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Donald T. Sterling, I feel your pain.

Seven words I’m pretty sure no one has ever written.

This one hurts a lot worse than one of the Donald’s many apartment tenants not re-upping a lease.

This is Elton Brand, the face of the Donald’s Clipper franchise, leaving the team and the city while leaving the Donald holding the bag, the one with $70 million inside.

This is Elton Brand reneging on what you could call an implied promise that he’d stay and team with Baron Davis to make this sad-sack franchise proud and relevant again.

Now playing the part of Elton Brand, power forward Benedict Arnold.

The news that likeable, dependable, talented EB is going to take the Sixers’ $82 mil instead of the Clippers $70m plus however much more they’d ante up in utter panic and desperation, hit Clipper Nation like an all too familiar ton of bricks.

The Clippers aren’t just a product of Murphy’s Law, they damn near invented it.                  

Whatever could go wrong in the crazy money world of NBA free agency, just did.

If it’s true the Clippers could screw up a two-car funeral, I believe that was the Donald driving the lead vehicle.

Signing Baron Davis for $65 million was a stroke of sheer genius and another sign that Sterling has changed eons from the skinflint who was always too cheap to pay to win.

Here he was prepared to give his two frontline stars, one new (Davis), the other historically true blue (Brand) at least $135 million big ones, and maybe more if they had to raise the price to satisfy EB, and what do the Clippers have to show for it?

They have an expensive point guard with no team around him to win with.

You know just as sure as the glue holding down Elgin Baylor’s toupee that the Clips wouldn’t have given the new Baron of Hollywood all those Benjamins if they didn’t believe they’d get Brand’s signature on paper right behind him.

Like Forrest Gump said, Baron and E-B were gonna go together like peas and carrots.

Instead the Clips get overcooked Brussels Sprouts. 

With no Brand name.

Their desultory history of dysfunction and disaster aside, how can you blame the Clippers for this one?

They did everything they were supposed to do and the celebratory cigar still blows up in their face!

This had to be a case of a 29-year-old star from Poughkepsie, N.Y. and Duke, a guy with the East Coast in both his background and his blood, simply telling the Clippers without actually saying the words:

Enough already.

Maybe Elton was just tired of L.A.

Maybe he grew weary of having his good name synonomous with the team’s bad one.

Maybe he knows it’ll be much easier to win in the NBA’s Leastern Conference that it would be in the wicked, Wild West.

Maybe he’d had enough of playing second fiddle to the Lakers, like Guy Ritchie does to Madonna.

Maybe as a member of USA Basketball, he got upset that Chris Kaman is playing in the Olympics for Germany.

Or maybe he was just ticked that in the L.A. courtside celebrity game, the Lakers have Jack while the Clippers trot out Frankie Muniz.  That’s four Oscars vs. Malcolm in the Middle if you’re scoring at home.

Whatever it was, if the initial reports are true that Brand is trading in L.A. sushi bars for Philly cheesesteaks, I am absolutely choking on the idea that not only are the Clippers unlucky and cursed, they are now officially sad, pathetic and pitiable.

The Donald may be a superficially sweet-natured snake oil salesman and basketball no-nothing who has spent his lifetime losing unlovably, but not even the man who once introduced me to his “great friend and world famous hairdresser, Vital Sassoon,” deserved this kick in the teeth.

Today the Donald doesn’t need another gold-plated office building, he needs a nice box of Kleenex, because it’s crying time in Clipperland.

Not only did Brand fail to give Sterling the proverbial hometown discount, he’s apparently leaving the hometown altogether.

He ran, alright, without taking the money.

And once again, it’s the Clippers who are left at the altar, eyes teary, makeup running, the wedding audience aghast…as the man they were to re-marry and live happily ever after with, runs off at the last minute with the other girl.

Ted Green is Senior Sports Producer for KTLA Prime News and a former sportswriter for the L.A. Times and National Sports Daily.

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