The Week In Racism--Sports Edition

You know it’s been a historic week in racism when the number two story involves a guy who started off his rant with the phrase “and let me tell you another thing I know about the Negro.”

That Donald Sterling, the soon-to-be former owner of the L.A. Clippers could somehow eclipse serial criminal, Fox News folk hero and clueless racist Cliven Bundy says something about how deep the spirit of racism remains entrenched at least in some of this country’s population.

And despite near unanimous (I’d say unanimous but the far right never completely disappoints) condemnation of both Bundy’s and Sterling’s words, the backlash with respect to the punishment has begun.

No one, especially politicians and hatemongers like Sean Hannity, have resurrected Bundy’s criminal enterprise to further their war on the country’s first black president.  I suspect no one of import will get back into bed with him.  But when it comes to unrepentant cheater and racist Sterling, we’ve now entered the backlash phase.

On Tuesday, a mere three days after Sterling’s private conversations blanketed the airwaves, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver came down hard.  He banned Sterling from the NBA for life and said he’d work to force a sale of his team.  For good measure, he fined Sterling $2.5 million on his way out the door.

The severity of the punishment has seemed to oddly work in Sterling’s favor, at least for a few contrarians and, surprisingly, not all of them camping out on the far right fringe of polite society.

To this point, the alternate perspective has fallen generally into one of two categories: privacy and freedom. The sound had barely left the auditorium where Silver announced the penalties when questions began to arise about not just the severity of the penalties but what the incident itself says about us as a country.

Jason Whitlock, writing for ESPN, took a thoughtful if nonsensical contrarian approach.  While not defending Sterling’s words, he did raise questions about punishing someone, including a racist like Sterling, for private thoughts uttered behind closed doors to his mistress.  Fair enough even though those supposedly private words were heard by so many so often in the last week that more people can quote them than the first amendment to the Constitution. 

He then raised questions about the apparent mob rule that seemed to mandate Silver’s decision, noting the dangerousness of merely responding to throngs that tend to act more on emotion than intelligence.  Again, fair enough even if he didn’t acknowledge that sometimes the mob gets things right.  But where Whitlock stopped making sense was when he advanced a theory backed by nothing empirical let alone thoughtful that Sterling’s penalty did nothing to solve the greater issue of the culture that informed Sterling’s world view in the first place, not to mention the greater issue of advancing the cause of blacks generally. 

Whitlock is wrong.  The punishment that Silver administered strikes exactly at the core of the culture that created a racist like Sterling in the first place.  Sterling lives in a bubble of his own making.  A line was crossed, probably decades ago, by Sterling when he came to believe that his business success gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted and without consequence.  And Sterling certainly lived out that life.  He cheated on his wife openly.  He discriminated against potential minority tenants in his housing projects, again openly.  Indeed Sterling conducted his life so outside of what most would consider normal that his life to most appeared to be a caricature.

The problem is, the standards by which he’s being judged are the thoughts of most of us because most of us don’t live in that bubble.  In Sterling’s bubble, he was just fine, the life of the party really.  Sterling’s past actions, fed by an almost complete lack of attaching consequences, fed, as Whitlock suggests, an insidious culture.  But where Whitlock is wrong is that heavy handed punishments often can and often do shake the status quo of those cultures in fundamental ways.  I still recall a debate from my college days about the seminal Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in which the concept of separate but equal was struck down.  The professor asked whether a simple Supreme Court decision would have any real impact.  As students we questioned the value of the rule of law in fostering significant cultural change with opinions varied on its effectiveness.

History has more than demonstrated that impact of that simple Supreme Court decision.  It created a sea change in the rights of blacks, changes that many whites are still fighting to this day.  Nonetheless what it did most was change our views, made most of us see the folly and ridiculousness of treating people differently simple because of the color of their skin.

Here, the power of Silver’s penalties can have a similar effect.  While blatant racism isn’t the problem it was in 1954, it’s still wildly prevalent no matter what the Wall Street Journal editorial board may think or how often the overwhelmingly predominately white far right claim it’s not.  On the same day Silver punished Sterling, a Wisconsin federal court struck down a voter identification law in Wisconsin put in place by a far right governor and legislature because while not fixing a problem that doesn’t exist in the first place (voter fraud) the law had a very detrimental effect on the minorities and the poor whose votes they were intentionally trying to suppress.  It was the second court to strike down the law.

The point is that racism may not be as open as it was in the 1950s when blacks had to use separate water fountains, but it exists and in very serious forms still.  The Sterling punishment is a very loud shot across the bow of the white establishment that it is no longer business as usual.  If the lesson learned is that not even private conversations are safe, then so be it.  Sterling’s private racism demonstrated him to be a public phony and ultimately a public racist.

When an essentially private club like the NBA, dependent on the public for its very existence, takes action in that public interest, whether informed by emotion, intelligence or both, it does have an effect.  It sends a message to owners in every sport, in every corporation, that their words have consequences and will be punished. Those in power do have a greater responsibility and as they clean up their act, whether forced by the severe consequences given to Sterling or simply because it’s the right thing to do, society as a whole is better off, more advanced.

Which leads to my second point, the presence of that free market that the right and the extreme right in particular seem to believe cures all ills.  It certainly did in this case and yet it’s those same advocates that are now having the most trouble with what happened to Sterling.

While Whitlock was being thoughtful, others not so much.  On the local front, the media’s biggest troll and lightest intellectual, Mike Trivisonno, used his platform at an increasingly irrelevant AM radio station that serves as the flagship sports station in town to rail on about how Sterling’s punishment is still another example of how our freedoms in this country are under attack.

The problem with jackasses like Trivisonno is not just their inability to process higher order concepts but also their rather simplistic view that freedom is threatened every time responsibility attaches.

Trivisonno decried, simply decried, the influence that various sponsors of the L.A. Clippers had on the punishment handed out to Sterling.  Sponsors pulled their dollars from the Clippers, sending a message to the NBA at the same time that similar actions could follow if Silver didn’t take sever action.  And it certainly it fair to suggest Silver’s actions were highly informed by the economic impact that could befall the league if he didn’t punish Sterling severely.  But so what?  Isn’t that just the free market at work?

Trivisonno was likely speaking from a more personal standpoint on this issue anyway.  As a media provocateur, to be polite, or as an ill-informed nitwit, to be more accurate, Trivisonno’s opinions have likely drawn the ire of his show’s sponsors and that seems to chafe in ways that probably clipped off the even more strident views he’d prefer to express.  Again, though, that’s just the free market at work.

No one holds a gun to the heads of any sponsor to advertise and no one holds a gun to the heads of any team or league to accept that advertisement.  The sponsors who pulled their advertising with the Clippers were maybe slightly motivated by moral concerns but were overwhelmingly motivated by economic ones.  They simply didn’t want anyone to associate their product or service with an avowed racist like Sterling.  It’s really the same thing that happened when Tiger Woods lost all his sponsors when the revelations about his sordid personal life became public.  Most companies not named Nike are concerned about the impact to their bottom line when people thing negatively about their product.

About 76% of the players in the NBA are black.  The NBA courts and counts a large black fan base.  Being sensitive to their concerns just makes economic sense to the sponsors who back the league.

Sterling’s freedom wasn’t at all impacted by the punishment Silver laid out any more than it was impacted by the multimillion dollar settlement he paid to resolve discrimination claims years ago.  He can and probably still will have the occasional private rant about the blacks he either cannot stand or understand.  What is impacted is his ability to conduct business inside the private confines of the NBA with people that don’t relate well to his thinking.  That is just the free market talking loudly and proudly.

Freedom isn’t a catchword for irresponsibility.  Simply because you can say it doesn’t mean you should.  Words and actions do have consequences.  Sometimes they get you into legal trouble.  Sometimes they get you in business trouble.  Sometimes they get you punched in the nose.  And in none of those situations is our freedom at all impacted.

Much of the criticism of Silver that falls into the bucket represented by Trivisonno is really a criticism of what they believe to be political correctness gone amok.  Denouncing racism is just correct.  There’s nothing political about it.

 The real movement we have in this country is being initiated by the Freedom Police, a weird band of off- thinking wingnuts who seem to think that any infringement on their ability to do what they want when they want and to whomever they want is tantamount to the oppression the colonists felt at the hands of the British.

As the fictitious president Andrew Shepard said in The American President, America is advanced citizenship.  We’re a country built not just on freedom as an amorphous concept but responsible freedom exercised by people with a sense larger than themselves.  We can and should put limits on absolute freedom because your right to do whatever you want exactly ends at the point on which it infringes on my right to be left alone.  There’s a reason shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is punishable and not an infringement on freedom.  There’s a reason that libel and slander are actionable.

Sterling may have been exercising his freedom of thought but the moment it impacted on his fellow owners and their ability to conduct their business, the moment it impacted on the league’s black players and their ability to work in a discrimination free environment, that ability to act irresponsibly and without consequence ended.  That’s as it should be and as it’s always been.

So please spare me the sanctimony of the contrarians like Whitlock who believe private words and thoughts shouldn’t matter.  Spare me too the ill-conceived logic of jerks like Trivisonno who only imagine a life lived without consequence, as if that’s ever existed.  Sterling got what the populace and the market dictated.  He got what he deserved, finally. 

Lingering Items--Bigger Truths Edition

If I had just one wish as a sports columnist, it would be to write with the absolute clarity and sense of purpose of Jason Whitlock.  He doesn’t duck important issues, particularly when race is involved.  He doesn’t adhere to conventional wisdom or anyone’s party line and doesn’t write to meet anyone’s expectations but his own.  Time and again he’ll be on the opposite side of where you’d thought he’d be on a particular issue and where you might be.  When you're finished, he'll change your mind.

His recent column on Jay-Z’s entrée into the world of sports as an agent is brilliant in both its simplicity and logic.  Jay-Z may be a cultural phenomena, Whitlock argues, but that doesn’t qualify him to represent athletes.  More to the point, Jay-Z only trusts his musical career to the best in the music business. Athletes like Kevin Durant and Robinson Cano should do likewise, meaning trust their athletic careers to the best in that business instead of a wanna be athlete living vicariously.  It’s such a solid, simple view that it reveals, in clear sentences contained in short paragraphs, the illogic of Durant firing his current agents only to be represented by Jay-Z.  It can't and won't end well.

But this isn’t a fan letter about or to Whitlock.  It’s more to emphasize that issues of race and politics and business and sports occasionally intersect and when they do sorting through them is tricky business.  The issues reveal themselves often enough that there's no need to contrive them, except if your the Plain Dealer's Bill Livingston.

Livingston never met a sentence he couldn’t torture or a thought he couldn’t mangle.  It’s usually best to ignore him, like his bosses do by relegating him to the back pages of the sports section waiting out his retirement.  Occasionally Livingston gets lucky, the Indians are off, the Browns and Cavs aren’t doing something stupid, and there’s a big hole to fill on the front page.  When that harmonic convergence occurs, we’re left with a column from Livingston like last week when he kind of sort of defended celebrity chef Paula Deen’s blatant racism by ham handedly using the Gordon Gee situation as a counterpoint, as if the situations are at all similar.

To put Deen and Gee in the same column is idiotic.  One is a racist and a hypocrite.  The other wears a bow tie.

Deen’s in trouble because she couldn't bring herself to settle a lawsuit/shakedown brought by someone who had the goods on her.  Now she's really paying because, well, she said what she said.  Yea, the legal system sucks sometimes.  Yea, the woman and her attorney were engaged in a legal form of extortion.  But ultimately Deen brought on her own demise because she hasn’t the good sense to understand that by not purposely escaping the vestiges of a racist upbringing you're damned to repeat them.

When it comes to Gee, what he said and did can’t credibly be argued as even remotely similar.  Making jokes at the expense of the boobs that run Notre Dame or mocking the modest academic achievements of certain SEC schools is a weird thing for a college president to do in any context but it isn’t racism or hypocrisy.  It’s just an uber geek unable to read the room.

The implication that Gee escaped his foibles as Deen is being unfairly punished given her recent change of heart is so off the mark that it makes you wonder if anyone at the PD bothered to even try to edit the column.    Gee was forced to retire.  His income, always less than Deen’s, was impacted.  Deen fell further because she had much further to fall.  Ohio State is as big of academic platform as anyone could want but it pales in comparison to the platform that Deen used very profitably to push her lard-based recipes on the public while hiding both the diabetes that her cooking style induced and the fact that once diagnosed she became a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical industry while still pushing the country toward obesity.

A sports columnist works best when he or she can take sports related events and find their inner truths in the context of a larger world.  That’s Whitlock’s unique talent and Livingston’s biggest problem.  With the Plain Dealer going to a mostly internet based platform, Livingston will now be forced to compete almost directly with Whitlock.  I suspect his retirement, like Gee’s, will be forced and will be soon as well. Good riddance.

**

The Indians have been one of the consistently worst teams in major league baseball the last 10 years.  Their attendance has been at or near the bottom in each of those years.  Some may see cause and effect but not club president Mark Shapiro.  He sees a different truth, one that requires no introspection on the failures of his front office reign.

Whether you view Shapiro has incompetent or unfairly hamstrung by cheap owners is probably missing the point.  Shapiro is a survivor of the first order because the chief skill he possesses is the ability to sell his genius to a gullible ownership that has bought everyone of his excuses without question or exception.

In a column in Crain’s Cleveland Business, Kevin Kelps unwittingly falls victim to Shapiro’s snake oil charm by advancing a Shapiro theory that the Indians’ attendance hasn’t really tanked, it’s been market corrected.  Under the Shapiro theory, per Kelps, the Indians’ sell out streak and attendance in the early 2000s was the result of a new stadium and a lack of competition from the Browns.  The loss of corporate backers that have moved out of town, increased competition from the Browns (as if) and a recession have all served to create a new normal where the Indians will be one of the worst draws in baseball because, well, they just will be because, I guess, we suck as fans.

Like most Shapiro theories, it has enough truthiness to pass muster among gullible owners and columnists.  But what’s far more fascinating is the utter lack of blame that Shapiro places on himself and his charges in building one of the worst teams in the league, year after year.  The underlying message from Shapiro is that wins and losses aren’t all that relevant to attendance.  Market size and competition within that market is what matters most.

What’s interesting about that theory is that it’s merely a rehash of what pre Jacobs field/Jacobs ownership tried to sell as well as if baseball games are to be enjoyed on their individual merits, like any other form of entertainment.  They, like Shapiro, sold that yarn because they couldn’t do what it really took to boost attendance: spend.  If fans are spending their discretionary cash on anything but the Indians, then that's the Indians' fault, not the fans.

There are true baseball fans among us but they are and always will be a minority here and elsewhere.  Baseball, like other major league sports, is not a collection of individual games but a pursuit with an overarching story, like a movie.  Brad Pitt can open a movie based on his name but he can’t make it profitable if the movie sucks.  Movie studio execs wouldn’t argue that the paying public should just be grateful to attend movies without regard to whether or not it’s entertaining so why should a baseball exec like Shapiro?

The Indians lousy attendance is directly and almost perfectly correlated to their performance.  It’s true that a particular game might be entertaining but most fans are tourists and not natives and so when they spend their money they want to maximize the chance that the product they’ll see will be entertaining.  A team that loses more than it wins doesn’t maximize the odds the average fan needs to make the investment and if there’s one thing we know about the Indians of the last decade it’s that they lose more than they win.

Shapiro has strangely held on to a job in which he’s been abjectly unsuccessful for most of it, assuming you judge success by wins and losses.  He’s not come close to building or sustaining a team that is more likely than not to win day in and day out.  He’s facilitated an ownership group that has repeatedly disappointed its fan base by refusing to make the needed investments despite promises to do so.

All I hear right now is that the Dolans did spend in the offseason.  They did.  But it doesn’t vitiate the previous decade when they didn’t. The indifference of fans now is that they already have the singe marks from the previous times they got too close to the flame.  You can't blame them for wanting to see more from a team and a franchise then a starting pitching staff that can't go 6 innings on a nightly basis.

Shapiro is smart enough to know that he’s selling a load of crap and smart enough, hopefully, to not actually believe that load of crap.  The truth is that the potential of this market is known and it’s much higher than what we’re seeing now because the team has been so bad.  Is it as high as it was in 2001?  Perhaps not.  But this town has more than demonstrated it will pay up and show up when given a consistent reason to do so.  Shapiro has more than proven an inability to give the fans their reason and the only ones who truly don’t get that simple point are the most important: the Dolans.

**

The Cavs' pursuit of rickety and underperforming free agent center Andrew Bynum is perhaps one of the most fascinating free agent pursuits in years.  By almost any measure, Bynum isn’t worth even half the money the Cavs have thrown at him.  He’s basically the basketball equivalent of Grady Sizemore, drawing interest based on his theoretical value unrelated to his actual production because all too often he's injured.

What makes it fascinating is that the Cavs offered to make him richer in one year than the average fan will see in a lifetime and yet they still couldn't keep him from pursuing a contract elsewhere.  Bynum and his agent felt obliged to test the greater fool theory to see if there’s anyone dumber or more desperate than the Cavs.  There could be.  Sports owners and executives are generally a nervous bunch. It didn't turn out to be the case.

The plight of the Cavs is such that they literally have to throw that kind of money around to even get in a conversation with a player of any credibility and it’s a stretch right now to even but Bynum in that category.  Cleveland is a miserable place to be in the winter and that’s the heart of the NBA season.  The Cavs have nice facilities but so does everyone else.  What they lack is something they can’t change: the weather.  They also don’t have enough horses to be considered an upper echelon team at the moment so whoever comes is coming into a rebuilding project that may or may not take.  It's not Shaquille O'Neal sidling up to LeBron James.

Twelve million a year is  certainly enough to get me to live even in Michigan during a football season but that doesn’t mean I’d like it and it may be enough to get Bynum to Cleveland even if he won’t like it.  But if either Atlanta or Dallas had gotten close to the Cavs offer, Bynum wasn't coming and the Cavs and they could have continued to stockpile cash and cap space in the misguided belief that LeBron James sees the errors of his way and returns to a city he didn’t much like in the first place.

The Cavs will be built, if at all, organically.  Free agents show up in basketball when they think they are the final piece and not the first.

**

There are plenty of sports questions to ponder, but the biggest question to ponder this week (and last): will it ever stop raining?