May 2, 2014 6:33 pm

The NBA’s racism drama is more about money than morals

By Christopher Caldwell

It will be hard to discipline Sterling without ramifications for other basketball personalities

©AFP

Los Angeles Clippers

The billionaire Donald Sterling, who has owned the Los Angeles Clippersbasketball franchise since 1981, was suspended for life from the National Basketball Association this week. Racist remarks he allegedly made in private to a young friend were aired on the gossip website TMZ. Adam Silver, the new NBA commissioner, also fined Mr Sterling $2.5m and announced he would try to force him to sell the team, which could bring as much as $1bn. He called Mr Sterling’s opinions “hateful”, “offensive” and “harmful”. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mr Silver’s outrage. But the predicament in which Mr Sterling has placed him has more to do with money than with morals.

Anyone who listens to the nine-minute TMZ recording after having read the press accounts will be a bit confused. Offensive the audio is. But “hateful” is too strong a word, especially for those Americans who remember the late Cincinnati Reds baseball owner Marge Schott, who was censured in the 1990s for saying Adolf Hitler “was good in the beginning” but then “went too far”. This new recording, by contrast, captures a pathetic intimate quarrel between Mr Sterling and a 31-year-old woman, V Stiviano. Something is upsetting Mr Sterling very much, but it is not black people – at least not primarily. It is the Molière-esque predicament of an 80-year-old man with a young companion he cannot control. Ms Stiviano posted photos of herself on Instagram with two black athletes many decades his junior. Some of his characterisations are racist. (“Why should you be walking publicly with black people?”) But what makes the audio bizarre is that, when race enters the conversation it is she, not he, who introduces it.

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Ms Stiviano, who is of Mexican and black ancestry, says at one point: “I wish I could change the colour of my skin.”

“You miss the issue.”

“What’s the issue?”

“The issue is we don’t have to broadcast everything.”

Later Ms Stiviano asks: “What would you like me to do? Remove the skin colour out of my skin?”

Mr Sterling replies: “Is that a for-real issue or are you making something up? . . . There’s nothing wrong with you or your skin colour. Why are you saying these things? To upset me?”

Go listen to the audio. There is something stilted, oratorical and manipulative about almost everything Ms Stiviano says. One would not want to lean too heavily on it in a courtroom. Nothing Mr Sterling said violates any laws. What made the audio a problem is it angered the NBA’s players. Their case was sometimes convoluted – Miami Heat forward LeBron James opined that, once you own a business that hires and fires people, “you have no right to feel the way you feel and express it out in the open” – but they appeared quite serious about it.

The NBA takes in about $5bn in revenues a year. A large fraction comes from television advertising in playoff season, which is now beginning. Four teams were credibly threatening boycotts and CarMax, Mercedes and State Farm insurance hadpulled their ads. Racial insensitivity can easily disrupt a league in which three-quarters of the athletes are black, and Mr Sterling’s remarks were creating a labour-relations emergency. A strike was in the offing. Mr Silver skilfully cast his deference to the players’ power as firmness against Mr Sterling’s vice.

Mr Silver has won praise for his boldness – rightly so, for he probably has only a very narrow window of time in which to resolve this issue. A former litigator, he must have a keen idea of the wobbliness of arguments built on secret recordings. “Whether or not these remarks were initially shared in private,” he said, “they are now public, and they represent his views.” But California has tough laws against unauthorised eavesdropping. On top of that, the Clippers are owned by a trust that includes Sterling family members. Can a trust be racist? If not, on what grounds can Mr Silver order a sale?

It is going to be hard for the NBA to discipline Mr Sterling without establishing principles of draconian justice that will ramify inconveniently for other personalities in the league. This includes many athletes and owners now calling for Mr Sterling’s head. Last year Tony Parker, the French guard for the San Antonio Spurs, made aquenelle salute, created and popularised by the French comedian Dieudonné. Thequenelle has become beloved of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, some of whom have been filmed making the gesture outside concentration camps, Holocaust memorials and synagogues. Is there a place for Parker in the NBA? Feminist groups have in recent years eyed the league’s sexual harassment policies.

It will probably not be hard to make the case that Mr Sterling is a lout. What will be hard is making the case that he is the only lout in the NBA.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

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