Clippers May Be on the Verge of a Sterling Image

You’re Donald Sterling, financier, and your basketball team is the equivalent of junk bonds. It looks good on paper but not on court.

You’re second banana in a town where top billing is everything. The star system was invented here. The hero’s best friend gets a seat by the kitchen in the better restaurants. The maitre d’ at the Polo Lounge doesn’t even know you.

Your team is the butt of jokes:

“L.A. has everything,” Arsenio Hall boasts. “If you like basketball, there’s the Lakers. If you don’t like basketball, there’s the Clippers.”

That’s your team, the Clippers. The guys in the baggy pants and the lens-less glasses squirting seltzer bottles and leering at chorus girls. The team belongs in Minsky’s, not the National Basketball Assn.

The Clippers won 12 whole games in 1986-87. They got all the way up to 17 last season. They really didn’t need the basketball. They weren’t going to do anything with it. Except, possibly, turn it over at the first opportunity. Business Week, no less, identified them as a “full-court mess.”

You’re not used to this. Your business deals usually work out better than this. Beverly Hills is probably the richest six square miles in the universe, and you own about 20% of it. But your team plays in the dilapidated Sports Arena. Jack Nicholson and Dyan Cannon don’t go there. On some nights, hardly anybody else does, either.

Your team would have to improve to be described as struggling. The truth of the matter is, your players don’t even appear to be struggling. They look like guys going to the electric chair some nights.

The Lakers are glamour, the Clippers are comedy. You yourself are a very proper man. You go everywhere in a dark double-breasted suit. In a town where executives always try to look as if they just got off a surfboard or are on their way to a disco, you look more like Calvin Coolidge. A friend once said you’d go fishing in a wing collar. And shoes.

You were raised in East L.A., so you know the value of a buck. Also what it means to be poor. The Clippers are the only thing you ever lost money at in your life, $10 million since you brought them to L.A. But you don’t sell. You don’t sell anything, particularly any California real estate, even the Clippers.

You don’t understand basketball players and the arts and mysteries of being an owner. You hire a living legend, Elgin Baylor, who almost re-invented the art of basketball in his playing days, to run the operation for you. But nothing prepares you--or him--for a 7-foot center who has all the tools but who has trouble keeping interested some nights.

And then, one night, one of your high-priced second-year men, Reggie Williams, a Georgetown star recommended by his coach, John Thompson himself, refuses to go into a game.

There’s nothing wrong with him--feet, hands, heart and lungs are all right. He just doesn’t feel like playing. We all know the feeling, of course. There are days you hate to go to the office. But this guy is getting $800,000 to go to the office.

You’re not a man to get angry. You don’t get ahead in business losing your temper. But a sports team is supposed to be like the Marines. You follow orders. When the sergeant says, “Take that hill,” you don’t say, “Get somebody else.” On the Clippers, you do.

You move the team out of San Diego because in San Diego, they write their Congressman if you raise the parking fees by $1--or the seats by $2. In L.A., they send your wife roses if you only raise the fees by $1. You estimate you gained a million dollars a mile by moving north to L.A. The potential take improved to $100 million.

The league fights you on the move. You fight back. The league doesn’t have a law to stand on. The Oakland Raiders move and a federal court rules multimillion-dollar damages against the league for trying to stop them.

But you don’t want to fight the league. You just want to move to L.A. Why not? Half the U.S. is there already.

But the suit drags on. Until the league commissioner comes up with an ingenious solution. Expansion--there will be four new franchises--is going to bring about $130 million to the league, or about $6 million a franchise. Why not waive your rights to that $6 million and the hostilities will cease, the move will be sanctioned?

You agree with alacrity because, even to win out eventually, will be a Pyrrhic victory, given the ongoing costs of the litigation.

So you’re at the crossroads now. When your team beat the Lakers the other night, the town reacted as if you had changed water into wine. But the Lakers looked a little uneasy to some. Something was gaining on them.

It’s always the Lakers. This is their town. The Laker owner gets in “Who’s Who.” You make the phone book.

But the Lakers aren’t going to be the Lakers with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar gone. He upgrades them psychologically. He’d be an intimidating force even in a wheelchair.

You’re Donald Sterling and you’ve got your chance. The Lakers may have nobody to bring the ball up to next year. They might leave the town up for grabs. It’s a heady thought. You can get rich owning Beverly Hills. You can get famous owning a championship. One’s no fun without the other.