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With the Donald Sterling situation in the process of being fully dealt with by NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the entire conglomerate of NBA team owners, Doc Rivers feels a bit more inclined to speak on his true feelings over how Sterling's racist rant affected both him and his players during their first round series with the Golden State Warriors.
In an interview with ESPN's Michael Wilbon, Rivers opened up on what it was like to deal with such a disturbing situation from a team perspective: "This was a distraction," Rivers stated, via ESPN.com.
"The first [team] meeting after this came out ... when I looked at [the players'] faces, they were angry, they wanted to DO something. ... As a coach, I had to think about it. I'm not going to kid you, I walked out with my [Clippers] gear on, because I need the players to see me with the gear on, but it wasn't easy to wear the gear on that day. Because at that moment, you're representing something else, and that was hard."
Rivers has made it quite clear that the Clippers aren't "America's Team" in the wake of the class and honor they showed in the face of adversity created by Sterling -- but as a child of interracial marriage, Rivers felt touched enough to share an immensely personal viewpoint on the racial divide which Sterling's comments both magnified and helped to bridge on some levels:
"I grew up in the '60s as a child at Proviso East [High School], which was on "60 Minutes" in the '60s because of racial acts," Rivers said to Wilbon. "... And the blacks walked one one side and the whites walked one the other side and they were throwing stuff back and forth. And I used to sit there and watch them do it and think, what are they mad at it."
"I remember asking my dad, 'What are they mad at' and he used to say, 'They don't know. They just don't know.' "