Donald Sterling
Donald Sterling has been the atrocious owner for the L.A Clippers for more years of incompetency than any owner in the history of sports. In fact, if there was a Mt. Rushmore for incompetent pro sports owners, he would most certainly be on it. His team, the Clippers, over the last thirty years of his reign, have been the NBA’s laughingstock franchise before suddenly getting good and making the playoffs each of the last three years.
He of course is in the news for his high profile divorce case and his making remarks that have caused the NBA to make him have to sell his franchise. For those remarks, which included the statement that said something along the lines of him not wanting a certain ethnic group of people attending his team’s games, he was fined $2.5 million, stripped of his membership in the league, and likely is going to be forced to have to sell his team (miracle of miracles, instead of the team selling for the approximate $700 million it was supposed to get, it is awaiting approval of a sale for $2 billion).
Sterling pretty much deserves to have to sell his team. Why? When what he said was an allegedly private conversation with his mistress? (this of course is a whole other story) Well, it’s because he made such an egregious PR blunder in offending the customer base of the league he was a member of – that fans and players alike started to threaten boycotts of the team and sponsors have refused to do business with him. It’s like an owner of an Italian restaurant chain publicly saying he didn’t want Italians eating at his restaurants. It’s bad business, His mouth became bad business.
In a league that is based on the public image that customers want to pay to watch their favorite players and teams play basketball, Sterling probably deserves to have to sell his team and deserves to be forced out of the NBA. He says things that are bad for business.
But the reason he is doing and saying these things, at this advanced age of his life, might have something to do with him having some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s. As his wife’s lawyers try to prove, and as he stumbles his way into verifying every time he opens his mouth, he might not be in total control of the things he is saying. He might, indeed, be saying and doing a lot of erratic things because he has either early or later stages of a very horrific loss of mental capacity disease.
So, if he loses his team due to his incompetent, demented state, I think he should NOT be fined $2.5 million for saying things that were said BECAUSE he probably had the dementia… or Alzheimer’s. He may have lost the team because he was bad for business, but he shouldn’t be fined for doing something that may not, technically, have been his fault. It would be like fining a person with Tourrettes’s Syndrome for cussing.
He is exhibiting all kinds of symptoms of a man with very compromised mental capacity. If the NBA is to stick with their plan of forcing him to pay a fine for something that turns out to have been said under a state of diminished capacity, I think they will be as guilty of bad business practices as the controversial Mr. Sterling.
And,the man who likes to sue everyone for all the wrong reasons, including the NBA for any reasons he and his lawyers can come up with, could actually have a legitimate lawsuit to pursue – suing the NBA for violating his civil rights as a disabled person and fining him for something he may not have been able to control.
