In 1984, Peter Ueberroth became commissioner of Major League Baseball. 25 years later, his daughter Heidi seems set to follow in her father’s footsteps. She is being touted as a successor to current NBA commissioner David Stern. Should she assume the role, she would become the first female commissioner of any major sports league anywhere in the world. For now though, at least, she is spearheading the NBA’s global push.

Heidi Ueberroth is the most powerful woman in the sports industry. As the president of global marketing partnerships and international business operations at the National Basketball Association (NBA), Ueberroth is the league’s top dealmaker. The daughter of former Major League Baseball commissioner and 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games organiser, Peter Ueberroth, she is now a massively influential figure in her own right.

Having joined the NBA in 1994, Ueberroth earned her stripes in the league’s international television department. Since then, she has overseen the most comprehensive international expansion in the league’s history. Thanks to Ueberroth, the NBA is now televised in 215 countries and in 43 languages. According to a list published by this magazine last month, the league is currently the third most valuable sports property in the world. Now, at just 43 years of age and a relative rarity as a high-powered woman in the sports industry, Ueberroth has been tasked with a new challenge: making basketball the biggest sport in the world and the NBA the most popular league on the planet.

The second of four children, Heidi Ueberroth grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley. Before he became MLB commissioner and Los Angeles Olympics organiser, Peter Ueberroth had made millions in the travel industry. Because of the nature of her father’s work, the young Heidi lived something of a jet-set lifestyle. “I was fortunate when I was growing up that my parents were in the travel business and so I had a unique chance to take some trips as a child that influenced me and I just loved learning about different cultures,” she says. In fact, although she always enjoyed childhood visits to Europe, early trips to Hong Kong and China would have a profound influence on Ueberroth.

Arriving at the NBA in 1994, the 28-year-old Ueberroth was already a highly experienced international sports businesswoman. Her first job out of university was with a production company called Ohlmeyer Communications. Ueberroth was based in Paris with the company’s sports entertainment division. She recalls: “At the time, they were in a partnership with Nabisco [the American snacks giant], helping run some of their sports marketing – which included at the time the title sponsorship of the men’s tennis tour.” Ueberroth worked from the famous tennis centre at Roland Garros, home of the French Open. Initially, she wasn’t keen to follow her father into sports business; she simply wanted a job in media that would allow her to experience different cultures. But her job at Ohlmeyer left a lasting impression.

Ueberroth left Ohlmeyer Communications to take up a programming role at ESPN. Based in New York but still travelling a lot, she became intrigued with the idea of the globalisation of sport. Having already made something of a name for herself, it was then, in 1994, that the NBA came calling. Ueberroth takes up the story: “Being based in New York, I heard about an opening at the NBA [whose central office is in New York] which was to get involved in their international television department. I came in and met with a number of the league managers and heard about the amount of programming and some of the relationships they had. This was ’94, looking back at the Barcelona Olympics [in 1992] and all of that, and I just thought ‘this is poised for incredible growth’ and, luckily for me, it was even bigger than I could see.”

Indeed, the 1992 Barcelona Olympics proved to be a turning point for the NBA. Coinciding with Ueberroth’s arrival, 1994 was the first year in which the NBA sent some of its teams abroad to play non-exhibition, regular-season games. The Portland Trail Blazers played the Los Angeles Clippers in front of a capacity crowd at the Yokohama Arena in Tokyo. Tickets sold for up to US$350 with the Trail Blazers’ guard Clyde Drexler a particular draw. But that popularity had been built by the decision to allow NBA players to represent their countries at the Olympics. Drexler had starred for the original ‘Dream Team’, the US side that dominated the 1992 Olympics, playing a brand of basketball that had never before been seen on an international stage, defeating its eight opponents by an average of 44 points.

Rick Welts, chief executive of the Phoenix Suns who was then the president of the NBA’s merchandising unit, believes sending the Dream Team to Barcelona was a watershed moment for the league. “It moved our international effort ahead 10 years,” he said. “It was the most important event in the history of the sport.” Joining the league as a director in the NBA’s international television department, it was an ideal time for Ueberroth to come on board.

She took to the job immediately, plunging herself into the task of internationalising the NBA. “Back then,” she says, “if you’d asked me if I could foresee that 20 per cent of NBA players today would be from outside the United States, and what high impact players they would be, and that you’d have international first round draft picks – incredible. That would have been very hard to imagine back then. But you could just see that it was the right game in terms of the fact that the game is played everywhere; it’s incredibly accessible. It already just captured the youth and you could see that the iconic personalities of the players would be something that would continue.”

Ueberroth went from strength to strength and her value to the league clearly did not go unnoticed. Before too long, she was given a wider mandate as an executive vice president of the NBA. In 2006, she was promoted to her current role, a position created especially for her, widening her mandate even further. When asked whether she could envision a female commissioner of the NBA, she thinks hard, careful not to give too much away, before replying with a wry smile: “Down the road? Sure.” But it is no wonder she is being touted as a genuine contender to replace David Stern as the league’s top executive as and when the 66-year-old decides to call it a day.