Kareem is the voice of reason in Sterling case
Kareem nailed it.
Amid all the hysteria and self-righteousness in the aftermath of the Donald Sterling audio that went around the world, NBA Hall of Famer and lifelong black person Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was among the few voices of reason.
In a column for Time.com, he wrote that “the whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Waving.”
While NBA team owners and officials and many in the media were showing long overdue outrage over the bigoted actions and words of Los Angeles Clippers owner Sterling, Kareem was asking what took so long. Abdul-Jabbar also said he hoped that whoever illegally recorded Sterling gets some jail time.
What took so long is the question that the new NBA Commissioner Adam Silver dodged like a champ at his news conference to announce Sterling’s lifetime ban. He referred to the NBA “family’ enough times to make anyone with a brain vomit, but he dismissed questions about the failure to act on Sterling years ago in a New York second.
You can be sure that the NBA knew that Sterling was a bigot. There were court cases stemming from his success as a slum lord and a few major stories in the media, including one in NBA partner ESPN The Magazine that laid his bigotry out there for everybody to see.
That story never got much traction from the rest of the national sports media and it sure didn’t cost Sterling his franchise.
The NBA was obviously okay with knowing that they had a bigot as a member of the … gag … family. What the league wasn’t okay with was you knowing that that they knew.
Once the (possibly illegally recorded) audio was out there, the NBA and the media had no choice but to show its zero tolerance for bigotry and racism.
The Thought Police have always been around but they’ve become a lot more influential in the cell phone/internet age when virtually every human on the planet has the ability to record every word spoken at any given time and spread it around the world in five seconds.
Sterling was a bigot and a slime ball long before his girlfriend made her sleazy recording and he’s getting a well deserved come-uppance, but it would be a lot easier to celebrate it if the NBA had given it to him a long time ago based on his public actions instead of his private conversations.
— I would have really been impressed if Commissioner Silver had gotten all the NBA owners to agree to having microphones installed in their homes and cars so the league could find out if it had any other bigots in their midst.
— Maybe the Rangers weren’t so tired after all. Or maybe it will catch up to them sometime in the next few days. They were playing their third game in four nights Friday night when they beat the Penguins 3-2 in overtime. The Penguins hadn’t played in three days. I don’t have any stats to back it up but it sure seems like teams that are supposed to be at a disadvantage because of fatigue win more often than they lose.
— Sidney Crosby is still looking for his first goal of the playoffs and hasn’t scored in 12 straight postseason games. He created a lot of chances for the Penguins in Game 1, but I’m beginning to buy into the theory that he’s playing hurt. Not because he hasn’t scored, but because he just looks a little off. There has never been an NHL superstar who has been willing to work the corners and the boards the way Crosby does and he’s been doing plenty of work there, but the intensity just doesn’t appear to be at his usual ridiculous level. I’ve seen too much of Crosby since he came into the league to believe that he’s pouting or has lost interest, but something’s just not right.
— My favorite part of the Rangers beating the Flyers in Game 7 was when Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist, with less than 30 seconds left in the game and the Flyers net empty, left his crease and played a slowly bouncing puck behind the net. The difference between that and the same decision by Marc-Andre Fleury of the Penguins in Game 4 vs. Columbus that resulted in him getting ripped and ridiculed was that the puck didn’t take a flukey bounce.
— The Penguins really need a laugher.
– Boxing champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. says he’s “Very, very interested in buying the Los Angeles Clippers. That would be an interesting vetting process. Mayweather served jail time in 2012 and has a reputation for betting large amounts of money on sports. He lives in Las Vegas.
And then there’s this comment about the vile racist whose team he wants to buy: “(Sterling) has always treated me with the utmost respect. And he always says, ‘Floyd, I want you to sit right next to me and my wife.”
Ain’t sports great?