Arsenio Hall mounts Indiegogo campaign to buy L.A. Clippers

Arsenio Hall is making good on his talk about buying the L.A. Clippers from Donald Sterling. Sort of.

The host of “The Arsenio Hall Show” announced on his show Monday that he was launching a crowd-funded campaign on Indiegogo to raise the cash to buy the team. (Hall’s show is produced by Tribune Co., which also owns The Times.)

Sterling, the current owner of the Clippers, has been banned from the NBA for life after the airing of racial comments he made on an audio recording.

The only catch of the Indiegogo campaign is that Hall is looking to raise $1 billion. Even the biggest crowd-funded projects to date have managed to raise in the neighborhood of $10 million. So don’t hold your breath for an Arsenio Hall-owned basketball team.

That doesn’t mean any contributions will go to waste. If he doesn’t hit the billion-dollar mark, Hall says, the money donated will be given to the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. The head of the NAACP’s Los Angeles chapter resigned in early May after controversy surrounding the chapter’s plan to give Sterling an achievement award.

High-level contributors to Hall’s campaign will get perks, such as the opportunity to write jokes for Hall’s monologue, get their names tattooed (temporarily) on Hall’s back or even be his talk-show sidekick for a night. That last perk will cost you $100,000.

In a statement on Indiegogo page, Hall admitted, “I know one billion dollars is a lot of money. For me. For Jay-Z it’s just a good week at the office.”

On Monday, the NBA announced it had begun the process of terminating Sterling’s ownership of the team. Sterling has also been fined $2.5 million, which he has said he will contest.

“We’ll do this together,” Hall told his audience Monday night. “We’ll end racism. Kind of. Not really.”