The imprudence of Donald Sterling (+ Video)

MIAMI — It’s easy to think that millionaires live in another world, in a distant dimension, in a parallel world with rules and conflicts that are foreign to us. But no, in the end, millionaires are also human beings who feel, suffer and love almost like you and me.

I realized that while watching a disconsolate Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, wipe his tears in front of CNN’s cameras.

Sterling didn’t cry because his shares fell in the Stock Exchange or because some of his property lost its value, much less because his basketball team lost in the NBA playoffs. He cried simply because of love, because his girlfriend, a 31-year-old woman who could be his grand-daughter, betrayed him, violated the sacred pact of complicity every couple maintains and made public a private recording between the two.

In it, you hear Sterling saying things that are said only in total privacy, words meant for her alone, words that nobody else was meant to hear. The recording served to confirm something that many already suspected: Donald Sterling is a racist old man.

It all began in late April, when TMZ Sports published the audio of a conversation in which Sterling, in a frenzy of jealousy, recriminated his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, because of a photo of her with Magic Johnson that had been disseminated through Instagram. The fact that Sterling has been married for more than 50 years with Rochelle Sterling seems to be irrelevant, as well as the manner in which the recording was leaked to the press.

Stiviano’s attorneys vehemently deny that she had anything to do with the leak and say they don’t know by what mysterious process of telekinesis the recording was made public. What truly unleashed the storm, the vortex into which the 80-year-old Sterling has fallen, was this:

“Why are you taking pictures with minorities, why?” the old man is heard saying. “It bothers me a lot that you want to promo… to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to? […] People feel certain things. Hispanics feel certain things toward blacks. Blacks feel certain things toward other groups. It has been that way historically and it will always be. […] I’m living in a culture and I have to live within the culture.

And then he adds: “I think it’s nice that you admire [Magic Johnson]. I know him well and he should be admired. And I’m just saying, it’s too bad you can’t admire him privately and during your entire f*****g life, your whole life, admire him. Bring him here, feed him, f**k him, I don’t care. You can do anything but don’t put him on Instagram so the world has to see it, so they have to call me. And don’t bring him into my games, okay?”

[Translator’s Note: To hear the entire recorded exchange, click here. In it, Stiviano points out that she herself is of black and Mexican ancestry.]

The reactions exploded almost in unison: Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oprah Winfrey and even President Barack Obama condemned the statements.

LeBron James said that he would not play in a league that included Sterling. The Clippers players took the court wearing their jerseys inside out as a sign of protest. The Miami Heat players did the same, as a sign of support. Several team sponsors, like CarMax and Virgin America, suspended their sponsorship. The NBA imposed an exemplary fine on Sterling. But the worst was yet to come.

Several weeks after the recording went viral on the Internet, Sterling spoke for the first time in public, on prime time, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. There, the man wept piteously because he had been a fool to believe that Stiviano, a girl who was so special, so sweet, so good, could ever have fallen in love with him, an old man 50 years her senior.

In an aside, he mentioned that successful blacks, as opposed to the successful Jews like himself, never did anything to help their communities. He also said that Magic Johnson was not a good example to children because he was HIV-positive. A man who beds every woman in the country and ends up contracting AIDS should remain in hiding, he said.

Finally, Sterling asked the viewers, Anderson Cooper and himself: What has Magic Johnson ever done for the minorities? With that, he finished digging his own grave.

Sterling made his fortune in the 1960s in Los Angeles real estate. He bought the Lesser Towers and named them after himself, bought the San Diego Clippers and is the owner who has spent the longest at the head of an NBA team (33 seasons), despite the fact that The New York Times and Forbes magazine consider him the worst owner in the game’s history because of the Clippers’ mediocre performance, although they’ve improved in the past five years.

In 1984, Sterling moved the team to Los Angeles, although the NBA objected and fined him $25 million. He convinced the Association to reduce the fine to $6 million and everything continued smoothly. In other words, he knows how to negotiate and persuade, almost as well as a politician.

This is not the first time that Sterling is accused of racism. In 2003, 18 tenants in one of his properties sued him for certain comments he made to his employees, such as “blacks smell bad and attract bugs” and “Hispanics only know how to smoke and loiter around the building” and “I try to rent only to Koreans because they pay on time and live under any condition that I impose.”

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice filed charges against him because he refused to rent to those who were not Korean in his apartments in Koreatown and because he didn’t want to accept African-Americans in Beverly Hills. In 2009, a Clippers executive, Elgin Baylor, sued him for discrimination in the workplace.

According to Baylor, Sterling told him that he wanted to form a team with poor Southern blacks, coached by a white professional. Baylor’s salary was $350,000 a year, while the great white coach would have a fixed contract of $22 million over four years. I don’t remember if I mentioned that Elgin Baylor is black.

Sterling came out rather well of all the lawsuits. He had to pay several million, but his properties were never threatened, whereas in the latest scandal he’s about to lose the Clippers. One could accuse Donald Sterling of almost everything except inconsistency. All his life he has been an avowed, militant racist but the cost had never been as high as now.

Why? Simple. Just two reasons.

First, he broke the golden rule of businessmen, of the major strategists: never allow them to know what you’re really thinking. The first time, he thought he was in the shelter of privacy. It was almost like a deathbed confession. Pass. But the second time he spoke before the television cameras, made comments that every good businessman reserves for the golf club or the cigar-smoking club.

I know of millionaires’ clubs where the members applaud every time that Tiger Woods — the best golfer in history, who ironically happens to be black — misses a shot. Or where in the reading room, of all the biographies of U.S. presidents, the one of Barack Obama is the only one shelved with the back in the wrong direction.

None of them will ever admit discriminating against anyone, and some (not all) will say it with all sincerity, because racism operates in obscure ways. At times, it is cunning, cynical, hypocritical; other times it works from the subconscious, crouched somewhere back there, unnoticed. Sterling’s racism seems to have moved from one extreme to the other; by now, it doesn’t even know where it is.

Sterling’s second mistake was described by Spike Lee with that ghetto jargon, savory and inimitable: “He messed up with the wrong brotha.” It is not just that Magic Johnson is considered a hero for having been a basketball star, for publicly acknowledging his struggle against HIV, and for leading campaigns to end discrimination against HIV patients. His foundation promotes job training in black communities and gives college scholarships to low-income black youths.

In addition, Magic Johnson has enough money to go two, three, four rounds with Sterling and his lawyers and deck them in the fifth. Sterling can’t shut Magic Johnson’s mouth with dollar bills as he did with the people to whom he refused to rent apartments. Sterling not only spoke more than he should have, but also picked the wrong opponent.

For that reason, he should follow the advice given to him by Johnson himself the night after the fateful interview with Anderson Cooper. That is, if Sterling survives the implacable sentence imposed by the NBA: he cannot enter any league stadium and must now watch the games in the solitude of his Los Angeles mansion, with his beer and his hi-def TV screen; he has to pay a $2.5 million fine, and is obligated to sell the Clippers, a team valued at $575 million.

If Sterling survives this hard blow, I was saying, the best he can do is listen to the advice from Magic Johnson, the most lucid advice anyone could give him: “Take all that money, go enjoy what life you have left. And, please Donald, don’t open your mouth again.”