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| Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers speaking to the media before Game 5 of their opening-round playoff series. Credit Associated Press |
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver banned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling from the league for life and fined him $2.5 million for the racist remarks he made in a leaked phone call. Silver said the NBA interviewed Sterling and he admitted to being the voice on the tape. "The views expressed are deeply offensive and harmful, that they came from an NBA owner only heightens the damage and my anger," Silver said. Sterling will not be involved with games or practices, offices and facilities, or any team business matters. Silver said he is pushing the NBA Board of Governors to force Sterling to sell the team, which requires the approval of three-quarters of the board. The vice president of the NBA player's union said players were prepared to boycott all the playoff games if Sterling was not suspended.
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The league commissioner, Adam Silver, called remarks by the Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, “deeply offensive and harmful.”
Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times.
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[Still]....it was a shock to hear Sterling, in a surreptitious recording obtained by TMZ, pleading with his then-girlfriend not to publicize her associations with black people. Everything about the recording is creepy. We should not be hearing this private dispute between an 80-year-old married man with a documented history of cretinous behavior and his twentysomething girlfriend. And Sterling most certainly should not be telling her that it is fine to sleep with black men as long as she doesn’t post pictures of herself with them on Instagram. (Bloomberg BusinessWeek )
MIKE VACARRO, N.Y. POST
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Coupled with the punishment itself — a lifetime ban, a $2.5 million fine, a banishment from future Board of Governors meetings and, ultimately, the other 29 owners deciding his fate (with the overwhelming assumption that Silver will get the necessary 75 percent to oust him) — it was a very good day for the new Boss, who came across as earnest, honest and serious. It was a good start.
And also the easy part.
Because this is where the road will begin to turn tricky, and ugly, assuming that Sterling isn’t willing to simply plead nolo contendere and walk away quietly. That has never been his style anyway; in the minutes before the Silver hammer struck, FOX TV reporter Jim Gray revealed he’d spoken with Sterling and Sterling had uttered the three words that guarantee this is just the opening salvo:
“Not for sale.”
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[According to Sports Illustrated, the NBA constitution, which is not a public document, “contains language permitting owners to authorize the league to sell a team without an owner’s consent,” but this provision covers financial failures, not moral ones. Bloomberg BusinessWeek ]
...Sterling isn’t the only NBA owner whose private opinions and behaviors made public would cause discomfort at best and outrage at worst. The other 29 know that. Sterling certainly knows that. He is a lawyer who loves litigation, and will surely have little problem fighting the NBA on every beach available between here and the Supreme Court. And it isn’t as if he’s ever been afraid to fight dirty. Rich men have lots of closets in their mansions, after all. Some of them stuffed with skeletons.
And now, with nothing left to lose?
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Photograph by Andrew D. Bernstein/Getty Images
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling
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When I first heard [the tape], I was shocked,” Silver said at one point. “I was hoping somehow that it was fraudulent or that it had been doctored, that possibly it wasn’t indeed Donald Sterling. I’ve known Donald for over 20 years, so I suspected it was his voice, and we set about immediately investigating, and that was my reaction, to … say, ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible.’ ”
And in that answer was the one fissure that is sure to shadow the league into court, the one question a smart lawyer such as Donald Sterling might ask: “You’ve known me 20 years and you never suspected I was a racist before now? What does that say about your powers of perception? Your ability to lead?”
That’s when the job gets a little tougher for Silver, and for the league that is now his league. Silver is smart. He is tough. He will have an answer for that, and will have to hope that his owners are equally tough when their own quirks and peccadillos are questioned by Sterling and the glut of depositions and discoveries that are sure to come.