| Ex-Clips escape from
L.A. By Frank Hughes Special to ESPN.com | |
Did you ever see the movie "Flatliners," where medical students intentionally kill themselves for a short time in order to see what heaven is like and then -- with their classmates' help -- bring themselves back to life?
They like the exhilarating experience at first, but after a while, something goes wrong, and they begin to have bad experiences in heaven.
That's kind of what it's like to be a member of the Los Angeles Clippers.
You think you are going to heaven for a while because you are playing basketball in Los Angeles, one of the best cities in the nation in terms of weather, culture, nightlife, livability, endorsement possibilities, everything.
But after a while, something goes wrong in heaven, and you can't wait to get out of there.
Now, there are undoubtedly bad owners in the NBA. Washington's Abe Pollin, Charlotte's George Shinn and Golden State's Chris Cohan spring directly to mind.
Whenever people are involved in a process, you always will have good and bad, simply because some people are better at things then others. It's pretty elementary.
But even Pollin, Shinn and Cohan are a step above Clippers owner Donald Sterling, which is a back-handed compliment in much the same way you would tell an insane person at least they are not the craziest loon in the asylum.
But Sterling is a different breed altogether, a man who brings new meaning to the term SNAFU: Situation Normal, All (messed) Up.
It's easy to say Sterling is a clown who should not own a team, but when you actually hear the stories of the things he has done, his continued ownership is even more mind-boggling.
Looking at the personnel moves is one thing. For instance, in recent history, the Clippers have had the No. 1 pick in the draft (Danny Manning) and the No. 2 pick in the draft (Antonio McDyess).
You know what they have in return for those players? Charles Smith.
Who?
Exactly.
Only one free agent, Loy Vaught, has chosen to re-sign with the Clippers. And even Vaught came to his senses and left for Detroit this season.
In fact, players such as Wayman Tisdale turned down offers from the Clippers for $1.5 million more than they actually got from their eventual teams to stay out of Clipperland.
This season, James Robinson allowed the Clips to buy out a substantial portion of his contract just so he could wave goodbye to the inanities of L.A.'s other team.
Ask anybody, and a unanimous finger will point at Sterling as the reason the Clippers are the most moribund franchise in the history of the NBA, possibly in major professional sports -- which does not take the IOC into account, mind you.
Trying to figure out where to start with Sterling is like trying to describe which of Quasimoto's features are the ugliest: Do we go with the head, or that reprehensible hump, or maybe that sideways face?
People who know Sterling say he's a shameless name-dropper, more interested in who came to his team's game than the outcome. He wants you to know everybody he has spoken with, had lunch with or taken a phone call from. It's part of the reason he did not want to move the Clips to Anaheim, because how many movie stars would go to games there?
Just being known and recognized by L.A. personalities as Clippers owner is payoff enough for Sterling. Never mind that he is known and recognized by everybody else as the worst owner in the world.
His ego is such that a reporter once was doing a story on Sterling when Sterling told the reporter he might get some good quotes from commissioner David Stern.
The reporter interviewed Stern, who said the obligatory niceties on the record, then went on to blast Sterling off the record for several minutes.
The reporter told Sterling what Stern had to say about him, after which Sterling said: "Yeah, but what was the nice thing he said about me?"
For a while, Sterling was palling around with Al Davis, so Sterling adopted Davis' fashion statements -- which even a street bum would have a hard time doing, considering Davis wears satin jump suits -- and began wearing dark glasses everywhere he went.
One time, when Paul Silas was coaching the Clippers in the early 1980s, Sterling was showing off his girlfriend around the office. So Silas walks into his office that day, and Sterling's girlfriend is in there, feet up on the desk, kicking back, making phone calls.
But Sterling's personal eccentricities are not what make him a terrible owner -- except that he cares more about them than he does his team.
A big part of the problem is that he is a lawyer. And if ever lawyer jokes were made to be told, Sterling could be the protagonist in every one.
For instance, when Sterling was about to hire Jim Lynam for the 1983-84 season, Lynam and Sterling came to a handshake agreement on the details of Lynam's contract, then called a news conference for the next day.
With the media waiting outside, Lynam walks into Sterling's office to review the contract before signing it. And in reviewing it, he noticed that Sterling had changed some of the numbers they agreed upon.
Lynam threw a fit, to the point where his wife and the media could hear through Sterling's door, and Sterling was forced to go back to their original agreement.
Sterling still owes former coach Bob Weiss money, which Weiss never will see.
As a lawyer, Sterling knows what he can get away with, and so he pushed the envelope where that is concerned.
One source said that on several occasions, Sterling refused to pay for hotels where the team stayed on the road.
Finally, the hotels would threaten to take Sterling to court, so Sterling told them he would pay 70 percent of the hotel bill, and the 30 percent they lost still would be less than what they would spend on attorney's fees if they took Sterling to court.
Even players who have no association with Sterling get jobbed. In a convoluted triangular business deal that we will try to keep brief, when the Buffalo Braves moved to San Diego and became the Clippers, basically, the Boston Celtics assumed the debts and assets of the Braves, and the Clippers assumed the debts and assets of the Celtics -- don't ask why.
A few years later, a former Celtics player had an accountant do his taxes and the accountant noticed there was a check missing for deferred salary, owed to him by, guess who, Sterling.
Well, Sterling mailed out the check, but for the six or eight months he kept it, he was collecting interest on what at the time was a fairly substantial amount.
"That's your Clipper history for you," said former Clipper Brent Barry. "It's like running water into a tub, with the drain open.
"The drain's pretty big there," says Barry. "The drain there seems to be extra large."
