It’s a players’ league. It’s LeBron James’s league. It’s a league driven by rare talent.
The irony of the Donald Sterling crisis is that his being exposed as the closest thing the NBA has to a plantation owner has proved as conclusively as any other event recently that the owners are only along for the ride.
The extraordinary set of events that culminated in Tuesday’s unprecedented announcement that the Los Angeles Clippers owner would be banned from the NBA for life and ultimately stripped of his franchise was a triumph for newbie NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
Leaping out from the shadow of David Stern, Silver brought down the hammer on Sterling for the audio recordings on which he confirmed his opinions on blacks could have been lifted from the script of 12 Years a Slave.
But the real story is that the players spoke and they were heard.
“We made it clear the players were willing to boycott the games if this type of action [removing Sterling] was not something that Adam Silver felt was necessary,” National Basketball Players Association first vice-president Roger Mason said after conference calls with player reps that went well into the night Monday. “We’re happy with the decision but we’re not content yet. We want immediate action. We want a timetable from the owners as far as when this vote is going to happen.”
The real story going forward will be how they choose to use the obvious platform they tentatively clambered up on.
From there the view is different, and sports may be different too, but only if they recognize the power they have.
Could the events of the last few days usher in a new era of social consciousness among elite athletes?
Steve Nash used the occasion to make a plea to use it towards eradicating racism. Meanwhile the San Jose Mercury News reported that had Silver’s punishment of Sterling fallen short the Golden State Warriors were going to invite the Los Angeles Clippers to join them in a highly symbolic protest prior to Game 5 of their series Tuesday night: As the ball went up for the tip both teams were going to turn heel and leave the floor.
Fifty years ago Wayne Embry participated in the NBA’s first labour action. He was terrified. The Cincinnati Royals centre along with NBA legends such as Jerry West, Tommy Heinsohn, Elgin Baylor and Bill Russell threatened to sit out the 1964 NBA All-Star Game unless league owners met the fledgling players’ association’s pension demands. The game was going to be televised for the first time and the players recognized their leverage and bravely used it, barricading themselves in a dressing room at old Boston Garden as various owners stewed outside pledging that the players’ careers would be over if they didn’t drop their demands.
“There were some pretty anxious moments,” said Embry, who is now the Raptors senior basketball advisor to the president. “Some guys were more secure than others, but those of us who were less secure were scared to death.”
With a network television audience waiting the owners finally caved in and met the players’ demands.
Even then in a nine-team league when all-stars had summer jobs – Embry worked for Pepsi-Cola – the players had power.
That power is exponential now. Do the players know it?
The events of the past few days might remind them.
Fifty years later Sterling’s fate was sealed the moment James opened his mouth and let it be known that he knows right from wrong, and he wasn’t going to let wrong go, not on his watch.
“It’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable in our league. It doesn’t matter if you’re white, black, Hispanic, whatever, all across the races. It’s unacceptable and as a commissioner in our league, they have to make a stand, and they have to be very aggressive with it,” James said as the Sterling recording was making the rounds. “I believe in Adam [Silver], I believe in the NBA and they have to do something and do something very fast and quickly before this really gets out of hand. Like I said, there is no room for Donald Sterling in our league, man. There it is.”
James spoke and his fellow players listened and more importantly so did the commissioner’s office, earning the praise of its marketable player and one who has – albeit in baby steps – began to embrace the impact his words can have to draw attention to issues that reach beyond the world of basketball.
“Commissioner Silver thank you for protecting our beautiful and powerful league!! Great leader!” James celebrated with his 12.6-million followers on Twitter.
The way the forces lined up against Sterling’s actions almost carried an air of inevitability – with sponsors sprinting away from the Clippers like it was a crime scene and fellow owners speaking out, no half-measures from the league office would have been enough.
But once James spoke, Sterling’s future was clear: the greatest player in the game didn’t want him in the game anymore, and so he wouldn’t be.
As a thought exercise, imagine what would have happened if Silver had waffled? If he’d tried to let how to deal with Sterling get bogged down in legal or procedural hurdles? What would things getting ‘out-of-hand’ look like?
It’s hard to imagine the players dropping the issue, not once the full weight of Sterling’s plantation mentality set in and not once it transcended from a sports story to a global news event.
The tentative protests of the past few days — where the Clippers and then the Heat wore their jerseys inside out in warmups — would have spread. Players would have become more emboldened.
“If the owners and the league and the rest of sports and society in general don’t get the message from this, they’re not listening,” said Embry, who went on to become the NBA’s first black general manager after he finished playing. “We’re not going back.”
But sometimes it seems the players need to be reminded what they have and why they have it.
When I talked to the Raptor’ Amir Johnson and Kyle Lowry about Sterling’s comments in the hours after they became public, they were guarded; in their minds an honest conversation about a white NBA owner’s racist views was not one they were ready to have in public.
But two days later, just prior to Silver’s press conference, Johnson announced the Raptors would be having their own form of protest for Game 5 of their Eastern Conference quarterfinal series against the Brooklyn Nets.
It’s not hard to imagine that in the absence of real and swift action from the commissioner that the players would have become more hardline and active and they would be doing it with a moral authority that would have won the day.
All kinds of dominoes were tipped over when the ramblings of a racist, lovelorn, billionaire coot were recorded and unleashed like a digital fireball on the NBA and across all of sports.
Legal, social, political and financial — making sense of where they’ve fallen and what it means will take time.
But Donald Sterling who fancied himself benevolent black benefactor who put money in the poor boys’ pockets and food in their hungry mouths, proved who really has the power with his racists rants.
It’s not him, for all his money. It’s not Adam Silver, despite his office.
It’s the players. The talent, not the help. Always has and always will be.