In an attempt to do damage control before any permanent damage was done, Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson is bowing out gracefully by selling his majority ownership of the Atlanta Hawks. Interestingly enough, this move is all over an email sent two years ago to the General Manager & two ownership partners in regards to Luol Deng (who was a Free Agent at the time). Atlanta Hawks GM Danny Ferry prompted an investigation after stating this during a conference call:
“having a little African in him. Not in a bad way, but he’s like a guy who would have a nice store out front but sell you counterfeit stuff out of the back.” (via New Yorker)
As a result of Danny Ferry’s investigation, a racially charged email written by Levenson was brought to light. Now we have yet another NBA franchise that’s officially on the market! Courtesy of the Atlanta Hawks official website, here are some of the alleged “Racist Comments” made by the now former Atlanta Hawks owner.
“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.
My 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 bitched 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).
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 pisses 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.”
Now a couple of things to keep in mind here, as we mentioned in the beginning this email was sent in 2012. Furthermore, it was sent to Hawks general manager Danny Ferry and two ownership partners, Todd Foreman and Ed Peskowitz (all of whom are still with the team). The question now begs as to why this wasn’t brought to someone’s attention earlier since this is believed to be “Racist Comments.” This isn’t a security breach situation like the “iCloud Hack fiasco”, this is a situation where a private email was sent by ONE person to THREE different individuals, and somewhere along this investigation this email was manifested back to life. Mere months after the conclusion of Donald Sterling’s forced sale of the team, which was the result of his alleged “Racist Comments” being exposed to the general public, I just find the timing impeccable that sometime during 2014 Bruce Levenson had some epiphany in his head that he made a big mistake two years ago. While Stevenson is the one who disclosed this racially charged email first, we think it was only a matter of time before the investigators disclosed this information themselves. Is there another potential NBA scandal on the horizon? Stay tuned
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