The most unsettling part of a culture of no accountability in 2022 America – across business, politics, and most recently sports – is how swiftly it drags the Overton window even further from what’s acceptable.
It feels like thirty years ago (it was eight) when Donald Sterling, multibillion owner of the Clippers, was forced into selling the team by Adam Silver, legal technicalities involving his wife, and an army of players who threatened to sit out games rather than share a room with him.
Fast forward eight years later. This week, Adam Silver suspended Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver for a year for essentially the same crime committed by Sterling but super-sized: multiple instances of the N word, a slew of sexual harassment claims, and menacing his employees. He was issued a fine of $10 million along with the suspension.
So to recap: Sterling had a lifetime ban and was stripped of his team. Sarver gets a year off and a tax write-off.
I’m not going to share any other articles except the best take on why the NBA’s response is a mess but was perceived “better” than others. David Aldridge’s piece in The Athletic is a case study in calling out the shift of what we’ve come to expect.
At least, in this case, there was a written report — unlike the NFL’s weak tea doled out in 2021 to Commanders’ owner Daniel Snyder, after an outside investigation corroborated claims of years of verbal and sexual toxicity directed toward female employees at Snyder’s company, by several of his subordinates. The year-long investigation did not even produce an actual white paper from the investigator, with the NFL hiding behind the ludicrous excuse that it was trying to protect the privacy of the women who’d come forward to tell their stories.
Snyder, personally, was not held responsible for any of it — the league’s statement said “the team” was fined $10 million, as if there was some nameplate in an office somewhere at the Commanders’ headquarters in Virginia that read “T.H. Team, Proprietor.” And the NFL never used the word “suspension” in announcing that Snyder’s wife, Tanya, would assume day-to-day responsibilities for the team “for at least the next several months,” while Dan Snyder would “concentrate on a new stadium plan and other matters.”
The Athletic
In a professional sports culture that’s now forced to compare Donald Sterling, Daniel Snyder, and Robert Sarver, the expectation shifted from “Are we justifiably banning behavior that stokes a racist workplace” to “Will they even get a suspension?”
Aldridge continues:
Sterling had a history of making racist statements, and reached a settlement in 2009 with the Department of Justice to quash a housing discrimination lawsuit filed by Black and Brown residents of his apartment building — a settlement that was, at the time, the largest settlement reached by DOJ for such a lawsuit in its history. But the league knew about all of that prologue and made no move against him until the 2014 tape came to light.
The league knew.
You have to ask: More and more leaders aren’t held accountable for open racism. If the Overton window’s moving in the wrong direction in the “healthiest” professional sports league in the U.S., how else is that lack of accountability manifesting itself?