Forget about healing, Donald Sterling is proving to be the black-eye that just won’t go away for the NBA.
After verbally signing off on the deal engineered by wife Shelly Sterling to sell the L.A. Clippers to tech guru Steve Ballmer for a cool $2 billion, Sterling has now not only reneged on the pledge but set course on a witch-hunt that seemingly targets everyone to have ever held a stake in the NBA not named Donald Sterling.
To wit, the league’s once longest tenured owner has hired a team of four private investigating firms and provided them with a six-figure budget to “dig up dirt” on the league’s current and former commissioners, not to mention all 29 other league owners.
Who knows what the demented Sterling plans to do with the “dirt” he uncovers, but it’s not at all surprising that he automatically assumes it exists and that everyone else has operated just as he has. In Sterling’s view, all the players who have suited up for his Clippers over the last three decades were not men, but chattel and as such rightfully deserving of all the boorish and inhumane treatment he regularly inflicted on them.
Sterling would have you believe it’s the same — or at least it should be — with every NBA player, no matter what team name they’re wearing emblazoned across their chest.
An element of the smoking-gun Sterling’s sleuths are said to be particularly focusing on is the question of if any other owners have made any “off-color jokes or racist or sexist remarks” over the years, you know something on par with what he uttered to start this whole firestorm in admonishing a girlfriend “not to bring black people to my games,” not even NBA Hall of Famer and L.A. legend Magic Johnson.
“His objective is to demonstrate for everybody that the NBA is a damned hypocrite,” Bobby Samini, one of Sterling’s lead attorneys told ESPN. “We’re going to pull every case against the NBA. Then we’ll demonstrate that the culture of racism and gender discrimination is born at the NBA, where Adam Silver has worked in a high-level position for a long time.”
Forget about making amends, saving his soul or even apologizing, Donald Sterling thinks its repentance enough just to show the world that there are others of it who might be just as twisted as he is.
“He realized these guys will literally go to any low to get this sold,” a source close to Sterling told ESPN. “Even if it gets him nothing other than exposing all these guys and shaking up the league and seeing a change in the leadership of the league, it’ll be worth it to him.”
Classic Donald Sterling. It’s always about the destruction.
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