No one has ever claimed that Donald Sterling is good team owner – hell, I don’t think anyone has ever said anything remotely positive about his helm atop the Clippers’ franchise – but a comparison to a slave master? That’s gotta be a first.
And it comes courtesy of Elgin Baylor, only one of the game’s greatest players, who was dismissed from his GM role (one he held for two decades) last October. Elgin is now suing the Clippers and the NBA.
The LA Times reports:
NBA Hall of Famer and former longtime Clippers executive Elgin Baylor alleges in a civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles that team owner Donald Sterling has embraced a “vision of a Southern plantation-type structure” for his NBA franchise, accusing him of decades-long racist behavior.
Baylor worked for the Clippers for 22 years. The complaint against Sterling and others, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and obtained by The Times, presented Baylor’s version of an eroding relationship between Baylor and Sterling. Baylor contends, among other things, that the Clippers owner had “a pervasive and ongoing racist attitude as expressed to then-NBA player Danny Manning during contract negotiations.”
According to a report from TMZ – which has a brilliant headline – Baylor claims that Donald Sterling repeatedly called players on the Clippers “poor Black kids”. There’s a press conference scheduled for today in the office of Baylor’s lawyer. That should be interesting, to say the least.
