The NBA banned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling from professional basketball for life on Tuesday and fined him $2.5 million in an unprecedented rebuke for racist comments that drew outrage from players, fans, commercial sponsors and even President Barack Obama, according to the Associated Press.
Sterling, 80, the longest-tenured owner of any of the 30 National Basketball Association teams, will be barred from any role in the operations of his franchise or from serving as one of the league's governors, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told a news conference in New York, the AP reported.
Obama, the first black U.S. president, called Sterling's comments "incredibly offensive racist statements," according to the AP.
Silver also urged the other owners to vote to force Sterling to sell the Clippers, a first-time use of such a sanction that would require approval of three-quarters of the current owners, according to the AP.
Asked whether Sterling could end up as essentially an absentee owner if the league fails to force a sale of the team, Silver replied, "I fully expect to get the support I need from the other NBA owners to remove him," the AP reported.
The controversy, which quickly grew into a national discussion of race relations transcending basketball, began over the weekend when the celebrity website TMZ.com released an audio recording with a voice said to be Sterling's, criticizing a woman friend for associating with "black people," according to the AP.
In it, he asks her not to invite former Los Angeles Lakers star Earvin "Magic" Johnson to Clippers games, the AP report. "The views expressed by Mr. Sterling are deeply offensive and harmful," Silver said as he confronted his first major crisis since he was named commissioner in February.
An investigation concluded the male voice on the recording, and on a second recording said to be from the same conversation and made public on Sunday, was Sterling's, Silver told reporters, according to the AP. He said Sterling confirmed it was his voice but did not apologize.
Silver said he felt "personally distraught that the views expressed by Mr. Sterling came from within" a league at the forefront of racial integration in American sports and where most of the players are black, the AP reported.
