Nothing beats watching a billionaire eat filth in public, unless the chefs and waiters at Maison De Merde are all billionaires too. And so it is that Steve Ballmer's semi-abject capitulation to reality, and to the penalty he was handed in the face of overwhelming evidence of salary cap contravention in the guise of botanical fraud, arrives without either the proper level of humiliation or the burn-down-the-village revenge that would have satisfied us all infinitely more. The fun was in the extremes. The middle road stinks. No one pines for the inevitable.
Yet, there it was, conveniently dumped on an NFL Sunday night where only those people who were sick of Giants-Cowboys but couldn't yet fall asleep were paying attention. Ballmer took the knee with just a hint of middle finger behind the back, proclaiming that least defensible of legal positions, "I'm clean but I'll do the time anyway."
Beyond who the hell follows the Clippers on Twitter, let alone Ballmer himself, this statement raises the question of who might be satisfied by this. Ballmer would not or could not admit guilt or swear blood oaths against everyone who has wronged him. It was grossly dissatisfying, and left everyone who still cares about this story draw our own conclusions.
Here is one:
Ballmer is awfully dim for a guy with that much money.
And here is another:
Ballmer is awfully rich to hatch such a transparently harebrained scheme instead of hiring people who would at least cover their tracks better.
Either one can frolic comfortably in the playground of our minds. Whatever the case, this was a sensational cock-up with a dismal payoff, all done in the service of destroying the Lakers' hold on Southern California. It is an obvious irony that would naturally be less funny to Ballmer himself that all he actually had to do was sit back and wait for the Buss family of Hooterville to do that themselves.
Still, there is something disheartening about encountering a man of such wealth who won't listen to his lawyers until it's way too late. To think that Ballmer might have just bailed because he was beaten or bored, or because his kids were tired of seeing Pablo Torre YouTube clips—well, that's no ending at all.
It is inarguably true, though, that this is the most Clippertastic end to this scheme to discredit all schemes. All illegalities and tackiness aside, it is extremely Clipperific to scheme the organization into forfeiting five years of normal rebuilding in exchange for five unremarkable and largely pissed-away years that only reinforced the sheer Clipperhood of it all.
There's a win in this, improbably. It just isn't one any Clippers fan would want. For all the money and talent applied to solving the NBA's longest-running problem, the Clippers finally are actually, definitively, comprehensively worse than the Sacramento Kings on general eptitude. This is just how it is for them, now—Sunday night Twittergrams from Invertebrate Stevie announcing more in sorrow than in anger that he will be assuming the position while pretending to be an innocent victim of circumstances, and as many years of Brandon Ingram as is feasible. The Cleveland Browns went out with more dignity, and they paid Deshaun Watson over the table where everyone could laugh in real time. They'd kill for an Aspiration-type deal, actually, but only if the definition of "aspiration" they were using was the medical one.
In the end, Ballmer looked within and found the strength to do the craven, half-hearted thing. He bowed to his financial inferiors while admitting nothing, and maintaining control of an organization that now feels as doomed as it has since he bought it from its previous owner. If we had known it was going to go this way, we might have preferred Bill Gates had swindled Ballmer out of his piece of Microsoft back in 2000.
Instead of playacting like any other humiliated-but-unashamed billionaire owner, Gates might have made a more concerted run at ruining the Lakers, or at least helped facilitate the Buss heirs' destruction by introducing them to Tom Dundon. Gates might have come up with the Aspiration scheme too, but he might have just as likely gotten crosseyed drunk at some seafood joint in Seattle and given the team away to UNICEF on a dare. Either of those we could have respected. This? Feh, with oak leaf clusters.
