Adam Silver and the NBA made a huge statement on Friday when they handed now-disgraced Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling a fine of $2.5 million and a lifetime ban from the league for the alleged racist remarks he made in a recording released last week. The fact of the matter, however, is that the Sterling has a very long and troubling history of inappropriate behavior, and the NBA did their best to simply ignore the issue until the issue grew far to big to be ignored.
In fact, it’s not even the first time that the NBA’s longest-tenured owner has been accused racism. Former NBA player and Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor, who is African-American, said in a 2009 wrongful-termination lawsuit that Sterling had a “plantation mentality” and once told him that he “would like to have a white southern coach coaching poor black players”. Baylor also claimed that several prominent Clippers players, including Elton Brand, Corey Maggette, and Sam Cassell, told him that Sterling would frequently bring different women into the locker room, once even telling one of them to “look at their beautiful black bodies”. The case was eventually rejected by a jury.
Sterling, who made his fortune in real estate, has also been repeatedly accused of making racially charged statements about African-American tenants living in his properties. In 2006, the Department of Justice even brought charges against him for allegedly refusing to rent his Los Angeles residential complexes to African-Americans. Sterling avoided an admission of liability three years later when the suit was settled for $2.75 million.
It doesn’t end there, however. Besides his now-obvious and undeniable racist tendencies, Sterling also has a history of other bizarre incidents and unusual behavior that had continually been overlooked by the NBA under former league commissioner David Stern.
Two-time NBA all-star point guard Baron Davis, who played for the Clippers from 2008-2011said that Sterling would often heckle him during games, calling him “the devil”, “crazy”, and would oftentimes even suggest that he shouldn’t be playing. In 2012, Davis opened up about his strained relationship with Sterling when he told the New York Post:
“I just stopped liking basketball. And then you dribbling down the court and having the owner like cuss at you and call you an idiot. I didn’t even look forward to coming to the games, and if the owner came to the game, I definitely was not gonna have a good game because it was just like, how do you play when the main heckler in the gym is the owner of the team, and he’s telling you how much he hates you and calling out your name?”
If one truly has any knowledge of Donald Sterling’s troubling history, it’s hard to say that the events of the last week have been surprising. Sterling has never done a good job of hiding his racist views, and yet, before Tuesday, he had never been disciplined by the league an any way. The league simply ignored Sterling’s antics for over 30 years, hoping that he would never do anything to embarrass the NBA on the national level that he has within the past week.
The truth is, Sterling never deserved to represent the NBA, and something should have been done about it long ago. Despite all the negative publicity that Los Angeles has received stemming from the latest Sterling incident, however, there is a silver lining. The timing of this incident could not have come at a better time for the Clippers, as or the first time since Sterling bought the lowly franchise in 1981, the Clippers actually have a respectable team, and with Sterling likely to be forced to sell the team, their chances of retaining star players such as Blake Griffin in the future are higher than they ever were under him.
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