Clippers Owner Donald Sterling to GF - Don't Bring Black People to My Games

[News]

Clippers Owner Donald Sterling to GF - Don't Bring Black People to My Games, Including Magic Johnson

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/videos/0_wkuhmkt8/#ixzz303FAEGcI

Clippers Owner Donald Sterling to GF - Don't Bring Black People to My Games, Including Magic Johnson
Published on Apr 25, 2014
L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling told his GF he does NOT want her bringing black people to his games ... including Magic Johnson ... and it's ALL on tape.

'There's no room for Donald Sterling in the NBA': Outraged LeBron James hits out at Clippers owner over 'appalling' racist rant - but the 81-year-old billionaire insists he does NOT hate black people

The conversation is allegedly between Donald Sterling and his girlfriend, who goes by the name V. Stiviano, who identifies herself as part Mexican and part African American.

VS: I wish I could change the skin. The color of my skin
DS: That isn't the issue. You've missed the issue.
VS: What's the issue?
DS: The issue is we don't have to broadcast everything.
VS: I'm not broadcasting anything. I don't do anything wrong.


DS: Why are you taking pictures with minorities... why?
VS: What's wrong with minorities? What's wrong with black people?
DS: Nothing, nothing, nothing.
VS: What's wrong with Hispanics?
DS: It's like talking to an enemy. There's nothing wrong with minorities, they're fabulous. Fabulous. Because you're an enemy to me.
VS: Why?
DS: Because you don't understand.
VS: I don't understand what?
DS: Nothing, nothing.
VS: That racism still is a lie?
DS: No but there's a culture.
VS: What culture?
DS: People feel certain things. Hispanics feel certain things towards blacks. Blacks feel certain things towards other groups. It's been that way historically and it will always be that way.
VS: But it's not that way in my heart and in my mind.
DS: But maybe you want to adjust to the world.


DS: Yea it bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associated with black people. Do you have to?
VS: You associate with black people.
DS: I'm not you and you're not me. You're supposed to be a delicate white or a delicate Latina girl.
VS: I'm a mixed girl.
DS: Ok well.
VS: And you're in love with me. And I'm black and Mexican. Whether you like it or not. Whether the world accepts it or not. And you're asking me to remove.... you want me to have hate towards black people?
DS: I don't want you to have hate. That's what people do- they turn things around. I want you to love them- privately. In your whole life, everyday you can be with them. Every single day of your life.
VS: But not in public?
DS: But why publicize it on the Instagram and why bring it to my games?

Read more: dailymail.co.uk

Clippers owner Donald Sterling tells girlfriend not to bring black people to games, disses Magic Johnson, report says

"Sterling, who is scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP next month, has a history of accusations of discrimination, as ESPN the Magazine documented in 2009 and Jeff Pearlman has written. In November 2009, Sterling agreed to pay $2.73 million to settle allegations by the Justice Department that he refused to rent apartments to Hispanics and blacks and to families with children. In March 2011, Sterling won a lawsuit filed by Elgin Baylor, the team’s former general manager, when a jury rejected his claim of wrongful termination and age discrimination."

Full Article : washingtonpost.com


NBA Owner Sterling To Girlfriend: Why Bring Black People To My Games?

By Timothy Burke
4/26/14 1:40am
http://deadspin.com/exclusive-the-extended-donald-sterling-tape-1568291249

We all knew that Donald Sterling was a racist and an overall horrible human being. So TMZ's lurid audio of the Los Angeles Clippers owner enraged about his girlfriend taking photos with black people shouldn't really surprise you if you've been paying any attention. And yet, the audio is shocking—maybe because it's 2014, and this man is still allowed to own an NBA team. [Update: We've obtained an extended version of the TMZ clip, featuring a cameo from Matt Kemp and Sterling's defense that he generously feeds and clothes his players.]

In this audio, Sterling expresses ideas similar to the ones he did in the original: The world will think certain things if you're seen with black people, he tells his mistress, so you should not be seen with them in public, and under no circumstances should you bring them to Clippers games. How does he square his dim view of black people with the fact that he has an NBA team full of black players? Sterling responds with a breathtaking non-sequitur.

V: I don't understand, I don't see your views. I wasn't raised the way you were raised.
DS: Well then, if you don't feel—don't come to my games. Don't bring black people, and don't come.
V: Do you know that you have a whole team that's black, that plays for you?
DS: You just, do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have—Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

Poor Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp is also dragged into the conversation, having appeared in an Instagram photo with V. Stiviano. It was her photo with Magic Johnson that had apparently started the fight.

V: Honey, if it makes you happy, I will remove all of the black people from my Instagram.
DS: You said that before, you said, "I understand."
V: I DID remove the people that were independently on my Instagram that are black.
DS: Then why did you start saying that you didn't? You just said that you didn't remove them. You didn't remove every—
V: I didn't remove Matt Kemp and Magic Johnson, but I thought—
DS: Why?
V: I thought Matt Kemp is mixed, and he was OK, just like me.
DS: OK.
V: He's lighter and whiter than me.
DS: OK.
V: I met his mother.
DS: You think I'm a racist, and wouldn't—
V: I don't think you're a racist.
DS: Yes you do. Yes you do.
V: I think you, you—
DS: Evil heart.

And there is also this baffling exchange about black Jews in Israel:

DS: It's the world! You go to Israel, the blacks are just treated like dogs.
V: So do you have to treat them like that too?
DS: The white Jews, there's white Jews and black Jews, do you understand?
V: And are the black Jews less than the white Jews?
DS: A hundred percent, fifty, a hundred percent.
V: And is that right?
DS: It isn't a question—we don't evaluate what's right and wrong, we live in a society. We live in a culture. We have to live within that culture.
V: But shouldn't we take a stand for what's wrong? And be the change and the difference?
DS: I don't want to change the culture, because I can't. It's too big and too [unknown].
V: But you can change yourself.
DS: I don't want to change. If my girl can't do what I want, I don't want the girl. I'll find a girl that will do what I want! Believe me. I thought you were that girl—because I tried to do what you want. But you're not that girl.

They close by essentially invoking Hitler and closing down the thread, comparing Sterling's viewpoints to the Holocaust:

V: It's like saying, "Let's just persecute and kill all of the Jews."
DS: Oh, it's the same thing, right?
V: Isn't it wrong? Wasn't it wrong then? With the Holocaust? And you're Jewish, you understand discrimination.
DS: You're a mental case, you're really a mental case. The Holocaust, we're comparing with—
V: Racism! Discrimination.
DS: There's no racism here. If you don't want to be... walking... into a basketball game with a certain... person, is that racism?

Full Article:
http://deadspin.com/exclusive-the-extended-donald-sterling-tape-1568291249

[News]

President Obama: Alleged Donald Sterling remarks 'incredibly offensive'
President Barack Obama says he’s “confident” the NBA will address and resolve the controversy surrounding the “incredibly offensive racist statements” attributed to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

~~~

Michael Jordan weighs in on Donald Sterling's alleged racist tirades, saying 'there is no room in the NBA' for racist comments

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Magic Johnson Suggests Donald Sterling Should Sell Clippers After Alleged Racist Remarks

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LeBron James: `No room for Donald Sterling in NBA'

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Donald Sterling's girlfriend insists tape of Clippers owner 'launching racist rant' at her is authentic but denies she released it to the media

~~~

Sharpton Wants Clippers Owner Axed: 'Prepared to Rally In Front of NBA'
"No one should be allowed to own a team if they have in fact engaged in this kind of racial language."

[News]

Donald Sterling is impossible: why the boycotts and sponsors can't stop him

The LA Clippers owner has the NBA caught between a racist and a hard economic place: experts say ticket sales and ad deals mean little unless the league's oligarchy turns on one of its own

By Heidi Moore   
April 28, 2014 - theguardian.com

donald sterling comments Amtrak, Carmax, Kia, Red Bull, State Farm and Virgin America all cancelled or reconsidered their Clippers contracts based on Donald Sterling's comments. But even that might not really hurt the owner's financial interests Photograph: Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty

When we see a rich man abusing his power, we like to imagine we know the way to cause him pain: hit him where it hurts – in his bank account.

It rarely works. Fines, lost businesses, even bankruptcies are all mere potholes on the road to wealth. That’s why a boycott is such an ineffective path to shaming our errant oligarchs, particularly in the case of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

Sterling is the Archie Bunker of NBA team owners, an unreconstructed racist who has long used epithets against his talented black players and who, most recently, asked his mixed-race girlfriend not to be seen with black people – including Magic Johnson – at Clippers games.

As a result, a cohort of influential people – from Johnson himself to Jesse Jackson – are advocating that fans, or even NBA players, stay away from the Clippers’ playoff games. Today, the NAACP revoked its anticipated lifetime achievement award for Sterling.

The outrage is justified. The question is whether it will be effective in changing anything. On a business basis, it’s nearly impossible to financially damage Sterling into seeing the error of his ways. While symbolically satisfying, a boycott inflicts little damage in terms of dollars, and it will inflict even less on Sterling himself. There’s a moat of money around him. As a member of the NBA oligarchy, his fortune is guaranteed protection from the flailings of populism. The NBA’s greatest profits come from TV rights, followed by season ticket holders, followed by sponsorships. A boycott – either by fans, or players, or corporations – won’t make a dent.

Let’s count the ways a Sterling boycott will fail on every financial count. Multiple experts on the league told me today that an attendance boycott will fail because it would hurt only ticket sales, which are one of the smallest parts of the Clippers’ profits – and there are only a couple games left in the season anyway. Cutting sponsorships? Satisfying in theory, but none too quick. Corporations like Amtrak, Carmax, Kia, Red Bull, State Farm and Virgin America – all of which cancelled or reconsidered their sponsorships of the Clippers today – may have a harder time than they think getting their names disassociated with the team. As Tony Schiller of Paragon Marketing told me, it may not be possible for sponsors or even season ticket-holders to cancel contracts based on Sterling’s offensive statements. The most they can do is avoid future deals with his team.

Boycott all you want: the only way to hurt Donald Sterling is to get his fellow NBA oligarchs to force him to step away from the Clippers. The NBA is a cartel – a monopoly run by team owners – and its main financial purpose is to protect the profits of those owners. Nothing will change until they turn on one of their own, Lord of the Flies-style.

So far, this kind of enlightened self-interest seems elusive. The other owners in the league, as well as previous league commissioners, have ignored Sterling’s racist antics – even after decades of controversy. His moral rap sheet is long: he won’t rent apartments to blacks or Latinos. A court deposition of remarkable misogyny didn’t even get him suspended. As the owner of the Clippers, he lived off the welfare of other owners by keeping his team below the salary cap, instituting a system of churn that kept players young, cheap and disposable. “If you list the top 10 most horrible things [Sterling] has done, this wouldn't even make the list,” says Dr Olugbenga Ajilore, an associate professor of economics at the University of Toledo who is also a long-suffering Clippers fan.

It’s simple math. No individual – or company – has the influence to turn a boycott of the Clippers into the anti-racist revolution it needs to be. The economic power is not in the hands of the people. You can’t Occupy the NBA.

For proof of that, I called Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who follows sports, to ask what would happen if fans stopped attending the last three LA Clippers games left in this first round of the playoffs (assuming their series with the Golden State Warriors goes the full seven games). Zimbalist’s offhand estimate of the financial impact of a boycott: “it would add up to maybe $1m in ticket revenue, and several hundred thousand dollars in concessions and related revenue.”

At most, a boycott of the Clippers would add up to $2m, Zimbalist says. “That's a drop in the bucket,” Zimbalist says, compared to the team’s $128m in yearly revenues – $48m of which come from ticket sales – or to the NBA’s revenues of nearly $4bn.

A boycott would, however, hurt the Clippers players. They staged a silent protest by hiding their team logos on Sunday afternoon, but they still have to play on the court for a vile human being.

Pulling sponsorships, while flashy, is also unlikely to work on its own. A lot of big companies are eager to distance themselves from the Clippers today. Carmax and Virgin America, which sponsor the Clippers, have said they will pull back their money. State Farm is “assessing its relationship” and Kia is suspending its sponsorship, as are Amtrak and Red Bull.

That won’t show Sterling much, but it may scare his fellow NBA team owners, who are probably concerned that the sponsorship-cancellation bug may hit the rest of corporate America.

Still, the loss of a sponsorship is a stronger financial blow to some players more than it would be to their boss. Chris Paul, the star Clippers player who has been starring in the “Born to Assist” ad camaign for State Farm for over a year, has to be wondering why he will end up paying for Sterling’s racist views. Another Clippers player, Blake Griffin has a longstanding relationship with Kia, which features him in its ads.

Sterling’s imperviousness shows the flaws in the NBA’s financial structure. The finances of the NBA are like a battalion of armored vehicles: the money’s inside, but it’s impossible to tell who’s it is, and even harder to get at it. It’s a unified front of rich men, sworn to protect each other.

Not even players get a break; when they objected to salary caps a few years ago, the owners simply locked them out of the league. Under the new collective bargaining agreement, if player salaries exceed 57% of the NBA’s profits in any given year, the players actually have to give some of their salaries back to the owners. When a team owner pays a “luxury tax” to hire more and better players, that money goes right to the other owners as well. It is nearly impossible to hurt the profitability of just one team owners.

Sensing the futility of all of this, Dr Ajilore himself is not boycotting the team. “It’s hard to be a Clippers fan,” he told me. “You just say, You know what, I am supporting a team that has one of the world’s most despicable people in the world as an owner. And I deal with it. I know the deal I’m making.”

It’s not clear, however, whether the NBA can say the same. We’ll find out on Tuesday afternoon, when the commissioner Adam Silver will try to fulfill his promise on moving “extraordinarily quickly” on an investigation. But increasingly, the league’s inaction on Donald Sterling’s racism looks like a deal with the devil.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/donald-sterling-boycotts-sponsors-la-clippers-owner-nba

[News]

The real tragedy of Donald Sterling's racism: it took this long for us to notice

The LA Clippers owner made his millions off racist housing policies. Where was the NBA and presidential outrage then?

By Kevin B Blackistone
April 28, 2014 - theguardian.com

As riots exploded across America in early April 1968 in the immediate wake of Rev Martin Luther King's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson went on a Capitol Hill offensive to pass a law he hoped would, in part, quell some of the violence and best honor the man just slain. A day after King was buried, the Fair Housing Act was passed.

And in the nearly half-century since the enactment of that bedrock piece of civil rights legislation, which outlawed housing discrimination, there hasn't been a greater offender of it, perhaps, than longtime NBA owner Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Yet it was just this Saturday that there arose a hue and cry for the NBA to act against Sterling. It came in reaction to an audio recording allegedly of Sterling, who is white, telling his mixed-race girlfriend not to bring black people to his team's games.

Decades of racist policy renting housing in Los Angeles, which turned Sterling into a real-estate mogul wealthy enough to buy and run a professional sports team, didn't elicit any such furor. But decades of lousy Clippers basketball under Sterling's stewardship turned the Clippers into the butt of late-night TV jokes. The Clippers were laughed at for losing, laughed at for being cheap, laughed at for moving in with the star-studded Lakers, laughed at for being a second-class franchise in a first-class sports league.

But all those years, not enough people looked at Donald Sterling as the racist landlord the law so bore him out to be.

Neither the league, nor the players, nor the sports media paid much if any attention to Sterling's agreement in 2003 to pay upwards of $5m to settle a lawsuit brought by the Housing Rights Center charging that he tried to drive non-Korean tenants out of apartments he bought in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles. Only a few observers noted in 2006 that the Justice Department sued Sterling for allegations of housing discrimination in the same neighborhood. The charges included statements he allegedly made to employees that black and Hispanic families were not desirable tenants.

And while a handful of us in the media excoriated Sterling and the NBA in 2009 when Sterling settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay $2.73m following allegations he refused to rent apartments to Hispanics, blacks and families with children, the story didn't resonate – despite it being the largest housing discrimination settlement in Justice Department history.

There was no investigation from the NBA, like the one new commissioner Adam Silver announced under pressure this weekend, promising to move "extraordinarily quickly".

There was no condemnation from black players who predominate the league like the one that erupted Saturday and Sunday from current superstars, including LeBron James and Chris Paul, and from retired icons like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. Paul, the Clippers star and head of the National Basketball Players Association, joined his teammates Sunday in stripping their warm-up gear and throwing it unceremoniously into a pile in a demonstration to disown the team's nickname in protest of their owner's loathsomeness.

And there was certainly no President Barack Obama to denounce Sterling, as he did Sunday. The comments with which the owner had been charged with spewing, the president said, showed how "the United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation."

But pro sports have their own legacy of ignorance as bliss.

The sudden Sterling backlash exposed a mythology that we've allowed to grow in sport's billion-dollar commercial industrialization: sport leads social change. In many cases, however, such as the blind eye cast to racial discrimination of prodigious proportion, sport is a laggard in social reform, its leaders tacit supporters – if not propagators – of unethical and immoral behavior.

Indeed, the NBA front office and its member owners continued to embrace Sterling, and players – black and white – continued to accept offers to play for him without condition. Paul, so apoplectic about Sterling now, jumped to autograph a five-year, $107m contract exactly one minute after the midnight free agent signing period opened last summer. Clippers coach Doc Rivers, who Sunday said he was uncertain about returning to the team next season in the wake of the newest unsavory report about Sterling, moved from Boston to Los Angeles last summer to accept Sterling's $21m offer to coach the Clippers.

That is the norm.

Instances wherein pro-sports participants have taken a stand against social intransigence, like the walkout of the 1965 American Football League All-Star Game by black players angered that they were denied rooms and board in the host city New Orleans, are few. It took Major League Baseball years before it ousted Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, who became infamous for spewing barbs about black players and homosexuals and marveling at Hitler. And while the majority of American society became accepting of gay people in recent years, it wasn't until the past year that an active gay pro basketball player and would-be gay National Football League player felt comfortable enough to declare their sexuality in public.

It was an overdue reckoning this weekend when so many voices started calling for the NBA to sanction or oust Donald Sterling. Ironically, he was only able to become one of the league's owners due to the wealth he amassed – wealth amassed in part by refusing to lease land to people who look like most of the players in the NBA. As such, he should've been treated like a pariah years ago. But he wasn't rebuked, or worse, way back when – and that should be the biggest outrage of all.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/donald-sterling-racism-la-clippers-owner

[Nakandi]

"God teaches us to forgive, and the way I look at it, after a sustained period of proof to the African American community that those words don't reflect his heart, I think there's room for forgiveness. I wouldn't be a Christian if I said there wasn't," Jenkins said.

"We are negotiating with him about giving more moneys to African American students at UCLA, and so we are in preliminary discussions," Jenkins said.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/naacp-yanks-donald-sterlings-award-forgive/story?id=23501911

[News]

Donald Sterling gets lifetime ban, $2.5 million fine from NBA

NBA Suspends Clippers’ Owner Donald Sterling For Life, Imposes $2.5 Million Fine
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced Tuesday Clippers owner Donald Sterling will be suspended for life and fined $2.5 million following racist remarks he made in a recorded audio clip.

NBA community reacts to Donald Sterling's lifetime ban
Silver banned Sterling for life from any association from the Clippers organization or the NBA. He is not allowed to attend any games or practice, or be involved in any business relating to the running of the team. Sterling is also fined $2.5 million dollars, the maximum amount allowed by the NBA.

After 33 Years of Sterling, a Boiling Point
Why did it take a tape recording aired on a gossip website to ignite nationwide ire against Donald Sterling?

Oprah Slams Clippers Owner Donald Sterling: 'A Plantation Mentality' (Video)
The mogul, on CBS This Morning to promote her new tea line with Starbucks, said Sterling's comments remind her of "a plantation mentality in the 21st century, in 2014. It just doesn't fit."

Spike Lee: Sterling Has ‘Mentality Of A Slave Master, Sees His Players As Slaves

[News]

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Welcome to the Finger-Wagging Olympics

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
April 28, 2014
http://time.com/79590/donald-sterling-kareem-abdul-jabbar-racism/

It's time to look at ourselves — and our collective moral outrage — in the mirror, says former NBA player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Moral outrage is exhausting. And dangerous. The whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Wagging. Not to mention the neck strain from Olympic tryouts for Morally Superior Head Shaking. All over the latest in a long line of rich white celebrities to come out of the racist closet. (Was it only a couple days ago that Cliven Bundy said blacks would be better off picking cotton as slaves? And only last June Paula Deen admitted using the “N” word?)

Yes, I’m angry, too, but not just about the sins of Donald Sterling. I’ve got a list. But let’s start with Sterling. I used to work for him, back in 2000 when I coached for the Clippers for three months. He was congenial, even inviting me to his daughter’s wedding. Nothing happened or was said to indicate he suffered from IPMS (Irritable Plantation Master Syndrome). Since then, a lot has been revealed about Sterling’s business practices:

• 2006: U.S. Dept. of Justice sued Sterling for housing discrimination. Allegedly, he said, “Black tenants smell and attract vermin.”
• 2009: He reportedly paid $2.73 million in a Justice Dept. suit alleging he discriminated against blacks, Hispanics, and families with children in his rentals. (He also had to pay an additional nearly $5 million in attorneys fees and costs due to his counsel’s “sometimes outrageous conduct.”)
• 2009: Clippers executive (and one of the greatest NBA players in history) sued for employment discrimination based on age and race.

And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing “pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.” She 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.

They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping.

I don’t blame them. I’m doing some whooping right now. Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.

What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That’s the smoking gun?

He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?

Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.

Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil. 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.

So, if we’re all going to be outraged, let’s be outraged that we weren’t more outraged when his racism was first evident. Let’s be outraged that private conversations between people in an intimate relationship are recorded and publicly played. Let’s be outraged that whoever did the betraying will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing with the Stars.

The big question is “What should be done next?” I hope Sterling loses his franchise. I hope whoever made this illegal tape is sent to prison. I hope the Clippers continue to be unconditionally supported by their fans. I hope the Clippers realize that the ramblings of an 80-year-old man jealous of his young girlfriend don’t define who they are as individual players or as a team. They aren’t playing for Sterling—they’re playing for themselves, for the fans, for showing the world that neither basketball, nor our American ideals, are defined by a few pathetic men or women.

Let’s use this tawdry incident to remind ourselves of the old saying: “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” Instead of being content to punish Sterling and go back to sleep, we need to be inspired to vigilantly seek out, expose, and eliminate racism at its first signs.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time National Basketball Association champion and league Most Valuable Player. Follow him on Twitter (@KAJ33) and Facebook (facebook.com/KAJ).

http://time.com/79590/donald-sterling-kareem-abdul-jabbar-racism/

[leslie]

NBA owners to hold 1st discussions on Sterling

NEW YORK (AP) -- The NBA owners' advisory/finance committee will hold a meeting Thursday to discuss the next steps in the removal of Donald Sterling as owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.
 
The 10-member committee will have a conference call two days after Commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling for life from the league and fined him $2.5 million for making racist comments. Silver also said he would urge owners to use their power to force Sterling to sell the team.

Read more . . .

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BKN_STERLING_OWNERS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-04-30-14-12-58


Oprah considering Clippers bid

Oprah Winfrey, David Geffen and Larry Ellison will join together in a bid to buy the Los Angeles Clippers if the NBA's board of governors votes to force Donald Sterling to sell the team, Geffen told ESPN's Jeremy Schaap on Wednesday.
 
Geffen said he and Ellison would run the team, while Winfrey would be an investor.

Read more . . .

http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/10861503/oprah-winfrey-group-considering-bid-buy-los-angeles-clippers