On Sports: A Legacy of Defeat
The voice on the telephone exuded bewilderment. "I've lived a fortunate life," Donald Sterling was saying. "As a trial lawyer I generated a good income. I got into real estate and, thanks to inflation and this wonderful country we live in, everything I owned went up tenfold. I have a wonderful family, wonderful friends. But this basketball team of mine..."</br></br>Mr. Sterling didn't finish the thought because he didn't have to. Everybody knows about the Los Angeles Clippers, the basketball team he bought in 198l. The Clippers are famous for failure, a club that defies the so-called law of averages by being bad year in and year out.</br></br>Other teams also do that, but not with the Clippers' obduracy. They were bad last year, when their 9-41 won-lost record was the worst in the National Basketball Association's Pacific Division, and second-worst overall. They were bad the year before, at 17-65. They've had exactly one winning season in the 17 in which Mr. Sterling has owned them, and not many more in the years before that, when he didn't.</br></br>They have some good young players this season, but, as everybody knows, it takes more than good young players to win in the NBA, and their record through Wednesday was 10-24, good (or bad) for sixth place in their seven-team division. They've won but one playoff series in their franchise's 30-year history, in 1976, and aren't likely to add to that total this year.</br></br>The Clippers have been good for a couple of things, neither of which professional-sports teams like to claim as distinctions. One is for ticket availability: Even in the new Staples Center, which they and their NBA citymates, the Lakers, occupy jointly, the Clippers are averaging 6,000 empty seats a game, about the same number as they had at their former home at the old Sports Arena (the Lakers generally sell out). The other is as a source of jokes. "Los Angeles has everything," the comedian Arsenio Hall has remarked. "If you like basketball, there's the Lakers. If you don't, there's the Clippers."