Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban: 'We All Have Our Prejudices and Bigotries'
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is a guy who, in the parlance of our times, likes to shoot from the hip.
In a recent interview with The Tennessean's Shelley DuBois, however, Cuban somehow managed to take a six-shooter and blast himself in the foot seven times.
On whether or not he will vote to oust Clippers owner Donald Sterling: You'll find out. I know how I'm going to vote, but I'm not ready to comment on it.
On how to keep bigotry out of the NBA: You don't. There's no law against stupid.
On stupidity in general: I'm the one guy who says don't force the stupid people to be quiet - I want to know who the morons are.
On bigotry in general: I know I'm prejudiced and I know I'm bigoted in a lot of different ways. If I see a black kid in a hoodie on my side of the street, I'll move to the other side of the street. If I see a white guy with a shaved head and tattoos, I'll move back to the other side of the street. None of us have pure thoughts, we all live in glass houses.
We might as well tackle all these in order.
According to ESPN.com, NBA owners will convene on June 3 for a hearing to decide the fate of disgraced Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling.
While it's widely expected that Commissioner Adam Silver will receive the 22 votes necessary to bar Sterling for life from any official association with the league, Cuban's above-quoted comments suggest he may well buck the trend and vote in Sterling's favor.
All the same, this could be a simple case of mistaken semantics.
It's true there is no law-local, federal or otherwise-outlawing stupidity per se. At the same time, Silver's gambit was never really about the law, so much as a statement about what kind of league he intends to steward going forward.
Therefore, Cuban could well side with those looking to ban Sterling, without it necessarily compromising his core, decidedly libertarian stance.
Or, Cuban's comments could portend a vote cast more according to his underlying political philosophy than how he feels about Sterling personally.
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Which is what makes his final remarks about the 'black kid in a hoodie' so fascinating: In making the self-aware observation that he too is, in fact, prejudiced, Cuban might be hinting that, for him anyway, all of this falls squarely in the realm of the First Amendment-not only that Sterling has the right to say the things he said, but that we as consumers have the right to purchase his product or not.
It's also, you know, pretty racist. And quite odd, given how jarringly it evokes Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teen who was shot and killed in 2012 by neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman, sparking one of the most polarizing murder trials in recent American history.
Contrarian though he prides himself on being, Cuban clearly could've chosen his words more carefully here.
Don't expect the fallout from that remark to subside any time soon.
Back to Sterling for a minute.
In his stunningly succinct synopsis of Sterling's legal strategy, Basketball Insiders' Nate Duncan lays out a sobering case for why the embattled Clippers owner may have backed him self into an inescapable corner:
In layman's terms, the league's decision gets treated by the courts as if the two parties already went to arbitration and the arbitrator ruled. When that happens, there is very limited recourse for the losing party. Sterling would have to argue one of four things: 1) there was corruption, fraud or misconduct in procuring the award, (2) partiality (i.e. bias) of the arbitrator, (3) the arbitrator exceeded his power, perhaps by showing a 'manifest disregard for the law,' or (4) the award violates public policy. It is hard to see how Sterling might argue the decision falls into any of these exceptions, and even if he could the practical reality is that arbitration awards are almost never overturned.
What Cuban's vote could represent, then, is less a criticism of the NBA for overstepping its bounds than an act of political conscience.
Then again, this is Mark Cuban we're talking about here. Would it really surprise you if he showed up to the hearing wearing warpaint and menacingly waving a machete in Sterling's general direction?
Me neither.
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