[ribosoma]

Originally Posted by The Ghost of Championship

Oh, come on. Phil Jackson is on record saying a bunch of racist stuff back in the early 90's. People change and society progresses, yet you want to hang a guy for having slaves in the 1800's?

Look, every mega-millionaire did slimy stuff back in the day. It doesn't mean we hold 32 year old junk over their heads. Sterling is a piece of garbage but playing the racist card is just dumb.

From:http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=4187729

When Sterling first bought the Ardmore, he remarked on its odor to Davenport. "That's because of all the blacks in this building, they smell, they're not clean," he said, according to Davenport's testimony. "And it's because of all of the Mexicans that just sit around and smoke and drink all day." He added: "So we have to get them out of here." Shortly after, construction work caused a serious leak at the complex. When Davenport surveyed the damage, she found an elderly woman, Kandynce Jones, wading through several inches of water in Apartment 121. Jones was paralyzed on the right side and legally blind. She took medication for high blood pressure and to thin a clot in her leg. Still, she was remarkably cheerful, showing Davenport pictures of her children, even as some of her belongings floated around her.

Jones had repeatedly walked to the apartment manager's office to plead for assistance, according to sworn testimony given by her daughter Ebony Jones in the Housing Rights Center case. Kandynce Jones' refrigerator dripped, her dishwasher was broken, and her apartment was always cold. Now it had flooded. Davenport reported what she saw to Sterling, and according to her testimony, he asked: "Is she one of those black people that stink?" When Davenport told Sterling that Jones wanted to be reimbursed for the water damage and compensated for her ruined property, he replied: "I am not going to do that. Just evict the bitch."

Repairs never came. The shower stopped working, and the toilet wouldn't flush; Jones needed to use a plunger and disposed of waste tissue in bags.

Kandynce Jones departed the home she loved but that caused her so much grief when she passed away, on July 21, 2003, at age 67.

Sterling's Tinseltown fantasy, though, didn't extend to investing much more in his team than he had in San Diego. Throughout the '80s and '90s, he didn't sign a single significant free agent. Instead, the franchise regularly picked players high in the draft -- Michael Cage, Danny Manning, Lamar Odom -- only to develop them for a while before letting them go. Some insiders saw his strategy as something more insidious than mere bargain-hunting. Baylor says that because he tried to pay African-American players such as Cage fairly, Sterling restricted him from negotiating with them; eventually, Baylor contends, the owner told his GM not to talk to players or agents about money at all. Baylor also alleges that when the Clippers got bogged down in negotiations with Manning, Sterling said, "I'm offering a lot of money for a poor black kid." (Clippers general counsel Robert H. Platt responded in a statement that Baylor's "false claims carry no weight and have no credibility," saying his lawsuit is "driven by publicity-seeking attorneys.") All the while, Sterling was building a reputation as an invasive but indecisive owner. Classic example: In 1993, Manning, then an unhappy All-Star, asked Sterling why he wasn't dealt at the trade deadline. Sterling replied that he'd dreamed the Clippers had won a championship after he'd passed the ball to Manning for the winning shot. The following year, though, Manning was dumped for an over-the-hill Dominique Wilkins. "Dealing with Sterling was impossible," Carl Scheer, the team's GM from 1984 to 1986, once said. "If he took the elevator down, he'd ask the operator what he thought, and by the time he had reached the lobby, he'd changed his mind."

Sterling's preference for Asians extended to the people he wanted in his buildings. "I like Korean employees and I like Korean tenants," he told Dean Segal, chief engineer at a Sterling property called the Mark Wilshire Tower Apartments, according to testimony Segal gave in the Housing Rights Center case. And Davenport testified that Sterling told her, "I don't have to spend any more money on them, they will take whatever conditions I give them and still pay the rent…so I'm going to keep buying in Koreatown."

At the Towers, Sterling's staff issued applications for garage-door remote controls that required residents to disclose their birthplace and national origin. Darren Schield, controller at Beverly Hills Properties, later denied that Sterling wanted the information to screen tenants by race.

Instead, he said, "sometime after Sept. 11, 2001," an FBI special agent warned that several tenants who were "foreign, I mean as Muslim, or, you know," were targets of Bureau investigations. Even more bizarre but just as effective at driving away African-Americans and Hispanics, Beverly Hills Properties changed the name of the Wilshire Towers complex to Korean World Towers. A huge banner printed entirely in Korean was hung on the building, and the doormen were replaced by armed, Korean-born guards who were hostile to non-Koreans, again according to testimony given by multiple residents.

In May 2002, Sterling met with the staff of the newly acquired Wilshire Tower Apartments. He talked about his plans to make the 20-story building a beautiful landmark. Then, according to sworn testimony given in 2004 by building manager Dixie Martin, he said, "I like Korean tenants."

Raymond Henson, head of security at the building, who was standing outside the room, heard what happened next. Sterling, according to Henson's 2004 sworn statement, once again expressed his distaste for Mexicans as tenants, saying, "I don't like Mexican men because they smoke, drink and just hang around the house." Later, Sterling told Martin that he knew he shouldn't discriminate. But he had the right to do so, she recalled him saying, because he owned the place.