Europe’s Donald Sterling – Lithuanian Team President: ‘Teams Should Be Limited To Two Black Players, Or They’ll Form A Gang’

Three years ago, TMZ Sports released a recording of a conversation between Clippers owner Donald Sterling and his mistress, in which he said:

 

“It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. You can sleep with black people. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is … not to bring them to my games”.

This led to Sterling being banned from the league for life and fined $2.5 million, the maximum fine allowed by the NBA constitution.

Now, three years later, Europe’s Basketball faces a similar scandal. The president of the Lithuanian team BC Lietuvos Rytas, Gedvydas Vainauskas had a very racist statement about how his team should be constructed. He said:

“We’ve always held a stance that there shouldn’t be more than two black players on the team. What happened was that coach Tomas Pacesas likes to play with black players — to control them, to teach them, to tutor them — and we ended up with four players that are black. All of a sudden, they came together to form … how should I put it … a sort of a gang. It cannot be that way; no more than two black players — I can say that from my 23 years of experience in the business. Teams, don’t ever have more than two black players … (smiles) Because that’s when bad things start to take place.”

Euroleague Basketball issued a statement saying he will be disciplined.

 

“Euroleague Basketball wishes to clarify the following: by no means do these words represent neither the sport of basketball, the European basketball family nor the Euroleague Basketball organisation at any level. On the contrary, European basketball has always been and will continue being an example of integration on and off the court, where cultures, races and religions have always come together under one passion, the sport of basketball.”