The Soul of Adam Silver.

I have been estranged from my own country since the Fall of 2012: First, Benghazi, then a one-two punch, Egypt and the Snowden revelations on NSA. Obama had made me proud to be an American, now he made me estranged from him, who I thought I knew, and from America. America was being eaten from the inside and its soul was being consumed and mutated. A week ago Saturday was another hammer blow. I was so sad. Sick. It made me light-headed. And then Adam Silver Lining. He made me proud to be an American again. This is Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News:

Here was Adam Silver, new commissioner of the NBA, one who has officially been on the job for three months, showing you that there is never any job experience required to do the right thing, to offer the kind of character and clarity and anger and purpose he showed on Tuesday afternoon in banning Donald Sterling, the racist owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, for life.

In so doing, Silver provided one of the great moments we have gotten lately in professional sports in this country. You saw it from the very start of his press conference on this day, you could hear the quiet fury in Silver’s voice and see it in his bearing as he spoke right away of how it was Donald Sterling’s voice on that tape, that the “hateful opinions” were indeed Sterling’s.

Then Silver called those views “deeply offensive and harmful,” and spoke of his “personal outrage,” and how he was “personally distraught.” This was not the lawyer in Silver speaking to this room of media people and to the country, this was the humanity in the man laid bare for everybody watching him to see.

Then Silver did what the players of his league and the fans of his league and most of his owners wanted him to do, delivered the message the country wanted to hear:

“I am banning Mr. Sterling for life.”

Silver talked after that about how he will urge the other owners to provide him with the three-quarters vote that will force Sterling to sell the Clippers.

“I have their full support,” Adam Silver said.

And ours on Tuesday afternoon. He had ours.

Silver prosecuted Sterling for what he said on that tape that ended up in the hands of TMZ over the weekend. He prosecuted him for his hideous and hateful beliefs about not just the African-Americans on his basketball team but every African-American who listened to those comments or read about them. He prosecuted Sterling for his old man’s attack on decency and fair-mindedness.

Maybe Sterling thought views like his, up and out of the gutter, are somehow still acceptable because of his experience, in his America. Just not Adam Silver’s.
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We constantly wonder how sports fits in our society, even in a country where Jack Roosevelt Robinson did not just change baseball by running out to first base at Ebbets Field one April afternoon in 1947, but changed the country as well. 
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This all played out in real time, over these past few days when this kind of angry storm blew across the NBA and blew through every news cycle the way it did. But in the center of it was Silver, showing you his own character...
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One of those watching Silver on Tuesday was Kimba Wood a federal judge now on senior status for the U.S. District Court in the Southern District, for whom Silver clerked as a young man.
“He was always this brilliant,” Kimba Wood said.

Silver showed you that on Tuesday when asked a question about Sterling’s right to express these 
kinds of view in a private conversation, as if somehow he was the one whose civil rights had been violated because of what he thought was a private conversation.

“They are now public,” Silver said, spitting out his words. “And represent his views.”
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You wondered how Adam Silver would stand up on this day. Everybody found out.There have been so many great moments in the NBA playoffs so far this season, so many moments to remember. Never one better or more important than this.

If Sterling is going to come after this lawyer with lawyers of his own, he better bring an army.