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| Growing up in North Carolina when he was young, Michael Jordan was pretty upset over how his family was treated during them days of Jim Crow. |
The Donald Sterling controversy is slowing calming down. The LA Clippers have advance to the finals. They ended the Golden State Warriors chances last week. Now they're taking on the Oklahoma City Thunder to advance.
The team has been in the news as of recently. Donald Sterling is their owner. The owner was on the phone with his mistress and I guess she recorded him making a racist tirade against Blacks. The NBA laid the hammer on Sterling. They banned him from every NBA game for life.
This is has pleased a majority of the fans and players of the sport. They believe that there's no place for racism, homophobia and religious discrimination in the NBA.
Legends had spoken out about the controversy. Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley and even Air Jordan (aka 23 or His Airness) had spoken out.
Michael Jordan.
He's a god among the basketball faithful.
The legendary NBA star is in a featured biography about his life growing up in North Carolina.
One reveling part of his autobiography was the apparent dislike of White people.
"Michael Jordan: The Life," a new biography about the six-time NBA champion by sportswriter Roland Lazenby that hit shelves this week.
NBC News reports that Jordan told Lazenby that he was suspended from school in 1977 after throwing a soda at a girl who called him the N-word.
"So I threw a soda at her," Jordan's quoted as saying. "I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people."
Lazenby told Sports Illustrated that it appeared that the root of Jordan's animosity came from growing up in an area of North Carolina where the Ku Klux Klan once had a large presence.
"I've been to North Carolina hundreds of times and enjoy it tremendously, but North Carolina was a state that had more Klan members than the rest of the Southern states combined," the author said. "As I started looking at newspapers back in this era when I was putting together [Michael's great-grandfather] Dawson Jordan's life, the Klan was like a chamber of commerce. It bought the uniforms for ball teams, it put Bibles in all the schools. It may well have ended up being a chamber of commerce if not for all the violence it was perpetrating, too. A lot of the context just wasn't possible to put it in a basketball book. A lot of it ended up being cut."
Jordan's story is "an economic story," Lazenby continued. "It's a black power story. It doesn't come from politics or protests, it comes right off the Coastal Plain of North Carolina and out of the African-American experience."
"As a former player, I'm completely outraged," the NBA Hall of Famer said. "There is no room in the NBA--or anywhere else--for the kind of racism and hatred that Mr. Sterling allegedly expressed. I am appalled that this type of ignorance still exists within our country and at the highest levels of our sport. In a league where the majority of players are African-American, we cannot and must not tolerate discrimination at any level."
Michael Jordan, the retired six time NBA champ recently got remarried to Yvette Prieto, a model and actress. He divorced his longtime wife Juanita, the mother of his children in 2007.
Michael Jordan is the father of three from Juanita and two from Yvette.
He is the owner of the Charlotte
Bobcats Hornets.
The celebrity couple is apparently breaking up.
