The series finale of Clipped (FX) aired Monday night, to no fanfare. The show, which dramatizes the scandal that led to the unprecedented lifetime ban of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling by the NBA in 2014, is a tragedy of missed opportunities.
It inexplicably contains no footage of the real “Lob City,” arguably the most highlight-friendly sports team of the 21st century. Instead, we are treated to cringe-inducing basketball simulations by actors who are expected to imitate a roster remembered for its athletic freakishness.
Unlike the Ramona Shelburne podcast series upon which the show is loosely based, showrunner Gina Welch chooses to keep Clipped narrowly focused on the Clippers organization, especially its owners and executives. We are treated to only a few flashbacks and no dramatization from inside news agencies, activist groups, fan communities, rival franchises, or, most appalling, the NBA league office. As a result, what makes this event worth revisiting - its causal chain dating back to the 1970s and the seismic effects it has since had on the NBA, professional sports, and the broader culture - is bluntly stated, but not really shown.
These flaws are so glaring that one can never lose sight of them despite often snappy dialogue and excellent performances by Ed O’Neill (as Donald Sterling), Jacki Weaver (as Shelly Sterling), Cleopatra Coleman (as V Stiviano), Kelly AuCoin (as Andy Roeser), Yvonne Pearson (as Deja), LaVar Burton (as himself), and especially Laurence Fishburne, whose Doc Rivers is not only an eery impersonation of the legendary coach, but is layered with the actor’s own star text.
Another missed opportunity, which no producer could have foreseen, came with the coincidence of the series concluding on the day the Supreme Court decided Trump v. United States, the grand finale in a string of decisions designed to preserve patriarchy and white supremacy by legalizing kleptocracy.
As Clipped acknowledges through a newspaper draped across Sterling’s nude body in the final episode, the expedited sale of the Clippers to Steve Ballmer concluded during the first wave of protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the police killing of Michael Brown. It was during this stretch in 2014 that Black Lives Matter became a national movement. Ten months later, Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign and with it a politics of ressentiment and whitelash which is now codified into law by the Supreme Court to which he nominated three justices.
As Shelburne shows in “The Sterling Affairs,” the affinities between Trump and Sterling date back to when both were trying to launder their well-earned reputations as urban slumlords into those of Reagan-certified business monsters of the 1980s.
Jay-Z hypothesized on the premiere episode of The Van Jones Show (CNN) in 2018 that Sterling’s lifetime ban was a key event in creating “Donald Trump, the superbug” of “closet racism” among the ownership class. The precedent that they might suffer material consequences, however mild, for racist comments, discriminatory behavior, gendered and racialized harassment, public infidelity, and their “plantation mentality” - as former Clippers GM, Elgin Baylor, memorably put it - was a cross too great for Sterling’s fellow billionaires to bear. In aggregate, they have proven willing to spend any sum, and trample any governing norm, to reassert the immutability of their authority and the presumptiveness of their immunity.
The last episode of Clipped includes dramatization of Sterling’s mid-scandal interview with Anderson Cooper. The show fudges the timeline in order to shoehorn the interview into the finale, rightly presenting it as pivotal. As Shelburne puts it in “The Sterling Affairs,”
If he’d meant to exonerate himself in that interview, Donald Sterling failed in every way imaginable. Any remaining question about what kind of man he was had been answered. There was no saving Donald from the court of public opinion. The owners were not going to vote to save him after this. His fate was sealed.
In Clipped the interview is treated as a catalyst which emboldens his then-estranged wife, Shelly, to exercise a mental incompetence clause in their family trust (through which they owned the Clippers franchise) in order to complete the sale to Ballmer before either the NBA can put the team up for auction or Donald can mount lawsuits against her and the league.
In reality, the interview was also what provoked Shelly to a temporary separation, theatrically waving divorce papers before Barbara Walters in her own competing interview (the couple is still married), and then to take control of the sale of the Clippers from the NBA, citing her co-ownership rights, lack of culpability for Donald’s sins, and relative public approval.1
But in both Clipped and “The Sterling Affairs,” the choice is made to focus on only a tiny portion of the Anderson Cooper 360° interview which, according to Cooper, lasted more than an hour, aired over the course of multiple episodes, and covered a range of (admittedly disjointed) topics.
In Clipped, Shelly’s fictional friend, Justine (played by Harriet Sansom Harris), who often acts as a kind of audience surrogate, says of Donald’s performance, “I think he’s saying exactly what he means, but he is unaware that he is saying it to all of America.”
That seems right. It was a rare glimpse inside the mind of a plutocrat, unrestrained by handlers or intermediaries, openly acknowledging the implicit promise which he believed post-Fordist America had made to him, that his accumulation would wholly insulate him from public opprobrium, material loss, or the unwelcome consideration of other lives.
“That’s not the way I talk. I don’t talk about people,” Sterling says, after claiming he was “baited” by Stiviano. “I talk about ideas and other things, but I don’t talk about people.” It’s an implausible denial, but possibly an honest one. A business monster does not trouble himself with petty accidents of human sympathy. He admits, “I’ve hurt so many people, so many innocent people,” but also asks repeatedly, “Am I entitled to one mistake?” As if harming people does not count as such.
“I never dreamed this could happen,” says a man who routinely settled housing discrimination and hostile workplace lawsuits. In his worldview, that’s what the money is for, so regardless of what he says or does, he can always pay to make it go away.
What was Sterling’s “one mistake”? Who was he apologizing to? It clearly wasn’t Stiviano, his wife, NBA players, Clippers employees or fans, the Black community, or Magic Johnson. The only explicit apology Sterling makes across the whole interview is “to my partners, I have 29 partners in a league that’s a wonderful league. I respect them and I love every owner and every owner knows me.”
The loyalty Sterling cannot show to his team, his city, or his wife, he can express towards other billionaires. Not only is he confident they are the only ones with any authority to decide his fate, but he promises not to fight their decision in court, because “if I fight with my partners, at the end of the road, what do I benefit? Especially at my age, if they fight with me, and they spend millions, and I spend millions, let’s say they win or I win, I just don’t know if that’s important.”
It’s a show of and appeal to class solidarity. Retaining that class solidarity is more important, and the potential loss of it more to be feared, than public humiliation, divorce, banishment, or even encroaching death. What matters, above all, is that power continues to reside where it currently resides. In service of that solidarity, he will give according to his ability. And, in the intervening decade, his comrades have given according to theirs.
In both Clipped and “The Sterling Affairs,” Shelly Sterling comes across as the true business monster, securing a record-breaking price (and 16,000% return on the Sterlings’ original investment), as well as lots of ancillary perks for herself, despite numerous impediments from her husband and the league.