Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is outraged by the Donald Sterling scandal — and the fact that “everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise.”
In an essay for Time magazine, Hall of Famer Abdul-Jabbar said the wealth of evidence revealing the LA Clippers owner as a racist should have led to official action long before his lifetime ban from the NBA on Tuesday.
“He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope.”
As a result of the hypocritical “moral outrage,” Abdul-Jabbar said, “the whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Wagging.”
The six-time NBA champ and MVP noted that he worked for Sterling as a Clippers coach in 2000, calling him “congenial” and adding that he got invited to Sterling’s daughter’s wedding.
Abdul-Jabbar even worked up a little sympathy for Sterling, noting how “now the poor guy’s girlfriend . . . is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism.”
The girlfriend, he wrote, “blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee.”
Abdul-Jabbar added: “Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil.”
He concluded: “In our quest for social justice, we shouldn’t lose sight that racism is the true enemy. He’s just another jerk with more money than brains.”