Angeles County area. Court documents show that Sterling and his wife made comments “indicating that African-American and Hispanics were not desirable and that they preferred Korean tenants”. The Justice Department was prepared to produce an expert witness that would have shown how the Sterlings had rented to far fewer Hispanics and African-Americans than was expected based on demographics. But the Sterlings elected not to go to trial and settle out-of-court. They paid a $2.725 million settlement, and as a condition of the settlement were required to hire an independent contractor to monitor their compliance with the Fair Housing Act for three years starting in 2009. This example is bad enough, but sadly there’s more.
Donald Sterling hired former basketball player Elgin Baylor to be the general manager of the Clippers in 1986. Baylor claims to have been grossly underpaid. It was reported that his salary had been ‘frozen’ at around $350,000 a year since 2003. This is a stark contrast to what other GMs around the league were making at the time. For example, the average salary of an NBA general manager was $1.5 million in 2009. The lowest among these being that of first year GM Larry Riley of the Golden Warriors (eHow.com). Baylor was the general manger of the Clippers for approxiatemately 22 years, yet was still paid less than someone new to the position. He left the team in late 2008. This all culminated in Baylor filing a lawsuit against Sterling in 2009. In the lawsuit Baylor stated that Mr. Sterling had a “vision of a Southern plantation structure’ for his team. The jury in that case ruled in Sterling’s favor, but the fact that this was even an issue should have bought forth an investigation of some sort by the league’s commissioner, at least in my eyes. Something could have been done before now yet, here we are.
The question I’m left asking is why take action now? Is it because the public now knows the character of this man with the recording being made public by TMZ? Or is the league just trying to save face because some of its most popular players are African-American? I don’t know any of this to be true, but the questions do linger. While I commend current NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for his actions in response to this mess, I still wonder why something wasn’t done sooner. Silver enforced a lifetime ban on Sterling and issued him a $2.5 million fine. He also is pushing for the NBA’s board of governors to force Sterling and his wife to sell the team. This