No Sale. So says Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling who has pulled his support from a deal to sell the team to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He will pursue his $1 billion federal lawsuit against the NBA, his attorney said Monday.
"I have decided that I must fight to protect my rights," Sterling said. "While my position may not be popular, I believe that my rights to privacy and the preservation of my rights to due process should not be trampled. I love the team and have dedicated 33 years of my life to the organization. I intend to fight to keep the team."
As I mentioned in a previous post Sterling's lawyer, Maxwell Blecher, is not your run-of-the-mill ambulance chaser. His specialty is anti trust law and the NBA is a trust in every legal sense of the term. It has no guarantees of immunity as does organized baseball. Yes, it is time to have a national conversation not on race- it's been talked to death-but about the anti trust status of the NBA, the NFL, and the NCAA, and the bundling of cable television programming. ESPN extracts about $6 from every cable subscriber even if he never watches an ESPN channel. The sport trusts are extracting money from all cable subscribers. They and the government regulated cable industry should follow the same laws as Apple and GM.
Damn Sterling's rights. What about the television viewing public?
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