The Man Behind the Commissioner’s Ruling
How Kevin Johnson Influenced the Donald Sterling Ruling
By HARVEY ARATON
MAY 1, 2014
When N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver announced a lifetime ban of the disgraced Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and said he would urge the league’s Board of Governors to vote for a forced sale of the team, Silver was widely hailed for his decisive leadership in defusing a burgeoning crisis.
But in tracing the timeline of events that led to the announcement Tuesday, it is apparent that the league’s response was shaped as much by the influence of a player turned politician who has no official affiliation with the N.B.A. as it was by Silver’s conviction.
Kevin Johnson, a former N.B.A. star who is now the mayor of Sacramento, was able to channel the growing anger among the league’s players and made clear to Silver the types of steps that needed to be taken to keep the situation from veering out of control.
With a long history as a fractious group plagued by infighting among empowered player agents and their famous clients, with its last three executive directors departing involuntarily, the players union has not been normally viewed as having a powerful voice in N.B.A. affairs. And it certainly did not seem to be cohesive enough to forcefully deal with the fast-moving, emotionally charged reactions to Sterling’s comments.
But in this instance, the union’s response was notably galvanized from the start, with Chris Paul, the union president, calling Johnson on Saturday morning soon after an audio recording of Sterling making disparaging remarks about black players and other people first appeared on the TMZ website.
Paul, the Clippers’ star point guard, immediately found himself in the middle of the uproar and needed someone else to guide the union’s response. He had already recruited Johnson to head a committee of businesspeople searching for a new executive director of the union, and so it was logical to turn to him again.
In a way, Johnson had almost been looking for such a moment.
In an interview several weeks ago with The New York Times, Johnson said he agreed with the assessment that the players union was adrift amid a $5 billion global industry and that its “financial power and leverage should be greater than it’s ever been,” but that it was not.
At the time, Johnson was making telephone calls to the league’s top stars, including LeBron James, urging them to imagine a union that could become much more than a collective bargaining agent, one that could demand a seat at the table in confronting the league’s most pressing issues.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, here was such an issue, but one more charged than Johnson could have imagined, with the potential to pull apart a league that is about three-quarters black.
People inside the union and the league office, who agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity given the developing ramifications of the story, agreed that Johnson, with Paul’s continual input, had Silver’s attention almost from the start once Sterling’s comments became public.
Paul, one person in the league said, made the initial contact, calling Silver from Los Angeles early Saturday morning just hours after the Sterling story broke and informing him that he would get Johnson involved.
As the weekend progressed, the person said, Johnson spoke with Silver several times, delivering the message that only decisive action that left Sterling no room to remain actively involved with the Clippers would satisfy the union.
Johnson found other ways to apply pressure. It was no coincidence that by Saturday night, before a playoff game between the Bobcats and the Miami Heat in Charlotte, N.C., James was speaking out forcefully, saying that if the audio was authentic, “there is no room for Donald Sterling in our league.”
Other players weighed in on Twitter. A campaign had been organized.
“With social media, the players were able to get a message out quickly in a way they wouldn’t have been able to even 10 years ago,” said Marc Edelman, as associate professor of law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College who has written about sports and antitrust law. “Back when Donald Sterling bought the Clippers, only the league had a well-oiled P.R. machine that controlled the message. Now the players also have a voice, and with it, power.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/sports/basketball/how-kevin-johnson-influenced-the-donald-sterling-ruling.html?hpw&rref=sports
