Just ten short days ago, lawyer/slumlord/billionaire racist Donald Sterling was heard on a covertly recorded tape saying that he didn’t want his mixed-race girlfriend to bring black athletes to L.A. Clippers basketball games. (Among other things: read the full transcript here.) Since then, volumes of outrage were expressed, much of it by NBA players; and NBA commissioner Adam Silver fined him the league maximum $2.5 million, banned Sterling for life, and ordered that he sell the team.
No good can come from defending someone like Sterling. And of course what he said was terrible. But did he receive justice? Here’s a man who has been ordered to sell a $500 million business because he expressed an ugly idea in the privacy of his home after being goaded by your gold digger girlfriend who was secretly taping him. There is no evidence that Sterling conducted the Clippers in any kind of racist way. One radio listener who called into Mike Francesca‘s show said that he had long known Sterling, that he had never witnessed behave in any racist way, and that these were the careless words of a vain older man who could no longer control his mistress.
We are witnessing in this very era the complete disappearance of the concept of privacy. One of the reasons that privacy was upheld as having value is that we are all imperfect. We all fart, burp, say stupid or ugly things, let off steam, pick our noses, eat in our underwear, say nasty things during sex that we don’t want broadcast during our campaigns for lieutenant governor. There is an implicit recognition that what we say in private means less than what we say in public, and far less than what we do in public. This is why a man’s home is his castle–so that he can be imperfect.
There was, however, something deeply emotional about the response of the players to Sterling that makes one think more was going on. There is a patronizing tone to some of Sterling’s comments that make it seem that Sterling at least sometimes behaved in a high-handed way that invited retribution. Second, there is something inherent in the life of a professional athlete that creates anxiety and resentment. Imagine: you are in one part of your life rich, independent, adulated, in charge of your world. In another part, you are significantly less rich than your owner, subject to a coach, criticized by the media, and only as good as your last game. You receive treatment for an injury, but no sympathy, and you are completely replaceable. The players seemed very quick to turn the vulnerability tables on a weakened owner.
One of Sterling’s comments seemed particularly patronizing. “I support them [the players] and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have—Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?” This is the language of the Koch Brothers and other other free marketeers who elevate their role in the economic process and denigrate other stakeholders. Who makes the game? Good question. Do sports fans want to see Blake Griffin compete, or do they want to watch DOnald Sterling make money? Capital has a big role in capitalism, in business, in propsperity. It’s not bigger than labor’s.