Sterling ‘sorry’ for racist comments

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was banned for life from the NBA over racist comments, has apologised and asked for forgiveness in his first public statement since the controversy began last month.

In an interview broadcast yesterday, Sterling told CNN he made a terrible mistake, but was not a racist. “I love my league, I love my partners. Am I entitled to one mistake? It’s a terrible mistake, and I’ll never do it again,” Sterling said in the interview. “I’m here to apologise.”

His comments came two weeks after National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver fined the billionaire businessman $2.5m and banned him for life after a tape surfaced of Sterling telling a female friend not to associate with black people.

“The reason it’s hard for me, very hard for me, is that I’m wrong. I caused the problem. I don’t know how to correct it,” Sterling told CNN when asked why he had taken so long to speak out.

Sterling’s wife, Shelly Sterling, who has co-owned the team with her husband since 1981, said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday she would fight any attempt to force her to sell.

“I was shocked by what he (Donald Sterling) said. And, well, I guess whatever their decision is, we have to live with it,” Shelly Sterling said. “But I don’t know why I should be punished for what his actions were.”

In response to her comments, the NBA said that, under the league’s constitution, the interests of all other owners of a team come to an end when the controlling owner’s stake is terminated.

“It doesn’t matter whether the owners are related as is the case here. These are the rules to which all NBA owners agreed as a condition of owning their team.”

In an audio tape released by entertainment news blog Radar Online on Friday, Sterling can be heard dismissing the racist remarks that set off the controversy as jealousy over other men spending time with a woman he was trying to woo.