It was also a tale about sports, a look at the game behind the games we all still watch, and this one pulled back the blankets in remarkable fashion.

And then of course, there was money, great gobs of it. Like most professional sports leagues, the N.B.A. is, at bottom, all about the Benjamins. Mr. Sterling’s remarks, in a league where teams are owned mostly by white men who buy and sell the talents of mostly black men, were an existential threat to a multibillion-dollar business.

The scandal also kicked a rare asset — a professional sports franchise — into play, and a number of traffic-generating luminaries put their hands in the air as potential buyers, including Mr. Ellison, David Geffen and Oprah Winfrey. Cue the yacht, once owned by both Mr. Geffen and Mr. Ellison.

And keep in mind all this happened in Los Angeles, the epicenter of pop culture with a conveyor belt that produces celebrity, scandal, television and movies with equal facility. Still, no one on the lots of Hollywood could devise a script this perfect, and it would be hard to outdo the casting.

Begin with Mr. Sterling, the cartoonishly perfect villain. Rich sports team owners are often reviled even when they win, and Mr. Sterling, the last few seasons notwithstanding, is a record loser.

But Mr. Sterling was not just a losing, tyrannical owner; he was a disloyal, mercurial one, having moved the team from San Diego to Los Angeles without league permission. His history of racism includes operating rental properties in discriminatory ways, according to the Justice Department, with which he reached a huge settlement. Still, for the most part, he lived a life beyond consequence, insulated by wealth and a host of enablers.

Then came the unraveling. It began, as things often do these days, on social media. V. Stiviano posted a photo of herself on Instagram with Magic Johnson in 2013. In September of that year, in what was then a private conversation, Mr. Sterling told her, “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people.” (Ms. Stiviano describes herself as multiracial, so you wonder how Mr. Sterling squared that with his inner racism. But we digress.)