So the NBA has grabbed not only sports headlines, but news thunder as well. The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a longtime scumbag named (or renamed) Donald Sterling, was handed a lifetime ban from the NBA along with a $2.5M fine, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver also let it be known he would seek from the rest of the NBA's owners a move to force Sterling to divest himself of the team altogether.
There has been enough comment on this to choke a herd of elephants, but I will try to add a small amount of worthwhile stuff to the fire.
Dude has another business, you know.
1) The description of Sterling above as "longtime scumbag" is not accidental. If you've followed this story much you've learned, if you didn't already know, that Sterling has had legal issues as a landlord/slumlord, including federal suits that were either dropped or "settled," i.e. bought off, hinging on discriminatory practices by Sterling against various minority groups.
This has begged the question: why were those explicit examples of raging bigotry not important enough to provoke action from the NBA, but these most recent words set the world on fire?
This isn't a unique spot. I can't help but recall the Chick-fil-A kerfuffle from a few years ago; Chick-fil-A had been giving plenty of money to anti-gay groups for some years before head honcho Dan Cathy made some impolitic remarks to a reporter, but large-scale outrage didn't get going until that interview got published. It would appear that actions do not, in fact, speak louder than words.
Some caveats: a) Adam Silver is a new commissioner, so we can't necessarily assume Silver wouldn't have acted differently in the past, or that former commissioner David Stern would have acted the same way as Silver has in this situation; b) this is a different NBA than a few years ago -- whereas Michael Jordan didn't dare speak out on anything lest his advertising revenue get dinged, current players are more likely to voice opinions even in non-basketball matters, as witness the LeBron James-led Miami Heat hoodie protest in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder. To a great degree the NBA has far outstripped the NBA, NHL, and (as much as it pains me to say) MLB, which Jackie Robinson might not even recognize anymore. (I would contend that MLS may well be near the NBA in terms of the overall progressiveness of its players and management, which would set it apart not only from its fellow American major leagues but especially from its European counterparts.)
2) Embarrassing ownership isn't new; ask anyone who remembers Marge Schott with the Cincinnati Reds. That ended up being a difficult, drawn-out spectacle for MLB, but ultimately the owner, prone to say embarrassing things about her players and unpleasantly nice things about the Nazis, was eased out of the game. The swiftness + severity of the NBA's action is the new thing here, and it is striking indeed.
3) As usual, a great deal of confusion about the First Amendment has followed in the wake of this action. As far as I know, Sterling will continue to have the right to vote in federal, state, and local elections, and can continue to express repugnant opinions to anyone he chooses (although he might want to be more alert to the presence of recording devices). The NBA, which like most sports leagues exists in a murky realm between business conglomerate and private club, is free (even more so than most leagues, so specific is its governing document) to take action against any owner who brings harm to the league, including removal if need be. Considering the degree to which American courts have been ratcheting up corporate power over employees of late, saying that Sterling somehow got jobbed is a raging act of hypocrisy unless you're basically picketing the Supreme Court daily on behalf of less oppression of workers.
4) All of this happened during the NBA's playoffs, which would be an excuse for most leagues to sweep it all under the rug until after the finals (or longer if possible). I haven't followed the NBA in years, not since Dominique Wilkins left the Atlanta Hawks (save for a short period around the Miami Heat's first (pre-LeBron) NBA championship, when I was living in West Palm Beach), and yet I found myself drawn to a Pacers-Hawks playoff game in the airport the other day, before all the Sterling mess had really hit. That this all got settled before it had the chance to become a festering boil on the league's showcase event makes it yet again more impressive.
5) The NBA, by a large margin, includes more African-American athletes by percentage than its other major-league sports. One suspects that another league would not have reacted so swiftly and decisively (it's impossible to conceive of the fossil known as Bud Selig doing anything decisively in MLB), again with the possible exception of MLS. But then, we don't know that for sure.
All in all, it's a mixed bag at the moment. While there is some satisfaction on seeing action taken, it's still hard to stomach that this particular scumbag's actions over the course of decades -- actions that directly made people's lives worse -- weren't enough to draw a peep from the NBA. People could not get housing, or were harassed about their race or ethnic origin for decades -- not powerful people, but folks who don't have a lot of other people in their corner. While I appreciate that Magic Johnson's feelings were probably hurt by Sterling's words, there is no way Johnson was as hurt by Sterling's words as any number of tenants in Sterling's slum dwellings. Yet our hearts bleed for Johnson, or Chris Paul or Blake Griffin, but we pretend those black and Mexican and Korean tenants don't exist, much less that their plight is worth our concern.
The least of these, folks. These are the ones Jesus wanted us to be concerned about and to speak for because their voices were not heard. I'm pretty sure that Magic Johnson can take care of himself. Chris Paul and Blake Griffin and others have a certain amount of clout themselves; even a hint of a game boycott had the potential to bring the league to its knees. We're ready to rally against Sterling because of words, but he and his ilk can practice raging injustice with impunity, at the cost of a few million dollars at worst -- chump change to his like -- and we yawn if we react at all.
I can't help but think this incident, even it has come to a far more satisfactory ending than most thought possible, points again to one of our worst practices where sport and faith again fail to intersect, or perhaps intersect in the wrong way. Where is our outrage, and why does it show up in places where it's not inappropriate, but perhaps not as needed, and fail to show up where it is absolutely needed and where Jesus demands that it appear?
It's hard not to conclude (in a phrase that could probably be appended to every entry on this blog) that sports matters too much.
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