilliant man as David Stern is one of them.