Maybe Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling isn’t as incompetent as people assume he is. Perhaps, all these years, it was just the prostitute he was allegedly seeking advice from regarding personnel issues that didn’t understand basketball.
Frankly, a lot of folks would probably respect him more if he admitted that this were true.
According to a fascinating (and really, really hilarious) report by Sports by Brooks, perennial candidate for worst owner in sports Donald Sterling allegedly sought advice about team personnel decisions from a woman that he once, under oath, in court testimony, described as a prostitute. Brooks pieced his take together based on an assortment of court documents in remarkable fashion, so let’s start from the beginning.
In 2003, Sterling found himself embroiled in a sex scandal involving a woman named Alexandra Castro. Via the Smoking Gun, here are some of the juicier tidbits from the pair’s relationship and the messy split that followed (all bold stuff is ours, not theirs):
“Donald Sterling, the miserly tycoon who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, testified last year that he regularly paid a Beverly Hills woman for sex, describing her as a $500-a-trick "freak" with whom he coupled "all over my building, in my bathroom, upstairs, in the corner, in the elevator." Sterling's graphic testimony--which came during a two-day pretrial deposition in connection with a lawsuit he filed against the woman, Alexandra Castro--will surely nettle basketball commissioner David Stern…Sterling had a blunt appraisal of his "exciting" relationship with Castro: "It was purely sex for money, money for sex, sex for money, money for sex."
And then, according to Brooks, this tidbit was also in the court documents:
“. a prostitute … she was a total freak and a piece of trash … “
Now, keeping that description of Castro In mind, let’s fast forward to July 9, 2009 when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted a sworn statement from Castro to federal court as part of a massive discrimination suit against Sterling.
“During our relationship, Mr. Sterling consulted me on issues he was considering almost every day including, among others, whether he should hire Alvin Gentry to coach the Los Angeles Clippers (although I had no experience in such matters), how he should respond to requests by players for the Los Angeles Clippers for increases in their compensation (Mr. Sterling and I often had dinner at the Arena Club with agents for a number of players) … “
So there you go. Sterling apparently consulted a prostitute regarding team affairs. Obviously this all comes from accusations levied by angry ex-lovers, but it is all a part of court records which does give it a certain level of legitimacy.
Time to sic Brooks on Michael Jordan. Maybe there is a similarly logical reason for why the Charlotte Bobcats are so bad.
(Kudos to SbB for doing the yeoman’s work of reading through painfully graphic descriptions of Sterling’s sexual encounters to compile his report)
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I don't care if he paid a prostitute for sex or advice on how to run a sports team. They are both consenting adults.
Jerome McCollom