The embattled owner of the LA Clippers has fired a salvo of his own. Through his attorney, Donald Sterling has informed the NBA he will not be paying the $2.5 million fine commissioner Adam Silver levied against him a while back. Nor will he honor the life-time ban, much less be forced to sell his team. Told ya (see Donald Sterling II in an earlier post -- stage right).
Enter one Maxwell Blecher. Blecher is a very prominent anti-trust lawyer that has fought high-profile legal battles before in the world of sports. Remember when then Oakland Raider owner Al Davis decided to relocate his team to LA against the wishes of the league? The mighty NFL sued Davis to stop the move. Davis counter-sued, and won. Guess who his lead attorney was? The same Maxwell Blecher. And now he's taken up Sterling's case. The man is certainly a legal heavyweight and, now that he's jumped in, the gloves will likely be coming off soon in the up-coming Sterling(s) vs the NBA mega-bout. Neither side is giving an inch, and a long nasty conflict, which will likely cost countless millions of dollars on both sides for legal fees alone, seems inevitable. It's going to get ugly before it's all over.
At that, yours truly finds some of the things he's read and heard to be rather presumptious before the battle has even truly begun. Many articles/talking points about Donald Sterling include such phrases as, "the disgraced owner", "racist", and "incendiary remarks" made about Magic Johnson, as if these are all presumed truisms before moving on to other possible proceedings in the case. However, all this is not necessarily so.
If anyone has been disgraceful in recent years -- it's the media. The times of truly objective reporting seem to be a thing of the past. Nowadays, everybody's got an opinion. Be they scribes, radio personalities, or TV talking heads -- by and large the media has stopped reporting the news and has chosen to become the news with their own slants on any hot-button issue.
The term "racist" is in the eyes of the beholder. In a landmark case (way back in 1964) on the issue of what constitutes pornography, former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said "he'd know it when he saw it". Hardly a definitive explanation. Like "racism" 50 years later, there remains no one size fits all. One person's perceived "racism" may well be accepted and championed by others as a legitimate cause. How else to explain various ethnic groups and organizations that promote their own to the exclusion and detriment of others?
"Incendiary remarks" about Magic Johnson? Sterling stated Johnson slept around with a lot of women in years past. (BTW, a lot of this happened while Magic was married, which made him quite the adulterer as well). No one, including Magic himself, disputes that. Somewhere along the line, Johnson contracted the HIV virus. That's certainly been established as true. Sterling went on to say a guy like Magic Johnson shouldn't be considered a role model for kids, because of his past behavior when he was a young man himself. This was incendiary? I dare say most people with sons, and especially daughters, would much prefer their children not to have countless sexual partners, much less become HIV positive while doing so.
Some of the reporting surrounding future possibilities regarding the Sterling affair defies all logic.
The Clipper players and others around the league will refuse to play next year unless the Sterlings are removed as owners? First of all, what happens at the ownership level is none of the players' business. As basically high-priced hired hands to do a job, they are several very large steps removed from having a say-so in how the franchise decides to conduct its own business.
Second, any player under contract that refused to play for whatever reason, would be in breach of that contract. Not only could their fat paychecks rightfully stop, they could be sued themselves by their owners for such breach of contract which was causing irreparable harm to their franchises by their absence.
Third, even if they were to boycott, their "rights" would still be held by their owners for the duration of those contracts. Either play for them, or don't play at all.
Fourth, let's hypothetically consider the "nuclear option" happens when the 2014-2015 NBA season gets underway this fall. The Sterlings and the NBA are still in litigation (entirely possible, perhaps even probable) over the future ownership of the team. Further, the existing NBA players at the time, draft choices and all, come together in a show of solidarity and decide they're not going to play until the Sterlings have been "exorcised" from the league. What would happen?
Would a few guys cross the "picket line" as "scabs"? Probably, the younger guys that don't already have millions in the bank and a bunch of endorsements in particular. The temptation of the money is too great.
As for the owners filling out their rosters to replace the guys "on strike"? Forget about the current $15-20 million dollar salaries some stars are making. Offer a mere $1 million a year and guys would be lined up around the block trying to make the team. Who's kidding who?
Sure, the skill level of the game itself would not be what it is now -- but think of the upside. Affordable ticket prices. No more dopey TV commercials bombarding us with super-rich players hawking products they probably don't use themselves for money they obviously don't need. Give it a little time to improve upon itself, and this might work out quite well for fans in the long run. Granted, some super-star playing abilities may have to be sacrificed, but the idea of paying these guys more per every 2 hour game than most of us make in an entire 2000 work hour year never seemed quite right either. They're good, but nobody's that good.
Back to Donald Sterling. Some claim if he retains ownership of the Clippers that sponsors will refuse to advertise in his arena. This is the dumbest media fabrication of them all.
The Clippers play in the Staples Center, which is also home to the LA Lakers, the WNBA's LA Sparks, and the NHL's LA Kings. The building itself is not owned by Sterling, but rather a business called the LA Arena Co., an independent enterprise, which basically rents it out to various tenants.
Businesses who pay to have their logos in various places around the arena do so to get their product names out there to the people in attendance. They also enjoy the added subliminal benefit of the TV cameras picking up their logos in the background as they pan back and forth covering the game. Millions of viewers sitting at home see these ads somewhere in their subconscious, and who knows how that works?
Thing is, these businesses don't put up their arena ads based on a particular team. They do so because of the fans such a team or teams will draw to expose them to their names. Plant a seed. Unless, of course, we're supposed to believe the sponsors behind these signs would want them shown for one game, and not shown for the next, depending on which home team was playing at the time.
Consider a scenario: The LA Lakers play in the Staples Center one night, the Clippers the next, and the Kings the following night. Entirely possible. Do you really think it logical various sponsors would want their signs on display for the Lakers, removed for the Clippers, and then re-displayed for the Kings on back-to-back-to-back days? Please. Even if that were feasible, what would they do about the signs when the Lakers play their division rival Clippers so many times throughout the year in the same building? Would they be up, down, sideways, what? See how stupid such a proposition becomes when one looks past typical knee-jerk reactions and probes deeper into the reality of actually trying to implement it?
How the entire Sterling vs the NBA case will eventually work out is anybody's guess. No objective person would question that, to date, the vast majority of the media (which has become deathly afraid of being anything other than "politically correct") and the opinions they (along with the "experts" they trot out) continue to put forth, are solidly lined up against Donald Sterling. He's going to lose. They want him to lose. He has to lose, they say. And maybe he will lose.
But the true fight hasn't even begun yet. Remember -- a couple decades ago, then Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott got in trouble for allegedly making remarks that were much more offensive than anything Sterling said a couple weeks ago. The late Ms. Schott supposedly referred to a couple of her black players as her "million dollar niggers", said all Jews were sneaky, any player that wore an earring was a "fruit", and even managed to pay a compliment to Adolph Hitler.
One would think such remarks would have resulted in her immediate ouster as a Major League owner. The league itself and many in the public were outraged. Sound familiar? It would take two years before Schott finally sold her controlling interest in the Reds, but still remained a minority partner in ownership until the day she died in 2004.
Donald Sterling merely said he didn't want his "girlfriend" bringing black guys to the game and Magic Johnson was a bad role model.
Given the above -- if it took two years for the dust to finally settle in the Schott affair -- unlike the media, Adam Silver and his minions, or even the politically correcters that demand immediate action -- methinks the current Sterling snafu might just be a while before it's all over. And Marge Scott was a long-time widow that never remarried. Basically alone. Sterling's wife Shelly will definitely be a player when the litigation begins.
This is going to get complicated......
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