For years, LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling has stunk up the locker room, the basketball arena and the buildings in which he’s refused to rent apartments to black people with his own particular brand of bigotry.
Now, folks in the media, in the NAACP and in the NBA are pretending to be shocked — shocked! — that Sterling, who was recorded ranting at his mistress for associating with black people, might have treated African-Americans with hatred and scorn.
Sterling’s rancid prejudices were well known in the sports world. But willful blindness and a perverse need to suck up to a rich guy, who contributes to charities that aid minorities, kept folks quiet — to the point where the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP at its 100th anniversary gala next month was scheduled to honor Sterling, for the second time.
The NAACP canceled the Lifetime Achievement Award. But also on the program is to be none other than the Rev. Al Sharpton, who’s accepting a Person of the Year award.
Had Rev. Al and the NAACP never heard that, in 2006, Sterling was sued, accused of refusing to rent apartments to black people? Come on. Though Sterling and his wife denied any wrongdoing, Sterling was ordered in 2009 to pay a $2.7 million settlement. This is not to be confused with the 2003 lawsuit in which Sterling was accused of trying to drive out blacks and Hispanics from his apartments. He paid an undisclosed settlement.
Sterling received his first NAACP Humanitarian Award in May 2009, just weeks after longtime Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor sued Sterling for wrongful termination and discrimination on the basis of age and race.
The suit claimed that Sterling said, “I’m offering a lot of money for a poor black kid,” and that he wanted the team to be made up of “poor black boys from the South” with a white coach. But the racial claims were dropped from the suit before trial and a jury found for Sterling in 2011.
Sterling, 80, is something worse than a dime-a-dozen racist.
He’s a vain and disgusting rich, dirty old married white man who, frankly, couldn’t care less if his one-time mistress, a black and Mexican woman named V. Stiviano, 31, hung out with retired legendary Lakers star Magic Johnson.
Sterling minded that Stiviano advertised her friendship with a black man on an Instagram post. In Sterling’s deranged head, his gal pal’s public relationships with African-Americans, even Johnson, might damage his friends’ perceptions of him.
By appearing in pictures with people bearing dark skin, Stiviano would, Sterling feared, trash the one thing the old coot cares for more than money, family, his basketball team or his temporary squeeze: the he-man reputation that exists only in Sterling’s fevered brain.
“In your lousy f–king Instagrams, you don’t have to have yourself with — walking with black people,’’ Sterling said during an April 9 argument with Stiviano in a recording released Friday night by TMZ.
On Tuesday, Sterling was banned for life from having any association with the Clippers or the league. Plus, he’s under pressure to sell the team.
But no punishment will cure the cancer eating at Sterling’s soul. His recorded conversation with Stiviano reveals a sexual insecurity and a twisted obsession with races other than Caucasian that has no place in basketball, and is out of touch with American values.
So Donald Sterling is likely to receive the worst penalty of all. He’s destined to be an old man, alone, with nothing to keep him company except his bile.
That is justice.