It wasn’t even close. The NBA Board of Directors unanimously ratified the sale of the Los Angeles Clippers to Steve Ballmer by a vote of 29-0 thus officially ending any association between the NBA and Donald Sterling.
The Clippers went for a whopping two billion bucks, with a B! just as the Dodgers did last year. Ballmer is the former CEO of Microsoft and has been attempting to get into professional sports for some time now. The NBA has now made the official announcement that Steve Ballmer is the new Clippers’ “Governor”.
The news of the sale came as a breath of fresh air to professional basketball fans who were not looking forward to years of litigation brought on by Donald Sterling in his vain attempt to evade the inevitable. Nobody wanted him to remain as the Clippers owner, especially not the coaches and players who were threatening to walk away from the team if Sterling still owned the franchise at the start of the coming NBA season.
For anyone who has been on the moon, Sterling was recorded on tape, at a Clippers game, making some very ugly racist remarks to his pretty friend Ms. Stiviano, who many believe set old Donald up for the fall. It really doesn’t matter, he said what he said and guys like Magic Johnson, who was mentioned in the discussion, were not just going to lie down and take it from a bitter old man who obviously doesn’t belong near professional sports in America today.
After the recorded incident, brand new NBA Commissioner Adam Silver pronounced that Sterling was ‘banned for life from the NBA’. Sterling’s appeal fell on deaf ears as Mr. Silver let the league know that his administration would not tolerate such behavior from anyone, including an NBA team owner.
However, with the help of his wife Shelly, Sterling got a huge price for the Los Angeles based NBA franchise. Two billion dollars should sooth his battered ego and put him in the lap of luxury. Sterling initially agreed to the sale of the Clippers but later reneged. His wife argued that Donald was ‘mentally incapacitated due to dementia’ and finally won the claim in court where Mr. Sterling was defeated on all counts, effectively preventing any further appeals.
Basketball fans across the country breathed a sigh of relief that this ugly chapter in NBA history is now over and hope that we never have to deal with this kind of thing again.
