Now that Adam Silver has excised the evil Donald Sterling, the Los Angeles Clippers could be huge for ESPN and TNT.

A deep run in the playoffs likely will mean big ratings for the networks. Instead of being the object for scorn, the Clippers now become a symbol for persevering through blatant racism. They could become the De facto “America’s Team” during the playoffs.

TNT will go all in for tonight’s Game 5 in the Golden State-Clipper series. Both of the NBA’s partners will be pulling hard for the Clippers to win the series.

This story resonates more on a basketball court than in the courtroom. Triumph over adversity always is the most compelling angle. Nothing gets the country more pumped up than rallying for a team or athlete that is trying to get up off the floor.

Also, this story now is so big, it likely will attract non-traditional viewers who hadn’t heard of the Clippers prior to Saturday. They will push the ratings even higher.

So yes, TNT and ESPN would like Doc Rivers’ crew to take care of business tonight and eventually prevail against Golden State.

The dream NBA Final for ABC/ESPN: How about Clippers vs. Miami and LeBron?

Thanks to Phil Barber of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat for including me in a piece about how new and social media helped trigger the events we saw today.

Barber writes:

If this were 1984 or 1994 or maybe even 2004, Sterling’s cringe-inducing words never would have made it to public ears, and he would have been sitting courtside at Oracle Arena in Oakland for Game 4 on Sunday. Thanks to the Internet and social media platforms and the ubiquity of hand-held computers, he became the biggest story of the weekend, and the groundswell of sentiment against him may be too massive to withstand.

And my quotes:

“It came out Saturday, right?” Ed Sherman, who writes about sports media at his site ShermanReport.com, said of the Sterling story. “So then boom, it’s on ESPN the whole day. Then you’ve got TNT (basketball coverage), and those guys get to weigh in, and then all that stuff gets posted … via either social media or YouTube. It all kind of feeds on itself, and you’ve got this big boulder that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it’s rolling right toward Sterling.”

And…

“I wish I had a dime for every time I heard the word ‘allegedly’ in the last two days,” Sherman said. “I’d make a lot of money. (Sports commentator) Stephen A. Smith was on George Stephanopoulos yesterday, and it was just amazing. He’s railing on about this guy, and then every fourth word he had to throw in ‘allegedly.’ ”

There’s also this observation:

“I spend a lot of time discussing what’s wrong with social media, what we shouldn’t be doing, best practices,” said Kerry Rego, a Santa Rosa-based social media consultant, author and instructor. “But I’m a hopeful person, and when I see something amazing and wonderful that social media is a big part of, I spend much of my time discussing that to inspire people in what can be done. Yes, everybody takes photos of their coffee and takes selfies, but they also can change the world with these tools.”

It definitely changed Sterling’s life.

High praise from someone who was pretty good himself at Sports Illustrated. If Gary Smith isn’t the best magazine writer ever, then he is at least in the team picture.

Writes S.L. Price at SI.com in a tribute to Smith:

Smith’s 13 selections in The Best American Sports Writing is a record, as are his four National Magazine Awards. When he won his first, in 1992, for Shadow of a Nation, he beat a stunning piece written for Life — by Gary Smith. All too often the man was competing only with himself.

Smith, 60, has decided to retire from SI and magazine writing, to focus perhaps on books or something entirely different. For the last six years he has taken to going, once or twice a year, on a silent retreat. “Just figuring out how the mind works,” Smith says. “Turn the lamp inward and watch the mind and what it does. We’re just a piece of the universe, and you can start to get a glimpse of how it all works if you can get the mind quiet and still enough.”

Price writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that every sportswriter of a certain ambition and age — let’s say from 20 to 70 — has had a Gary Smith moment. This is not fun. What starts as excitement soon becomes a swirl of puzzlement, awe and surprise; the frantic fluttering of pages forward and back; the parsing of sentences like so much Kremlinalia; some involuntary, half-baked blurts like, “How did he…?” and “Why did no one else…?” — and all of it leads back to you, you sorry bastard, and how you’re never, ever going to write a story like that, so what were you thinking getting into this business in the first place?

Since youth is the time of prime vulnerability, such a moment always hit fresh-faced Hemingways the hardest. Mine came at 23, when Smith’s cover story in the Nov. 18, 1985, issue of Sports Illustrated began like this:

When Dale Brown was nine years old, he set fire to the building where he worked. He didn’t mean to. Something he didn’t understand drove him to strike a match in the furniture warehouse and light the piece of straw sticking out from the leg of a chair. It made him feel fearless and free. Suddenly the chair was in flames and the feeling was gone. He raced into the street unnoticed, up the stairs to the family apartment just a few doors away, and into the bathroom.

He pulled down his pants, sat on the toilet and put his head in his hands, heart hammering, each scream of the sirens. …

Indeed, to read Smith was to take a ride into a place you never had experienced in the pages of a magazine. His long tales and unique style weren’t for everyone, and Price writes, he occasionally had some misses.

But more often than not, you were at once riveted and blown away by what Smith produced.

Sports Illustrated will be tweeting out his best stories today. Here are a few:

Fallen coach George O’Leary.

A cover piece on troubled high school basketball star Richie Parker.

Muhammad Ali’s entourage.

I saw this passage in Bryan Curtis’ piece in Grantland on the media coverage of the Donald Sterling saga.

We have finally blown away the false politeness of the old sports pages. Sports pages weren’t all bad. They could be very good. But they practiced a certain “civility” of speech and they erected Green Monster–sized walls to get news into print (a secretive TMZ recording wouldn’t have passed muster) and they enforced the dreaded “stick to sports” ethos. 

Interesting comment on the TMZ recording and how it wouldn’t have passed muster with newspapers. Curtis, though, is wrong to signal out newspapers here. I have a feeling his home team, ESPN, also would have had some trepidation going with the tape.

Indeed, while watching the coverage yesterday, I struck by the repeated use of  “allegedly” in discussing Sterling by ESPN analysts and elsewhere. Wish I had dime for every time I heard that word.

Even this morning, two days after the story broke, ESPN still was using “purportedly” in its graphic for the story. Check video above.

TMZ, a gossip site, didn’t use “allegedly” in its post. But other outlets were making sure to cover their tracks in case the tape was a fraud. Nobody wants a lawsuit from Mr. Sterling.

It all poses the question of whether more traditional newspaper and network outlets would have gone with this story, given the somewhat uncertainty over the tape. I would think there would be more caution than perhaps what TMZ exhibited.

Listen, TMZ has lawyers too. The outlet had to feel certain knowing they had the goods on Sterling.

Curtis, though, should be reminded that ESPN had the jump on the Manti Te’o story, but the network lost the scoop to Deadspin because it didn’t feel it had everything nailed down.

This is about a lot more than newspapers.

Phil Mushnick takes great pride in playing the role of the contrarian, but really about Donald Sterling?

In his column this morning–and by the way this wasn’t the main topic–he had this passage about the Clippers owner.

Longtime NBA followers, executives, employees and media know Clippers owner Donald Sterling as a moneyed fool. Not a terrible man, but a jerk with dough who likes to show off, pop off and, increasingly, think too late, if at all. He’s someone best — and easily — ignored, especially at 81.

Well, not anymore.

Yes, what he allegedly said was painful, indefensible and inexcusable, except why would we expect him, at 81, to be less loony and more discreet and clear-headed than he was at 75 or 78?

Visit any assisted living facility. Or think of that aunt or uncle all of us have known and suffered with a wince because we knew they were off. And they come in all races.

Not everyone, at 81, should reasonably or humanely be held accountable for whatever ugly comments come out their mouths.

At least keep that in mind.

Well, yeah, there are people who in their 80s say cringe-worthy remarks. However, given that people are living longer than ever, there are many 80-somethings who could run circles over 20-somethings, at least mentally.

Also, most 81-year-olds don’t own a NBA team.

Not sure what Mushnick’s intent is here, but giving Sterling a sliver of an excuse for his outrageous comments isn’t going to go down well. As you would expect, Mushnick is getting hammered on Twitter.

David Feherty has interviewed former presidents (Bill Clinton) and former basketball coaches (Bobby Knight) and some golfers too for Feherty on the Golf Channel.

Tonight’s show (10 p.m. ET) might feature its most compelling guest: Feherty himself. For all the laughs on the outside, Feherty is a highly complicated individual who continues to fight many interior demons on a daily basis.