With Sterling gone, do sports owners now need to tread carefully?

Vince Lombardi was a racist? Do tell.

 

Lee Remmel would tell stories about walking to practice and hearing Lombardi yelling the N-word from blocks away.

 

I think it's just cultural. If sports are a reflection of society, how could it not be? That's why I believe it took so long for universities in the south to accept racial minorities, why the stuff Jackie Robinson endured in the 1940s was the way it was.

I think those attitudes and beliefs still exist, they've just been sort of shamed into the closet by the political correctness movements.

 

I always heard the stories of Lombardi being one of the first to have whites and blacks room together in training camp and on the road, changing hotels the team had stayed at for years if they were white-only hotels and expected black team members to stay elsewhere, and barring his entire team from restaurants and bars on the road that would not serve blacks.

I don't know if it was the NFL Network special or the Maranis book (or both), but there was a passage where a black player had a white girlfriend/fiancee, and they were trying to keep it quiet because the NFL and society wasn't looking favorably on such unions, and Lombardi came out in public in support of them.

 

How did we get this far without mentioning Irsay? If he were to come out with some anti-gay or racist rant while in one of his stupors, I would bet the NFL would act just as swiftly. But I think history does play a role in how harsh a penalty would be if an owner said something controversial. I don't think the average owner is watching what he/she says or does any more than they were already.

 

Ty Cobb (wasn't he a player/coach at one time?)

 

How many no black, no Jew country clubs do we still have in America today? How many owners sit on high ranking boards inside these clubs?

 

With those they can pretend they didn't know. They'd be full of shit, but in most instances we can't prove that they knew.

I think you need audio or video proof for something like this to happen again.

 

All these other political things aren't issues because 80 percent of the NBA's employees aren't gay, or liberal, or Tea Party, or whatever. Sterling's statements weren't political. They were personal, wrong and so out of step with the times that you couldn't ignore them.

 

Agree completely.

 

I agree as well. I was just stating things the NBA would probably not punish but would get the airwaves blistering with traffic.

 

Why are we talking about them in the past tense?

They still perform, right?

BTW, I think they actually have had at least three white players.