It literally could not have gone worse.

Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, was supposed to apologize for his recent racist remarks in an exclusive interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN Tuesday night.

That may have been the plan, but the interview became an unmitigated disaster. His house was burning and he tossed gasoline on it.

If he was coached by media “experts” they should not be paid. Even the way he dressed and carried himself was poor. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find anything positive about his appearance.

Sterling should have had one goal for the interview: Sincerely Apologize. He was to go on a national TV show and fall on his sword in front of the public (see Tiger Woods’s apology).

Instead, Sterling apologized and then rambled about how Jews help other Jews, how Magic Johnson should not be considered a role model (see video below), and that there is no such thing as “African-Americans.”

In fact, his performance was so pathetic that his handlers today might try to stress his age (80) as one excuse. They might also consider a dementia defense.

If individuals were working with Sterling they should have realized early on that in a live media interview situation he would be a disaster. At Bottom Line Communications we once worked with an aging company president whose views rivaled Sterling’s. Our main goal was to keep him away from live interviews where we knew he would get in trouble.

Sterling’s handlers could have developed an apology video (see Domino’s President’s apology) and issued that to the media. By giving CNN an exclusive interview all he did was irritate all the other networks. CNN did not do him any favors by bringing in Spike Lee to attack Sterling.

Instead, the story now has a new set of legs, and Sterling will continue to be front and center in the public eye for weeks to come. It was the opposite of what should have occurred.

Move over Exxon. The new case study for poor media handling is Donald Sterling.