ESPN the Magazine has done a long piece on Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, by far the least successful franchise of the four “major” North American sports.

The profile is interesting on several levels, but these are the two that struck me while reading it:

1. Donald Sterling is even sleazier and cheesier than I imagined. And I didn’t know I could think less of him, but I now do. It’s patently ridiculous for anyone to pull for his Clippers franchise to win anything, because so much of what he does is wrong/bad/amoral/immoral.

Probably a significant fraction of the owners of pro sports teams are bad people, but The Donald seems out there on the far edge of the “loathsome” spctrum.

2. It’s nice to see that long-form journalism survives. Here and there. Despite a few glitches in the version of the story up on espn.com (mostly involving paragraphs breaking at bad spots) … this seems to be a well-researched and well-reported piece of the sort that was a staple of American journalism just a decade ago … but of the sort that now is an endangered form of journalism.

If you don’t have the enthusiasm to read, what, 4,000 words on a bad guy … here’s a precis: Sterling is a racist, sexist slumlord, probably no longer quite sane (in that old rich guy sort of way), who alleges to care about winning but looks at the Clippers as a cash machine, not a potential champion.

Edifying reading, if a bit disturbing.

Oh, and another message: If you’re wealthy enough, you’re eccentric.

Sterling is very, very, uh, eccentric. Trouble? Just something to buy your way out of. Yep, that’s our Donald.