Travis

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf...

I slept through a colonoscopy today. (Good results; one tiny, harmless-looking polyp in the rectum, don't need to repeat for 5-10 years.)

As anybody who has gone through the procedure knows, the preparation is by far the worst part. The mixture I was given to gag on was called "Golytely", so I thought it would be funny to refer to the whole nightmare as "Breakfast at Tiffany's".

Mother to doctor: Go wash your hands, you never know where they've been,

Doctor: Hey Joe! Come over here and look at the size of these roids!

So Sterling has been given a lifetime ban based entirely on a single secretly-recorded, informal conversation. And recorded by the other person in the conversation as far as I know.

It's just too extreme. Had he said those things in a public forum, fine. But in a private conversation?

Doesn't that sword cut both ways? If you think Sterling should be shielded from the private business consequences of his speech, you're saying to the other 29 NBA owners that they have no choice but to continue to yoke their wagon to this guy, never mind all the terrible publicity and the very real harm it would do to their bottom line. Isn't that constraining *their* freedom of association? Why do the rights of one outweigh the rights of twenty-nine?

"Terrible publicity?" Are the owners beholden to the newspapers?

Let me see: one man is overheard saying something about his girlfriend and what he said can possibly destroy the NBA?

Well, I'm a bit confused on what you think is fair. You said "no action would be fair", which led me to believe that you think the drastic actions taken today and planned for the future are <un>-fair. But now you seem to be saying otherwise.

<"Terrible publicity?" Are the owners beholden to the newspapers?>

Business people overwhelmingly seem to care about their bottom line, yeah. It all depends on the industry. The electronics giant Siemens built gas chambers for the nazis and seventy years on haven't even changed their name (they even tried to market a vacuum called "Zyklon" a decade ago) but for reasons I don't really understand, nobody seems to care. In sports and entertainment though you can't really get away with expressing socially retrograde views. The consumer has a right to spend his dollar on whatever he chooses.

You write "[e]ither we have free speech or we don't" but I wonder how it could possibly be that simple. Leaving aside a legalistic argument about what free speech means, all speech acts have consequences. You seem to be implying that free speech means people can say what they want and not suffer any consequences. Pardon me, but aren't you married?

Suppose Sterling's daughter doesn't call him for a week after the tape gets out. Does that mean we don't have free speech? Suppose his mixed-race weekly men's group tells him he can't come anymore. Would that violate his free speech?

< But while I personally detest what Sterling said on the recording his mistress made, something rubs me the wrong way about the fact that she made it at all and that it was able to get such traction in the media. I’ll tread carefully here because I don’t want to be misconstrued, but it goes like this: When you’re surreptitiously recording someone during a conversation, you have the upper-hand at all times. An argument between two people involved in a romantic relationship can often consist of both sides losing their cool at some point, but Stiviano knew that she couldn’t. She couldn’t say anything that would make her look bad because she knew what Sterling didn’t: that they were being recorded and that those recordings were likely going to end up in the hands of the media.

What wound up happening is that a guy who deserved to be destroyed publicly was destroyed, certainly, but it still seems inherently unfair that what Sterling believed was a private conversation was all-along going to be heard by others eventually, in one way or another.>

But the punishment for words said in private to a non-NBA person is way over line. This shows that the NBA and probably all professional sports team make their decisions based not on what actually happens but on what could happen.