Blake Griffin Speaks on Donald Sterling, Clippers, More on the Players' Tribune
Los Angeles Clippers superstar Blake Griffin is the latest athlete to write a piece for The Players' Tribune, the Derek Jeter website that gives fans an inside look at athlete stories. The All-Star forward wrote at length about his feelings and interactions with former Clippers owner Donald Sterling, as well as early impressions of new owner Steve Ballmer.
The bulk of Griffin's piece centers on his experience in 2009 attending a party Sterling throws every year, known as the "White Party" because everything in the house was white. ("White tents. White umbrellas. White cloth. I showed up in all white. Everyone showed up in all white.")
Griffin starts by noting that Sterling "had me by the hand. You know that thing elderly women do where they grab the top of your hand with just their fingers and lead you around? That's what he was doing."
It only got stranger from there, as the former No. 1 pick writes about an encounter with two young women at the party:
"Two blonde models showed up on either side of me. They had clearly been hired for the event. I knew this because they were wearing size XXXX-L Clippers T-shirts tied at the stomach. I looked at Sterling. He had a big dumb grin on his face. I looked at one of the girls, as if to say, "Uhhh, you don't have to do this." She looked back: "Uhhh, yes I do."
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The awkwardness continued for Griffin. He goes on to discuss how Sterling was introducing him to people at the party:
""Everyone, have you met our newest star? This is Blake! He was the number one pick in the entire NBA draft. Number one! Blake, where are you from?"
Then I'd say I was from Oklahoma.
"Oklahoma! And tell these people what you think about LA."
Then I'd say it was pretty cool.
"And what about the women in LA, Blake?"
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Griffin then notes that he didn't try to pull his hand away or leave the party because Sterling "was my boss." He adds, "Ask yourself, how would you react if your boss was doing the same thing to you?"
One of the biggest questions that came up when Sterling was being forced out as owner of the Clippers is why his incident with V. Stiviano seemed to set everyone off when he had been accused of racist behavior many times in the past.
That topic is addressed by Griffin, who says that he did a Google search for Donald Sterling after the Clippers took him in the 2009 draft. He writes the first thing that came up was, "Donald Sterling is a racist," and his "first thought was, Wow this guy is really, really a racist … how is he an owner of an NBA team?"
One incident Griffin talks about came during the 2010-11 season when Sterling was heard heckling Baron Davis, who was a member of the Clippers at the time. Griffin writes no one on the team reacted because that's how it had always been with Sterling and the franchise:
"The incident didn't make SportsCenter. It didn't even make the local papers. If you're wondering how a known racist can own an NBA team without anyone batting an eye, first ask yourself how the owner of an NBA team can scream at his team's best player in front of thousands of people and hundreds of cameras without anyone even caring.
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After the recorded tapes of Sterling talking to Stiviano were made public and he was making media rounds trying to defend his image, Griffin wrote that the interview with Anderson Cooper—when Sterling proclaimed his players "love" him—turned into a comedic moment. Griffin and Chris Paul "looked at one another from across the room and just tried our best not to laugh."
The final part of Griffin's piece is about Ballmer and how different he is, and how different things are compared to Sterling's tenure:
"Ballmer wants to win no matter the cost. Donald Sterling didn't care if we won — at least if it meant he had to spend money. It wasn't just about spending money on players. For years, our training staff wanted to buy this sophisticated computer software that would let them scan our bodies and keep track of our progress throughout the season. Sterling wouldn't sign off on it.
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He also wrote that there was a different feeling around the training facility over the summer: "People were smiling. From the security people to the game operations staff to the office staff, everybody seemed happy to be there."
Trying to compare Ballmer to Sterling, Griffin said the former is "a cool dad who gives you candy" and the latter was "like a weird uncle."
Everyone outside the Clippers organization had formed an opinion on Sterling. Whether it was the result of the Stiviano tapes, years of running a franchise into the ground or any of the other allegations brought against him, it's evident players knew how they felt about Sterling.
To hear some of the horror stories going on behind the scenes from the Clippers' biggest star provides a whole different perspective.
It makes you wonder how in the world Sterling was able to keep a franchise alive, however bad the product on the court was, for more than 30 years.
The good news, based on Griffin's account, is there's a new energy around the franchise. That can mean more than any player a team might acquire.
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