The Donald Sterl-mancipation

So I guess I'm supposed to be happy that Donald Sterling got a lifetime ban from the NBA.  Yeah, that's fantastic, considering that his days on this earth are probably in the single digits, anyway.  It's a lifetime ban for a person without much life left.  And he still owns the team, so all Adam Silver really did was tell him he can't come to the stadium.  When you buy Clippers merch or tix, you're still putting money in his pocket. And speaking of money, on a percentage basis, the amount that he got fined is about the same as you being fined around $20. 

Yeah, we got a huge win today.

But during a few checks on social media when I was supposed to be working, I see y'all out here acting like we just got emancipated.  Like it was the OJ verdict all over again.  And I gotta ask, what are you so happy about?

Now, I'm not one of these people who's gonna try to ruin your good mood by saying that there are more important things to be concerned with.  Those people are assholes, because of course there's always something to be more concerned with. It's just that there hasn't been much change on the Keystone XL Pipeline and Congress still isn't passing any bills.  And since The Walking Dead still hasn't come back, we're pretty starved for excitement.

No, I'm going to ruin your good mood by telling you that this is nothing to be happy about, because Donald Sterling didn't get banned because he's a racist.  Donald Sterling got banned because it became big news that he was a racist. 

Donald Sterling was a racist a long time before now, and there were a whole lot of incidents that he was involved in that were reported on and promptly ignored.  The only difference between this one and all of those was how you found out about it.  The other ones came out through lawsuits and court depositions and OH MY GOD THIS IS SO BORINGZZZZZZZZZZZZ. This one came out because his jump off (I refuse to call her anything else) goaded him into talking about black people so she could record it and leak it to TMZ.  Already, this story is more sexy.  Certainly, sexier than she is.  She looks like she used to be a man. 

All of a sudden, Donald Sterling is an embarrassment and needs to be removed, but wasn't he just as embarrassing, if not more so back in 2009, when he paid out the largest settlement on housing discrimination lawsuit ever?  Or what about those sexual harassment suits?  His callous nature when it came to evicting tenants?  The time that he made his wife pose as a government worker and visit the residents of his buildings to find out what race they were, so he could evict them?  Refusing to rent to Blacks or Latinos at all?  Donald Sterling has been a horrible piece of shit racist for a long time.  So really, it should insult all of you that this is what it took to bring him down. 

You mean to tell me that the NBA didn't know about any of this?  And that his racist views expressed in a private conversation is worse than the stuff listed above that the NBA certainly knows about?  The NBA doesn't care that Donald Sterling is racist.  The NBA cares that you know he's racist.  If this was about his racism, they would have banned him in 1983 when he asked Rollie Massamino, "I wanna know why you think you can coach these niggers."

The truth is, if Donald Sterling's jump off was a woman of a higher character, you wouldn't know anything that he said and they wouldn't have done anything.  Period.  Despite the fact that he's continued to make himself rich by denying living space to minorities.  Despite the fact that he's sexually harassed women in his employ.  Adam Silver can get in front of reporters and make his dramatic statements, but the truth is, it wasn't a problem for them before.  It only became a problem when it became public.

And the same goes for all of these sponsors who cut ties with the Clippers.  If y'all don't stop acting like you have morals.  Every one of you is a conglomerate of corrupt pieces of shit.  Every one of you knew who Sterling was and chose to sign deals with him anyway, because OOH LOOGIT BLAKE GRIFFIN JUMPS HIGH.  And now that everyone knows that he's a bigot, you don't want your brand associated with him.  Good thing those lawsuits got swept under the rug, otherwise, you would have been forced to leave all that money on the table.  So CarMax, State Farm, Kia, Corona, AQUAhydrate. Red Bull, Sprint, Lumber Liquidators,  LoanMart, Yokohama Tires, Samsung, Mercedes-Benz, and Virgin America, you ain't shit.  Not a single one of you.

So don't get too excited about all of this.  All that happened is that they reminded you what their real priorities are.  No progress has been made.  Unless you're Donald Sterling's jump off.  She's about to come up when she gets that spot on Basketball Wives.

DeAndre Jordan's dunk was aiight. And that's it.

The other night, DeAndre Jordan brought down a lob pass on top of Brandon Knight, and Twitter went ape shit.  I didn't see it, because I was unconscious, like other old men who can no longer stay up past nine.  But the next morning, I read all of the tweets from the night before, with Bomani Jones most notably holding forth about about impressive the dunk was. 

So, I pulled it up.  I figured it had to be amazing, right?  Yea, verily; t'would be the nastiest dunk mine eyes had ever gazed upon and bards would sing it's praises for ages.  After all, the cats on Twitter spent all night photoshopping Brandon Knight laid out beside Manny Pacquiao, with Simba trying to wake them up.  Twitter had declared Knight dead.  I caught a picture of DeAndre Jordan grimacing at what he'd done.  Even he looked impressed.  I was so ready to watch this video.

And I swear, y'all are too easily impressed these days.

It was a nice little dunk, but it wasn't worth all of that.  Maybe my standards are too high, but a seven-footer dunking over at 6'2" point guard might as well have been Blake Griffin jumping over that car.  I had a short Twitter exchange with Myth (author of Shadow Precinct, available on Amazon), and he said about Knight, "You thought you was about to block that shit?"  And that's my point.  He was never going to block that shit, not without cheating.  Maybe if he pantsed Jordan or started making out with his girl in the stands or something like that.  But that's about it.  Otherwise, Jordan did what he was supposed to do, like how I used to jump over my cousins back before they were fully coordinated and I wasn't fat.  There was only one way that it could have gone down.  So what was so impressive about that?

I'mma need for DeAndre Jordan to go up over someone roughly his size, like Shaq over the majority of centers in the NBA in the 1990s.  Otherwise, it's just bullying.  And it's not Jordan's fault.  What was he supposed to do, finger roll it because Brandon Knight didn't drink enough milk as a child?  No, Jordan did what big men do; yam it over the faerie folk who shouldn't be in the paint to begin with.  But folks were trying to gas up his head like he did something and he didn't.  If that counts as an accomplishment, then so does that time I dominated all those 8th graders.  Stop crying, Charlie's little brother.  Shoving you after my crossover is part of the game. 

and even though it says more about Detroit's defense than anything else, Brandon Knight did what he was supposed to do:  He challenged the shot, even though no one would have blamed him for letting that one ride, because, c'mon; he's 6'2".  That's like being a preemie in NBA circles.  No, he couldn't stop it, but he tried to make Jordan work for it.  Anything could have happened.  He might have slapped the ball away, Jordan could have tripped over his corpse; anything.  But he tried, which is more than I can say for Andrew Bynum.  Bynum would have been thinking about race cars, then blown out his knee imagining himself getting out of the car. 

But let's not act like something routine is supposed to be a special moment.  It was aiight, like Lebron hurdling John Lucas III in a world where Vince Carter already jumped over Frederic Weis.  After all, John Lucas III is bite size.  What makes the impressive dunks impressive is that the outcome is in doubt, or in some cases, weren't supposed to happen at all.  Kevin Johnson over Hakeem Olajuwon.  Russell Westbrook over Omer Asik.  Michael Jordan over damn near everybody.  You mean to tell me that what DeAndre did is on the same level as something like Shawn Kemp over Antoine Carr?

Get the fuck outta here.