The sad-sibling story of LA’s other team

In baseball’s two-team towns, there’s often been a sad-sibling syndrome.
It’s been the YANKEES and the mets in New York, the DODGERS and the angels in Los Angeles. Other sad siblings ran away from home, looking for love elsewhere; ask fans of the Boston Braves, Philadelphia A’s, St. Louis Browns or New York Giants.
And in pro basketball? Los Angeles has the Lakers and the Clippers, now with opposite TV series: “Winning Time: The Rise of the Laker Dynasty” had fun, flash, magic and Magic; Hulu’s “Clipped” (ahown here) — Tuesdays, starting June 4 — has a grimmer view.
That starts in 2013, with Donald Sterling thriving.. “This guy was the largest residential landlord in Los Angeles County for decades,” Ramona Shelburne, a journalist covering him, told the Television Critics Association. “He (owned) half of Beverly Hills.”
Still, she said, he was envious. He had arranged the apartment-building sale that gave his friend Jerry Buss enough money to buy the Lakers. At that point, “he’s an attendee at The Forum Club all the time. He wants that life; he wants to be Jerry Buss.”
So he bought the San Diego Clippers in 1981 and soon defied the league by moving them to Los Angeles … where he became the sad sibling.
The Lakers were already in the “Winning Time” era. In a 12-year stretch (the Magic/Kareem era), they reached the NBA finals nine times, winning five of them. Later, from 1999-2010, the Kobe/Shaq era reached the finals six times, winning five.
As the Lakers soared, the Clippers floundered. There were six seasons in which they won less than 20 games out of 82; once, they finished 12-70.
Then it all changed. “They were doing everything right,” Shelburne said. “They get a reputable coach in Doc Rivers; they get Blake Griffith, who’s a bona fide superstar. They get (point guard) Chris Paul (and shooter) JJ Redick.”
Even without Rivers and Redick, they finished 56-26. The next year, they were 57-25 – 30 games above the slumping Lakers. And then? “Just as it feels like it’s coming together,” producer Nina Jacobson said, “this tape comes and blows it all up.”
On the eve of his 80th birthday, a tape was released of Sterling ranting at V. Stiviano, a bi-racial beauty in her early 30s, who was his assistant and girlfriend. Infuriated that she’d posted her photo with Magic Johnson, Sterling ranted that she spent too much time with Blacks and told her to “not bring them to my games.”
Race and roots had always been a factor for Sterling. The son of Jewish immigrants, he was a bright lawyer who was rejected by all the big law firms, said Ed O’Neill, who plays him. “He was a product of racism himself as a young man.”
(O’Neill is shown here, with Jacki Weaver, as Sterling’s wife, ad Cleopatra Coleman, as Stiviano.)
He was 25 when he and his wife Shelly change their name from Tokowitz to Sterling.
“Shelly was running most of that real estate,” Weaver said. “She’s the strength …. She outsmarts and outwits all those guys.”
But eventually she couldn’t save her husband, who was banned from the NBA.
“For a league that is majority Black,” said writer-producer Rembert Browne, “it’s an important story to relive …. This is what it’s like to be Black in a white space.”