Owner Bruce Levenson selling Atlanta Hawks after racist email
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Young_Chitlin
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ESPN.com news services
Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson is selling his controlling interest in the team, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced Sunday.
In July, Levenson self-reported an email he wrote to the team's co-owners and general manager Danny Ferry in August 2012 that he called "inappropriate and offensive." The league commenced an independent investigation after being made aware of the comments.
Levenson writes in a statement that the racially offensive comments came as he pondered ways to bridge Atlanta's racial sports divide and increase fan attendance at HAWKS' GAMES.
"In trying to address those issues, I wrote an E-MAIL two years ago that was inappropriate and offensive," he said. "I trivialized our fans by making clichéd assumptions about their interests (i.e. hip hop vs. country, white vs. black cheerleaders, etc.) and by stereotyping their perceptions of one another (i.e. that white fans might be afraid of our black fans). By focusing on race, I also sent the unintentional and hurtful message that our white fans are more valuable than our black fans."
"If you're angry about what I wrote, you should be," Levenson CONTINUED in the statement. "I'm angry at myself, too. It was inflammatory nonsense. We all may have subtle biases and preconceptions when it comes to race, but my role as a leader is to challenge them, not to validate or accommodate those who might hold them."
Levenson notified Silver on Saturday night of his intentions to sell.
"I commend Mr. Levenson for self-reporting to the league office, for being fully cooperative with the league and its independent investigator, and for putting the best interests of the Hawks, the Atlanta community, and the NBA first," Silver said in a statement.
Levenson had presided over the Hawks' ownership group since 2004. Over the past decade, the team has never ranked higher than 18th in attendance and is largely overlooked in a market that also has the NFL, Major League Baseball and a passion FOR COLLEGE football.
Atlanta CEO Steve Koonin will now oversee all team operations.
The Hawks BECOME the second NBA team to hit the market this year. The Los Angeles Clippers
Comments
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email, 1/2In an effort to be fully transparent about this, the Hawks released the original email, which was sent to general manager Danny Ferry and two ownership partners, Todd Foreman and Ed Peskowitz:
1. from day one i have been impressed with the friendliness and professionalism of the arena staff -- food vendors, ushers, ticket takers, etc. in our early years when i would bring folks from dc they were blown away by the contrast between abe pollin's arena and philips. some of this is attributable to southern hospital and manners but bob and his staff do a good job of training. To this day, I can not get the ushers to call me Bruce yet they insist on me calling them by their first names.
2. the non-premium area food is better than most arenas, though that is not saying much. i think there is room for IMPROVEMENT and creativity. Levy is our food vendor so we don't have much control but they have been good partners. i have wished we had some inconic offereing like boog's barbeque at the baseball stadium in balt.
3. our new restaurant, red, just opened so too early for me to give you my thoughts.
4. Regarding game ops, i need to start with some background. for the first couple of years we owned the team, i didn't much focus on game ops. then one day a light BULB went off. when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can't get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs and they are the primary demo for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders. then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:
-- it's 70 pct black
-- the cheerleaders are black
-- the music is hip hop
-- at the bars it's 90 pct black
-- there are few fathers and sons at the games
-- we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.
Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.
Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba's urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience. -
email, 2/2My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. Please dont get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arean back then. i never felt uncomfortable, but i think southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority. On fan sites i would read comments about how dangerous it is around philips yet in our 9 years, i don't know of a mugging or even a pick pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some PEOPLE saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many blacks at the games.
I have been open with our executive team about these concerns. I have told them I want some white cheerleaders and while i don't care what the color of the artist is, i want the music to be music familiar to a 40 year old white guy if that's our season tixs demo. i have also balked when every fan picked out of crowd to shoot shots in some time out contest is black. I have even ? that the kiss cam is too black.
Gradually things have changed. My unscientific guess is that our crowd is 40 pct black now, still four to five times all other teams. And my further guess is that 40 pct still feels like 70 pet to some whites at our games. Our bars are still overwhelmingly black.
This is obviously a sensitive topic, but sadly i think it is far and way the number one reason our season ticket base is so low.
And many of our black fans don't have the spendable income which explains why our f&b and merchandise sales are so low. At all white thrasher games sales were nearly triple what they are at HAWKS GAMES (the extra intermission explains some of that but not all).
Regardless of what time a game starts, we have the latest arriving crowd in the league. It often looks and sounds empty when the team takes the floor.
In the past two years, we have created a section of rowdy COLLEGE students that has been a big plus. And we do a lot of very clever stuff during time outs to entertain the crowd. Our kiss cam is better done than any in the league.
We have all the same halftime acts that other arenas have but i question whether they make sense. PEOPLE are on their CELL PHONES during half time. i wonder if flashing on the scoreboard "$2 off on hot dogs during halftime tonight" just as the half ends would be a better use of our halftime dollars and make the fans happier.
We do all the usual giveways and the fans are usually their loudest when our spirit crew takes the floor to give away t-shirts. It ? me off that they will yell louder for a t-shirt then for our players.
Our player intro is flat. We manufacture a lot of noise but because of the late arriving crowd and the fact that a lot of blacks dont seem to go as crazy cheering (another one of my theories) as whites, it is not great. Even when we have just returned from winnng four straight on the road, i am one of the few people in the arena standing and cheering when our team takes the floor. Bob has kicked around ideas like having the starters coming down aisles rather than off the bench during intros. Sounds cool but may highlight all the empty seats at the start of games.
Not enough of our fans wear hawks jerseys to games. i have just begun to push for ideas like discount food lines for folks wearing jerseys, special entrances, etc. I think we need a committed and perhaps incentivized fan club. We need to realize atl is simply different than every other city. Just adopting nba best practices is not enough. we have to create our own.
I am rambling and could probably go on forever. If you have any specific areas you would like my thoughts on, let me know.
Best,
Bruce
ps -- I have cc'd todd and ed so they can chime in with additional or different thoughts.
Sent from my iPad -
Let's put facts/statistics in bold to point out racism brehs
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Pretty sure a majority of the owners feel this way
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Rubato Garcia wrote: »Pretty sure a majority of the owners feel this way
Yeah this is no surprise.ALL WHITES racist in my eyes until proven otherwise.And lately they've been proving me right. -
I live north of Atl and I ? with the local teams. If you listen to sports radio you hear white people voicing fears similar to what dude was speaking on. It's true that a lot of white people (not all) are scared to come into the city, scared to be anywhere where they're not the majority. Then again, this argument falls apart when you look at the falcons. I just think Levenson needed to focus on putting together a good team instead of being worried about demographics.
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He just said what white folk think. Miss me wit that self reporting ? .
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He probably leaked this ? himself after seening clips sell for 2 billion
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Angeles1son85 wrote: »He probably leaked this ? himself after seening clips sell for 2 billion
If he wanted to sell the team why would he expose himself? He can sell them without a reason right?
That's what the ? I'm saying. ? tweakin b -
Not getting $2B, it's Atlanta not LA. Probably go for $600M, which is based on an estimated 7x EBITA.
Sterling had a lot of like minded people, that's why he survived so long.
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Side bar,
Refuse to be outraged, same ? everyday, everyone knows what's up.
NBA is a minority majority league in a lot of cities.
Feel like there's always going to be tension between owners, players, and fan bases.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-clippers-like-many-nba-teams-have-a-majority-minority-fan-base/ -
His estimate -
Angeles1son85 wrote: »He probably leaked this ? himself after seening clips sell for 2 billion
If he wanted to sell the team why would he expose himself? He can sell them without a reason right?
But buyers would do the same thing in the sterling situation and overpay for a team just to get rid of the owner -
That email didn't bother me in the least bit. What he said is the truth about how a lot of people feel. He even says it is BS that they think that way, but that it's a reality....
The other stuff is true to about catering to a certain crowd. If you want a mixed audience then you have to mix up the entertainment. What's the issue? -
Imo no where close to Sterling just reality.
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here is the reality about the NBA in most markets. older white male audiences prefer mediocre college basketball over the nba unless the team is a conference final contender or better. this ? ain't close to what donald sterling did and ? even that ? had been going on in plain view for years before pepople randomly got offended.
i think this email says more about our society than it does about this one white owner. in many areas middle age white demographics are scared away from a city by black crowds or attendance. even though crime has dropped in every damn city outside of the chi suburban people are reluctant to head to the city to catch the nba and sometimes mlb (see turner field in the atl). NFL people dont care but thats different. cats like dude here are not racist they are just greedy steakholders. -
Why self-report though? Can't be because dude is actually a good person or some ? , right?
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Just read this. Muthafucca wanted to get ahead of this before it gets out on it's own. Smh. Like someone said earlier, he's not the only owner who feels this way.
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I'm not even mad at this ? and I see the point he was trying to make
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I am sure he saw the clips deal.....dude wants to make a 600 million profit.....
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Inglewood_B wrote: »I'm not even mad at this ? and I see the point he was trying to make
Me too. I mean I can see this as being stereotypical, but it ain't hard core racism. He's basically just speculating on why White people aren't coming to the arena. To some degree he's right too. Why you think David Stern was making dress code rules and ? like that. The same reason.
I'm wondering what his angle is here. Why self report this ? ? The Clippers were sold for more than they were worth. I bet you this is an angle to make extra money off the team.
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being racist in public doesn't automatically quadruple a team's sale price lmao ? is ya'll on
Some of ya'll must really believe that if Jerry Jones go on a racist rant he can flip the Cowboys for 12 billion FOH
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Monizzle14 wrote: »here is the reality about the NBA in most markets. older white male audiences prefer mediocre college basketball over the nba unless the team is a conference final contender or better. this ? ain't close to what donald sterling did and ? even that ? had been going on in plain view for years before pepople randomly got offended.
i think this email says more about our society than it does about this one white owner. in many areas middle age white demographics are scared away from a city by black crowds or attendance. even though crime has dropped in every damn city outside of the chi suburban people are reluctant to head to the city to catch the nba and sometimes mlb (see turner field in the atl). NFL people dont care but thats different. cats like dude here are not racist they are just greedy steakholders.
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Slippery slope
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Swiffness! wrote: »being racist in public doesn't automatically quadruple a team's sale price lmao ? is ya'll on
Some of ya'll must really believe that if Jerry Jones go on a racist rant he can flip the Cowboys for 12 billion FOH
Nobody said that. It's just that in today's climate, these wannabe investors seem to be willing to overpay for a team especially when there is some kind of political or social statement to be made. I don't believe anybody thinks that this dude is going to make more money just by racist. The point is that he may be trying to capitalize on recent events to maximize his profits when bailing on something he might not want anymore anyway.
