Silver takes on Sterling in NBA racism row
I was late to the story of the cattle rancher in Nevada by the name of Cliven Bundy who, for 20 years, flouted Federal rules about public land â which he didnât own and never would â being off-limit to his poor innocent cows.
I was mainly late to the story because the paranoia of government-hating extremists blunt my worldview and make me despair. I could have happily gone through my days without knowing Cliven Bundy existed.
But there he was, daring the US government to send in an armed response to his obstinacy after years of letters and court orders failed to convince him of the simple fact that he was wrong and the law was being broken.
This being the wild west, help was on the way for Bundy. In rolled almost a 1000 armed militia men and women with a similar hatred of the government.
It was all needlessly tense and depressing. Guns were trained on paid government officials, doing their job and hoping to get home that evening. It was far from an over reaction by the Feds â Bundy and his wife had made threats long before their 15 minutes of fame began to tick. This was seriously worrying.
But then Bundy did something hilarious.
As his popularity increased and his podium levitated through media championing, he lost the run of himself, as many men of advanced age and advanced egos do. He decided now was the time to lecture his inflated audience about race.
The diatribe which launched a million U-turns from Republican politicians on down began with the immortal words âI want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negroâ.
What followed were the murmurings of a madman but highlights include his assertion young black men end up in prison because they never learned how to pick cotton â his overall hypothesis being black people may have been âbetter off as slavesâ.
So what else can you do but laugh? I got in trouble for laughing when I heard these soundbytes first but I stand over it. And all I can really do when listening to the meandering logic of the racist owner of the now banned for life Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling, is laugh.
The NBA has been shaken to its core by a recorded conversation which emerged Friday that seems to have been produced by the former mistress of the notorious 81-year-old who couldnât possibly have the sense to match his millions.
Laughably, Sterling seemed to be miffed that one of his cohorts in the upper echelon of society took exception to his girlfriend posting an Instagram photograph of her and Magic Johnson, the former Lakers point guard. But this wasnât a rivalry thing, this was his embarrassment that she should see fit to pose for a camera with a black man. It was a protracted but by no means coherent justification for his vaunted place in the world, that is to say above blacks and Latinos.
The truer tragedy was that this was Sterling at his least damaging. A surreal discussion about race in private is nothing compared to how that worldview has often played out in his business practices as a property mogul. The few clear voices who had long ago protested Sterlingâs status as a fit-and-proper NBA owner placed this yarn in its proper context and instead pointed to the years of mistreatment of his non-white tenants. Ever since he took over the Clippers in the early 1980s, he has been an embarrassment of varying degrees to the league. Unfortunately it took the grotesquery of his cartoonish opinions to get the upper brass to finally consider taking his team away.
It moved quickly â less than 48 hours elapsed between Clippers players staging a simple but powerful protest before their play-off loss to the Golden State Warriors on Sunday and the Manhattan press conference yesterday at which NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the newly-installed boss of bosses, enacted a crystal clear rebuke â Sterling would be removed from the game for life and the highest possible fine would be awarded against him.
The drama in New York unfolded just hours before the Clippers team returned to the Staples Center in Downtown LA to host Warriors on the 22nd anniversary of the sparking of that cityâs riots which followed on from the police beating of Rodney King.
When this legal minefield is played out in the courts, it is certain that the NBA will be tip-toeing into their own wild west, wary of bitter old white men with power on their minds.
* johnwriordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
