So we have to start with this: We don’t know, with 100 percent certainty, the voice on that TMZ tape really belongs to Donald Sterling. NBA commissioner Adam Silver is a smart man, and so he certainly wasn’t about to work on assumptions or prevailing wisdoms as he addressed this critical matter Saturday night.
On the tape, TMZ alleges it is Sterling talking to his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, and saying, “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?”
The voice purportedly belonging to Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, continues: “You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that … and not to bring them to my games.”
Silver, in his first critical moment as NBA commissioner, knows he needs to be right about this, knows he needs to be fully armed in the belief these comments are indeed Sterling, directed to Stiviano, (who is black and Mexican), after she posted a picture of her with Magic Johnson on Instagram, a photo that has since been removed.
Everything we know about Sterling, everything his disgraced record as an owner in the league tells us, is that this is almost certainly him. He has been sued multiple times on multiple racial charges in his business career, five years ago paying $2.73 million to settle allegations his companies targeted and discriminated against blacks, Hispanics and families with children in renting apartments in greater Los Angeles, nine years ago settling another discrimination suit reported to be in the $5 million range.
This always has been the darker side of Sterling’s public persona. He always was a bumbling owner, cheap and low on accountability, and for years he oversaw the NBA’s perennial joke franchise. But losing games at staggering pace was one thing. His business affairs always were troubling, and just barely on the side of the line that kept the NBA from doing what it must do now.
Which, if that’s really Sterling’s voice on the tape, is this:
He must go away now. For good. Forever. Immediately. He must be shipped off to that same place where Marge Schott lived out the rest of her sad life after she talked about admiring Hitler’s bus schedules and everything else she uttered in her half-wit way.
That is Silver’s mission now. That is his duty. Johnson already has said he never will attend another Clippers game as long as Sterling is in charge, and if he made his fame as a Laker, he still is one of L.A.’s most prominent athletic citizens. That is a bold and proper statement.
Beyond that, Sterling owns a basketball team whose coach, Doc Rivers, is a thoughtful voice of intellect in the league — and also happens to be African-American. His two best players, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, are minorities. Presumably so are many Clippers fans, patrons, ticket buyers. He has to go. He has to go now. For good. Forever.
This isn’t the thought police run amok. This is a man who long has been suspected of racial intolerance finally — presumably — uttering the wrong thing at the wrong time into a live microphone. Maybe it was a matter of time.
But it is time. Silver promises a quick, thorough investigation, and he is right about needing to be right, needing to be sure.
Once he is? Sterling must be gone. Immediately. For good. Forever.