In the beginning, before the talk of frozen envelopes and creased corners and all the rest, the first NBA draft lottery had a simple goal: Stop Donald Sterling.

The year was 1984 and NBA teams were tanking with a Hinkie-esque gusto, but none as publicly as the San Diego Clippers, who were owned by Sterling, a 50-year-old real estate magnate who preferred his employees subservient and his shirts open to the navel. Two years earlier, as his Clippers trotted out increasingly inept lineups, Sterling had proclaimed, “We’ve got to bite the bullet. We can win by losing.”

The problem was, he was right. The draft order was determined by inverse order of finish, with the top spot hinging on a coin flip between the sorriest franchise in each conference. It was a tanker’s paradise: The worst the worst could do was the second choice. But the Clippers weren’t even the best at it. In 1982–83 the Rockets ripped off a series of stirring losing streaks and then won the coin flip for Ralph Sampson. A season later Houston set to work again, losing 20 of its last 27 games to -overtake—who else?—the Clippers on the final day of the season. (Late in the season Rockets coach Bill Fitch played the 38-year-old Elvin Hayes 52 out of a possible 53 minutes in an overtime game. Hayes, perhaps still gassed, retired a week later.) Houston won the flip again. This time, the reward was Akeem Olajuwon.

Marty Ledermandler/AP

Owners and league officials were, as then 76ers general manager Pat Williams recalls now, “beside themselves with anger and frustration.” David Stern, the league’s young, ambitious (and recently installed) commissioner, was determined to do something. There was no time for task forces or committees. Instead, at the board of governors meeting in June, the lottery was introduced and approved.The hurry was understandable, for the 1985 draft promised the most exciting, and potentially lucrative, prize in decades.

Manny Millan for Sports Illustrated

To understand just how coveted Patrick Ewing was 30 years ago, you have to forget what you know about the NBA in its current incarnation and return to a time when big men ruled the league. Sure, there existed the odd stretch-four or point-forward—players like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson—but for the most part, positions were determined by height, and size valued above all else. This was the league of Russell and Chamberlain, of Walton and Malone. Get your giant, the thinking went, and then surround him with ball-handling, post-feeding minions.

And not since Lew Alcindor left UCLA in 1969 had there been a giant as dominant as the 7-foot, 240-pound Ewing. In four years at Georgetown, Ewing took the Hoyas to three NCAA finals, winning one. He offered the total package. He could score in the post, defend, rebound and knock down an 18-foot jumper. When TBS superimposed a graphic of strengths on the screen during the 1985 draft broadcast, it read only, are you kidding? In Ewing, teams saw not just talent but salvation: ticket sales, playoff runs and, most of all, relevance. He was, as this magazine put it at the time, possibly “the most recognized athlete ever to enter a major professional league.”

Lane Stewart for Sports Illustrated

The seven nonplayoff teams each had an equal, 14.3% chance at Ewing. They ranged from the truly downtrodden (the league-worst Warriors, out of the postseason since 1977) to the temporarily stumbling (the Hawks, who had barely missed the playoffs, some believe on purpose). The Seattle Super-Sonics had Jack Sikma, a power forward masquerading as a center, and not much else. Clippers GM Carl Scheer sent letters of apology to the team’s season ticket holders after a 31–51 season. The Pacers still resembled the ABA team they once were, while the Kings had recently fled Kansas City under a downpour of boos for the pasturelands of Sacramento, the NBA equivalent of witness relocation.

TIME CAPSULE May 1985 MAY 6 Los Angeles Clippers point guard, CHRIS PAUL, is born. Courtesy of the Paul Family

And then there were the Knicks, coming off their worst campaign in 20 years. Star forward Bernard King missed 25 games; center Bill Cartwright was out the whole season. Many nights, Madison Square Garden had been half full.

If there was a perfect landing spot for Ewing, it was New York, the league’s biggest market. We consider the 1980s an NBA heyday, but it’s easy to forget that most of that growth came in the second half of the decade. In the spring of ’85, Michael Jordan was still a rookie on a bad Bulls team, the modern Lakers-Celtics rivalry was still blossoming, and the NBA was dogged by dwindling attendance, money-leaking franchises and a cocaine problem so widespread that an ’82 Los Angeles Times story reported that 75% of the players were on drugs. Just two years earlier the league had come close to disbanding six of its 23 teams.

Now, the NBA’s four-year, $91.9 million TV deal with CBS was set to expire after the season. Ewing in Sacramento did not move the TV needle. But Ewing in the Big Apple? Wrote The New York Times before the lottery, “There is a strong feeling among league officials and television advertising executives that the NBA will benefit most if [Ewing] winds up in a Knicks uniform.”

Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images

Others took it a step further. Stan Kasten, then the GM of the Hawks, recalls attending a college tournament in Hawaii a few months before the lottery. “I was sitting with a couple of NBA guys,” says Kasten, “and I remember one high-ranking- team executive, who I will not name, was a million percent convinced of what was going to happen. ‘He’s going to the Knicks,’ he kept saying. ‘He’s going to the Knicks. It’s all arranged.’ ” Kasten pauses, chuckles. “I didn’t believe him at the time.”

David Joel Stern never lacked for ambition. Both street smart (he learned people skills watching his father run a successful New York City deli) and book smart (Columbia Law), he was promoted from his position of NBA executive vice president to commissioner in February 1984, at 41. Instituting the lottery was one of his first acts and, most agreed, a necessary move to protect the league’s integrity. But what he did next was equally novel: He decided to televise it.

This may seem obvious now, but this was a pre–Kiper Jr. age, an era blissfully bereft of 24-hour hot takes. Half the NBA playoff games weren’t even on national TV at the time, and the draft had aired on the USA Network, on a weekday, in the afternoon. What’s more, interest was so low that, according to Stern, the NBA actually paid USA $40,000 to carry the draft one year.

The lottery? It was basically a glorified drawing of straws. Nonetheless, Stern was determined to leverage it. Any buzz was good buzz.

So it was that on the morning of the lottery, Sunday, May 12, CBS reporter Pat O’Brien arrived early at the Waldorf Astoria in midtown Manhattan. Then 37 and brilliantly mustachioed, O’Brien had written out a handful of lines, depending on which team got the first pick. Most involved the phrase “Basketball’s back in. . . .”

Rob Lewine/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

The NBA had credentialed more than 100 media and invited another 100 guests, all of whom crowded into the Starlight Roof on the 18th floor. Once one of the city’s hippest nightclubs, hosting Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller under a retractable roof, the Starlight had temporary blue walls bearing the NBA emblem. And there, on the stage next to a podium, sat what appeared to be a bizarrely large, transparent beach ball.

The ball—a plastic drum, really—was the brainchild of Rick Welts, a 32-year-old rising star in the NBA office whom Stern had deputized to design a lottery that would be both fair and, against all odds, entertaining. At the time, Stern was famously hard-driving; he hired young staffers with the expectation that they work 60 to 70-hour weeks, then dressed them down if they didn’t meet his perfectionist standards. As a result, Welts felt enormous pressure. In this case, Welts and his team turned to Hugh Rasky, a set designer known for working on presidential debates. After rejecting a number of ideas, they settled on using the drum to shuffle seven envelopes, each one a square foot.

In retrospect it seems a peculiar decision. Square objects don’t exactly roll inside a circular container like, say, Ping‑Pong balls. But the NBA had its reasons. For one, “we were afraid of having the thing pop open and all the balls fly out,” says Brian McIntyre, who was head of the league’s then minuscule media relations staff. The hope was also to make the ceremony seem dignified, and everyone agreed that Ping‑Pong balls felt more like a circus (or an actual lottery). More important was to get the team logos on the cards inside the envelopes to pop on the 20-inch TV sets of the day. And if they were going to be placed in order on a shelf, they needed to be square. So: giant envelopes. At the first dress rehearsal, in Stern’s office, an envelope came flying out of the drum, “much to our horror,” says Welts.

“It was very, very tense,” says Pat O’Brien of the scene at the Waldorf before the first lottery. “I’ve been in courtrooms and murder trials that weren’t that tense.”

The show logistics turned out to be daunting on many levels. By using the Waldorf, rather than an arena or studio, CBS and the NBA had to set up an entire operation on site. That meant bringing hundreds of feet of cable up in the elevator and then dropping it back down 18 floors to a waiting TV truck, which had its own issues trying to idle for most of the day on 49th Street in Manhattan. Then there was the matter of the team representatives, who were asked to be on hand for the event. What were these people supposed to actually do? Just sit there the whole time?

By 1 p.m., a little under an hour before the show went live—it was to take place at halftime of a Sixers-Celtics playoff game—the Starlight Roof was packed. At least one reporter, if not more, had flown in from every lottery city. Three Atlanta stations were running live remotes.

Even so, O’Brien remembers it being eerily quiet. “It was very, very tense,” he says. “I’ve been in courtrooms and murder trials that weren’t that tense.” On stage, representatives from the seven teams fidgeted in their seats. Back home, Seattle was hosting a St. Patrick Ewing Day, while the Clippers had arranged to open their switchboards on that Sunday for the deluge of season ticket requests. The Kings were holding a party at the site of the new Sacramento Arena that included two psychics. Meanwhile, Knicks GM Dave DeBusschere had a horseshoe from prize harness racer On the Road Again. He also later admitted that earlier that morning, at the 9:15 Mass at St. Joseph’s near his home, he may have been “a little selfish” during his prayers.

MAY 11 “Saturday Night’s Main Event” premieres on NBC, marking the first time professional wrestling had appeared on TV since the 1950s.

Around 1:45 the playoff game went to halftime. From the Waldorf, O’Brien prepared to go live. As both an inside joke with a friend and an homage of sorts, he had decided to host the event as if he were David Brinkley. So, to lighten the mood, he stated with mock gravity that the security guard was unarmed.

Moments later Stern took the stage. What unfolded next has since become the Zapruder film of sports, watched and rewatched on YouTube and dissected by conspiracy theorists. Stern explaining the process. A white-haired man from the accounting firm of Ernst & Whinney, Jack Wagner, tossing seven envelopes into the plastic globe one at a time, pausing for the briefest of moments—perhaps to adjust his aim?—before dumping in the fourth, which bangs off the interior of the drum, creasing the corner. The NBA’s head of security, Jack Joyce, spinning the drum five times. Stern exhaling visibly and reaching in for the first choice, the one that will determine Ewing’s fate. Stern fumbling around for a moment, grasping and turning the envelopes, then lifting out the lucky one—which just so happens to have a creased corner.

After choosing six more, placed in order behind the first envelope, Stern began the reveal, counting down from the final selection. “The seventh pick in the 1985 draft,” he announced in that nasal voice, “goes to the Golden State Warriors!”

And with that, the camera panned to Al Attles, the proud, stoic face of the Bay Area franchise, a GM and former coach whose team had finished with the worst record and, just a year earlier, would have been guaranteed at least the No. 2 choice. “He looked,” recalls Williams, the Sixers’ GM, “like he got hit in the face with an ax handle.” Sitting next to Attles, Kasten reached out and patted his arm, as if comforting the bereaved. Attles’s face sank and then rose in disbelief. “It was,” recalls Los Angeles Times NBA writer Sam McManis, “like watching a man go through the five stages of grief right there on stage.”