Shelly Sterling: “He’s happy about selling the team now."
Ramona Shelburne: Huh?”
Shelly Sterling: Yes. He tells a lot of people. He says, ‘You know, I had to sell the team, but I feel like I fell off a tree and I landed on a pile of gold.’”
ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne released a ’30 For 30’ podcast earlier this week called ‘The Sterling Affairs’ which detailed one of the biggest scandals in sports history, when a racist audio recording of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was leaked by one of Sterling’s mistresses.
The woman, V. Stiviano, recorded a conversation she was having with Sterling without his knowledge, that revealed an angry Sterling furious at the woman for ‘associating with black people’ after she was photographed with NBA icon Magic Johnson at a Clippers game, and then griped to the woman ‘The little I ask you is to not bring them to my games.’”
The audio was sold to TMZ and instantly became one of the biggest news stories of 2014.
Sterling would later receive an unprecedented lifetime ban from new NBA commissioner Adam Silver and forced to sell the franchise he had owned since 1981.
Shelbourne, one of the most recognizable faces at ESPN, put together a five-part podcast documenting the entire saga and the fallout that it perpetuated.
One of the most notable admissions from the piece was Donald Sterling’s wife, Shelly, telling Shelbourne that her husband Donald is he’s now ‘happy’ he was forced to sell the team, and added “He says, 'You know, I had to sell the team, but I feel like I fell off a tree and I landed on a pile of gold.’”
Sterling had bought the Clippers (then in San Diego) for $12.5 million and would then sell the team to Microsoft co-founder Steve Ballmer for $2 billion.
ESPN’s Marc Spears commented on the podcast "I mean, I don’t feel sorry for Donald Sterling. Some people may say he got the last laugh” And former Clippers star Blake Griffin told Shelborne “At the end of the day they got two billion dollars, so is it a win? Is it a loss?”
In 2014, it was announced that Sterling was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
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