Sterling saga reveals players' power

ByHOWARD BRYANT
April 30, 2014, 3:02 PM

— -- In the end, Adam Silver knew the NBA was a players' league, perhaps even more than did the players. In a fantasy world of myths, of so many myths, the truth that the players make the league grew irrefutable. Donald Sterling's indefensible racism, his mistress and her recordings -- during one segment he referred to the league as belonging to the owners and not the players -- were not worth the risk of challenging that truth. The owners isolated Sterling, maintained a fragile order with the players and negotiated his sacrifice -- as it became clear that only total sacrifice would do.

Over the coming days and weeks, key details will emerge about how the NBA commissioner built a swift but certain coalition of owners that empowered him to bury one of their own. On Monday, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban called removal of an owner a "slippery slope," naturally -- because if one owner can be removed, so, too, someday, might Cuban. On Tuesday, however, while Silver was taking questions during his news conference, Cuban tweeted that he was "100 percent" in agreement with Silver's decision to ban Sterling.

There will be details of the furious, precarious negotiations that occurred over the 96 hours leading up to the announcement: the threat of playoffwide boycott, the emotional tailspins and betrayals of Doc Rivers, Earvin Johnson, Chris Paul and so many others, and reassurances by Silver through daily conversations with each, as well as with former NBA guard Kevin Johnson, working for the National Basketball Players Association, that he would make this right.

There will be rightful pride in the collective outrage -- from all races and all classes -- at Sterling's comments and his beliefs and pride in the comprehensive resolution, during a time of significant racial tension in the country. Less than a week ago, a controversial Supreme Court decision upheld a ban on using racial preferences in admissions at public universities in Michigan, while Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy wondered last week whether African-Americans were better off as slaves.

There also will be much to say regarding the reconfirmation of Earvin Johnson -- who spent $50 million of his own money to buy into the Los Angeles Dodgers' ownership group -- as the dominant black power broker in sports and potential next owner of the Clippers.

But in the end, concluding an extraordinary week of race, revolution and a revolution that never was, the lasting imprint for the remaining life of the league is the enormous power of the players -- if they choose to unite and use it, and believe in it. Baseball, hockey, football and soccer players should be listening, too.

During the past several decades of increasing branding and affluence and progress of America, the social conscience of the professional athlete has diminished. Maybe that's by necessity, and maybe our desire for it has been overinflated by nostalgia for Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Sandy Koufax.

Maybe nothing, no singular issue, could be sufficiently galvanizing to bring players out from behind the tinted glass of their Escalades. Certainly, a lover's quarrel between an 80-year-old man and his 20-something girlfriend would not on its face qualify as a seminal moment.

Yet several days after the trouble began, Rivers has made his inner conflict clear through the crumbling of his usually sturdy facade. At first, he appeared as a basketball coach, talking of the Sterling controversy as he would of any other: as an obstacle to the goal of winning a championship. He used the word "clutter," as though Sterling's reference to associating with black people as "like dealing with an enemy" (in a conversation with his black girlfriend) was simply another news cycle to overcome before Bill Russell handed him the Larry O'Brien Trophy.

As the days progressed, Rivers became less basketball coach and more African-American man born in 1961, the year of Anniston, when the Ku Klux Klan bombed a bus of Freedom Riders. The man whose house was burned to the ground by racists in 1997, who was again reduced by whites no matter how much he accomplished. On the tape, Sterling referred to African-Americans in his most paternalistic voice. "I give them clothes. I give them houses. Who else gives them that?" Rivers, in 2014, was W.E.B. Du Bois writing "How does it feel to be a problem?" in 1903. He had been accomplished, an elite player, a championship coach, and yet in the eyes of the man for whom he had chosen to work, the man who signed his check, he was still just a boy, someone to be fed and clothed and taken care of. Suddenly, after all of Rivers' respect and accomplishment, Sterling had reminded him that he and his people were just property to be maintained.

David West, an  Indiana Pacers power forward, cut to the core of America, of its latent conflicts, the ones in remission until these eruptions, and of Sterling's pathologies with a tweet: "Sterling basically articulated Plantation Politics...Make money off the Bucks/Lay with the women/No Association in Public good or bad."

And it was here that it became impossible to dismiss Donald Sterling or Cliven Bundy. Here it became impossible not to recognize the connective tissue that for the past week has been running through America at surface level instead of the usual, simmering undercurrent. As Rivers discovered and rediscovered, as Earvin Johnson discovered and rediscovered, it never goes away; there is no escaping what they really think of you. Sterling and Bundy could not be dismissed as yesterday's old cranks because here they are today, still powerful and worth millions, with sympathetic, powerful, like-minded friends who did not suffer the misfortune of being caught on tape.