I know it’s the playoff season in the NBA, but the events surrounding the Donald Sterling scandal have the NBA looking more like a soap opera than a professional sports league, except that a soap opera is not as contradictory, sordid, or farfetched.
Where do we start in this convoluted plot?
1. The question of privacy. While everyone agrees that Sterling’s comments are unacceptable, those comments were, in fact, made in private, raising the question of whether it is right to punish someone for their personal, privately held opinions.
The comments of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, in response to a reporter’s question, are disturbing: “Whether or not these remarks were initially shared in private, they are now public, and they represent his views.”
Perhaps all owners should be subject to a lie detector test to determine whether they hold to views considered unacceptable by the league? And does this mean that information that would be thrown out in a court of law (if obtained illegally) can be used by the NBA?
2. The hypocrisy of the NBA. Aside from the fact that the NBA conveniently overlooked Sterling’s past public transgressions, the league is now faced with the fact that plenty of people employed by the league (or who work closely with the league) have made remarks that are far more inflammatory and racist than Sterling.
As Ben Shapiro pointed out, Spike Lee, who is “currently a host on NBA Radio on SiriusXM, stars in NBA commercials, and had a front-row seat to the Sterling announcement,” has stated that “white gentrification of Harlem has been horrible, has posted the address of George Zimmerman’s parents online to spur violence, has explained after visiting South Africa in the early 1990s, ‘I seriously wanted to pick up a gun and shoot whites. The only way to resolve matters is by bloodshed.’ He, like Donald Sterling, is no fan of interracial dating: ‘I give interracial couples a look. Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street.'”
Shapiro also mentioned Jay Z., closely involved with the NBA on several fronts, who “was spotted recently at an NBA game wearing a necklace medallion for the Five Percent Nation, which sees black men as gods and white people as devils.”
Do I hear an outcry anywhere?
3. Sexual immorality is no big deal. Isn’t it ironic that you can have a mistress (or two, or more) and own an NBA team without a problem, but if you tell that mistress you don’t want her posing with blacks on Instagram or bringing them to games, you’re banished for life. Why the selective moral indignation?
Rush Limbaugh cited an email claiming, “You can find eight NBA players and one coach, a total of nine men who have hooked up with 55 women and produced 72 children over the past few years with no marriages involved.”
If this is true, then it represents a far greater scandal than Sterling’s ugly comments. Could the NBA (among other professional leagues) survive if the secret lives of its stars were revealed?
4. The folly of the NAACP. Despite the fact that the NAACP leadership knew about Sterling’s long-documented (or, at least, long-alleged) racist history, they had already given him a lifetime achievement award and were about to give him a second one.
Now, they are saying that the NBA’s punishment of Sterling was not sufficient, calling for a meeting with Commissioner Silver. In fact, a coalition of African-American leaders issued a statement saying, “Sterling’s long-established pattern of bigotry and racist comments have not been a secret in the NBA. Yet until now, they have been tolerated and met with a gentle hand and a blind eye” – and a lifetime achievement award from the NAACP.
Even L.Z. Granderson, an African-American, gay-activist journalist, has written that, “The NAACP needs to sit down,” adding, “The phrase ‘sell out’ is one that gets tossed around, but for some reason, it doesn’t quite cover the NAACP’s L.A. chapter in this case.” (He’s claiming that the awards Sterling received were the result of donations he made to that chapter.)
5. Mark Cuban and the slippery slope. Outspoken NBA owner and business entrepreneur Mark Cuban, while calling Sterling’s remarks “abhorrent,” was concerned that the NBA’s actions represented a “slippery slope.” He asked, “How many people are bigoted in one way or the other in this league? … But you find one, all of a sudden you say well, you can’t play favorites being racist against African-Americans. Where do you draw the line?”
Raising this issue from another angle, Rush Limbaugh said, “Rachel Nichols, formerly of ESPN and now of CNN, has told us who the next target is, the next NBA owner who is the target. It’s the owner of the Orlando Magic, Rich DeVos. And you know why he’s a target? Because he doesn’t agree with gay marriage. He’s the next target of whoever it is that’s going to clean up the NBA.”
6. Enter Floyd Mayweather. To add to the intrigue, Mayweather, the mega-rich boxing champion, expressed an interest in buying the Clippers, despite the fact that he has served time for domestic violence and despite his own history of racist remarks, to the point that he was even called out by the UFC’s Dana White.
7. The legal battles have just begun. Sterling, on his part, is hardly going down without a fight, and he has now launched a $1.7 billion dollar suit against the NBA, accusing the league of modern-day extortion (among other things) and claiming that the case is a slam dunk. And what if he actually wins?
8. The Jews rule the world. OK, that charge hasn’t been raised yet, but seeing that David Stern was the last NBA commissioner and Adam Silver is the present commissioner, you’ve got to figure that someone will raise that charge soon enough, now with irrefutable proof.
The plot thickens.
