Fans support for the Clippers remain strong as the team battles the thunder in the playoffs,

but Scandal continues to swirl around team-owner Donald Sterling.

The NBA hopes to force Donald Sterling to sell the Clippers, but his estranged wife,

Shelley, owns a 50% stake in the team.

She promises to fight to maintain ownership.

Fans say the team needs a fresh start.

First night back in the staple center for game five, hours after Adam Silver,

banned Donald Sterling, I noticed a couple sitting in the press room.

They were an older couple wearing matching red shirts that said,

team Shelley on the front. It caught my attention.

In all my years of covering the Clippers, I'd never really thought of Shelley as

anything more than Donald's wife, the woman who stuck it out with an obnoxious

cheating husband for 60 years. But also, Shelley wasn't exactly a popular figure at the time.

Anything associated with the Sterling name was downright toxic.

So who were these people brave enough to wear team Shelley shirts to a hostile arena

in the middle of all this?

The couple wearing those shirts were Shelley's dear friend Catherine Bauman and her husband.

My first conversation with Catherine wasn't remarkable in any way.

But it did for the first time wake me up to the fact that Shelley Sterling was not simply the

quiet stand-by-your-man housewife that I had imagined she was all those years.

She was in the middle of a battle herself and she was not about to go down without a fight.

This is episode five, not fit.

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