Winners & Losers In The Donald Sterling Saga
As the dust begin to settle following Donald and Shelly Sterling's apparent surrender, who were the biggest losers and biggest winners in this scandal?
Biggest losers:
Donald Sterling - his reputation will never recover.
Shelly Sterling - she will always be tainted by this scandal, and sees the team pass out of her family.
David Stern - failed to take action against Donald Sterling for decades as NBA commissioner.
The mainstream sports media - with a few notable exceptions, ignored the evidence of Sterling's racism until TMZ aired the tape.
Biggest winners:
TMZ Sports - Call it checkbook journalism, but they dominated the story.
Clippers Coach/GM Doc Rivers - Held his team together and became the most powerful coach in the NBA.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver - Excelled in his baptism by fire.
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson - Skillfully led the NBA Players Association to oust the Sterling family.
Please look below the fold for an extended discussion of each of the winners and losers.
THE LOSERS
Donald Sterling's Complete Meltdown
Donald Sterling is the ultimate example of "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it." Sterling bought the Clippers in 1981 for $13.5 million and moved them from San Diego to Los Angeles in 1984 because he wanted to have the spotlight like Lakers' owner Dr. Jerry Buss. It took over thirty years for Donald Sterling finally became the focus of national media attention. Now, he is one of the most infamous people in the United States.
For the first twenty-nine years that Donald Sterling owned the Los Angeles Clippers, he was a largely unknown, incompetent, racist tightwad. From 1981 until 2010, the Los Angeles Clippers were horrible but Donald Sterling's despicable character was scarcely known. In 2005 and again in 2008, Sterling paid millions to settle two lawsuits for wide-scale housing discrimination, the latter brought by the United States Department of Justice. Only a few stories were published and he was not subjected to league discipline. When Clipper General Manager Elgin Baylor (a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame) sued Sterling for racial and age discrimination, the story barely made a ripple in the national media. He cleansed his reputation with high-profile donations to the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, which led to a truly-ironic Lifetime Achievement Award.
After thirty years of obscurity, Donald Sterling finally began to garner the attention he had always sought when the Clippers became one of the best teams in the league. In 2010-11, Blake Griffin emerged as the NBA Rookie of the Year. Griffin's spectacular dunks raised the Clippers profile. After the NBA lockout of 2011, the Clippers obtained Chris Paul - the best point guard in the league - in a lopsided trade after NBA commissioner David Stern blocked the Los Angeles Lakers from obtaining Chris Paul. After missing the playoffs 25 out of the first 29 years that Sterling owned the team, the Clippers made the playoffs for the next three years in a row. The Clippers, and Donald Sterling, suddenly took wing.
It did not take long for the wax in Sterling's wings to melt under the glare of the spotlight. In early April, Sterling learned that V. Stiviano had recorded his racist rant against Magic Johnson and African-Americans in general. Knowing that he might be exposed at any time, he did not take any action to inoculate himself or the Clippers from the fallout if the tape became public. On April 25, TMZ published the recording. Today, Donald Sterling is indelibly known by virtually all Americans as a stupid, racist, sexist bigot. At this point, he literally cannot give his money away to repair his reputation.
Shelly Sterling's Foolhardy Lawsuit Against V. Stiviano
The release of the Donald Sterling recording directly resulted from Shelly Sterling's lawsuit against V. Stiviano. Shelly Sterling took a crazy risk in seeking to recover $1.8 million in gifts that Donald Sterling gave to Stiviano, since those gifts were less than .1% of the Sterlings $1.9 billion net worth. That money literally made no difference in Shelly Sterling's standard of living, but was a fortune to V. Stiviano. On April 2, Stiviano sent a copy of the Donald Sterling recording to a Clippers executive, but Shelly Sterling did not back off from her lawsuit. On April 25, TMZ published the recording. By April 29, NBA commissioner Adam Silver banned Donald Sterling from the NBA for life and began the process to terminate the Sterlings' ownership of the Clippers.
Shelly Sterling has fared poorly in the scandal. Her hope that she, or her surviving son Chris, would inherit the team after Donald Sterling's death has been dashed. She was exposed as a co-defendant in the housing discrimination lawsuits against her husband. In fact, she was a co-plaintiff as Donald Sterling rode roughshod over former Clippers' employees and other estranged business partners.
Dents In David Stern's Legend
When David Stern retired in February 2014 after 30 years as NBA commissioner, he was lauded as the greatest commissioner in sports history. Miami Heat President Pat Riley encapsulated the conventional wisdom when he declared that David Stern was the "number one reason" for the success of the NBA. Before Stern's tenure, the NBA was so lowly that its championship series were not aired live, but rather placed on tape delay to compete with Tonight Show. During Stern's reign as commissioner, the NBA saw the 1992 Dream Team capture the world's attention, the rise of Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan and league revenues rise to over $4 billion/year.
The Donald Sterling fiasco has punched a few small holes in the hagiography of David Stern. New NBA commissioner Adam Sliver, Stern's handpicked successor, has literally offered no defense of Stern's failure to take action against Donald Sterling. During the April 29 news conference, Silver refused to address why the NBA did not fine or suspend Sterling for his past racist actions. The press quickly followed with indictments of Stern for "letting Sterling stick around".
David Letterman's treatment of David Stern shows the Stern's legend being deflated. When Stern retired in February 2014, David Letterman had Stern appear for a victory lap Top Ten list. Two months later, David Letterman spliced the footage to make Stern look foolish and incompetent for his failure to take action against Sterling.
The Mainstream Media Largely Ignored Sterling's Racism
If David Stern and the NBA ignored Donald Sterling's racism for thirty years, so did most of the mainstream media. A search of the internet for coverage of Donald Sterling's racism largely comes up empty. In 2009, only ESPN's Bomani Jones, Jemele Hill and Peter Keating (h/t Deadspin) exposed the horrible evidence against Donald Sterling.
Grantland's Bill Simmons provides a stark example of the mainstream media that knew of Sterling's racism but elected to focus on his other failings. As Rolling Stone recently published, Bill Simmons has the biggest pulpit of any columnist in sports. In his epic 2009 open letter to Blake Griffin, Simmons spent more than 5,000 words laying out three decades of the Clippers' failings, but only devoted twenty-five words to a passing reference to Elgin Baylor's discrimination suit against Sterling. In fact, Simmons became a Clippers' season ticket holder when he moved to Los Angeles, because as a lifelong Celtics' fan, he could not abide paying money to the Lakers. It is amazing that Sterling's racism ranked lower than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's "ninny" personality in the list of sins that Simmons believed were worthy of public comment.
The New York Times provides an even more stark example. The hallmark of the Times' sports section has been its moralistic campaigns to expose wrongdoing. For example, the Times devoted dozens of columns over several years to the refusal of the Augusta Country Club (home of The Masters) to admit a woman as a member. In contrast, from 1981 until TMZ published the Sterling recordings, the Times published exactly one expose of Donald Sterling as a a racist, and that was written by business columnist Joe Nocera and published in the Magazine section.
WINNERS
TMZ Owned The Story
TMZ dominated this story from beginning to end. It published the Sterling recordings on April 25. It broke the news that Donald Sterling was giving Shelly Sterling control of the team to facilitate a sale. I am certain that TMZ paid someone for the recording, but it has emerged as the leader. Not only has it eclipsed the National Enquirer, it now directly competes with Deadspin for coverage of the seamy side of sports.
Doc Rivers Emerged All-Powerful In Clipperland
Doc Rivers became the coach and Senior Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Clippers in the summer of 2013. During this crisis, his boss (team President Andy Roeser) and team owner (Donald Sterling) were removed. Rivers did a masterful job of guiding the Clippers through the media storm, even leading them to a first round playoff victory over the Golden State Warriors. He headed off a team boycott and he kept the team unified. He spoke calmly and rationally and refused to overcommit or overreact. In the vacuum of leadership, he has gained complete control over basketball operations for the Clippers.
Adam Silver Took Command Of The NBA
Adam Silver served as NBA commissioner David Stern's aide-de-camp for nearly a decade before rising through the ranks to succeed Stern as commissioner. Many wondered whether Silver would have the gravitas to preside over the league, or if he would merely be an echo of the thirty-year Stern regime. By taking command of the situation and imposing the maximum penalty on Donald Sterling within five days of the explosion, Adam Silver established himself as a powerful and decisive leader in his own right. Sports Illustrated's cover story both reflects and furthers the Adam Silver legend as the new sheriff in town.
Kevin Johnson Gets His Biggest Assist Since Retirement
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson was an All-Star point guard during his decade as a player for the Phoenix Suns. Since his retirement, he earned election as mayor of Sacramento. He led a successful campaign to keep the Kings in Sacramento, when the former owners sought to sell the team to a group from Seattle.
When the Sterling recording went public, the NBA Players Association had been without an executive director for more than a year. Kevin Johnson had recently been appointed to lead the search for a new executive director. At the request of NBA Players Association President Chris Paul, Mayor Johnson stepped in to coordinate the unions response to the crisis. Johnson was able to unite the players behind a demand that the maximum punishment be imposed on Sterling and that his family be stripped of ownership. He carefully implied that the players would boycott the playoffs if the NBA did not take swift action, without making an overt threat. His plan led to Adam Silver moving from an initial position that the maximum punishment was "suspension and a $1 million fine" to imposition of a lifetime ban, a $2.5 million fine and termination of the Sterlings ownership of the Clippers.
After this high-profile success, Kevin Johnson will have ample opportunity to rise in politics or possibly to follow the Dick Cheney model of executive search and become the next executive director of the NBA Players Association.