OT: Owner Bruce Levenson will sell the Atlanta Hawks

[Jcool0]

[tweet]https://twitter.com/WojYahooNBA/status/508635959705886720[/tweet]
[tweet]https://twitter.com/WojYahooNBA/status/508636703612219392[/tweet]
[tweet]https://twitter.com/NBA/status/508636146146889728[/tweet]

[bledredwine]

Awesome.

Guys,

let's all buy the Hawks together. If we all chip in, mods pay 10% a piece, Fleet pays 20% and the rest of us give .005% each, we can buy the Hawks and use their trade pieces for the Bulls.

Or if someone is friends with Oprah, then the rest of us can pay .001% instead of .005%

[TheStig]

The slippery slope has begun. Good bye privacy.

[Notbeat]

kickstarter or gofundme? Sham, are you interested in a front office job?

[The Kane]

The slippery slope has begun. Good bye privacy.

I guess you missed the part where the Hawks owner told on himself. This has nothing to do with privacy.

[Jcool0]

Atlanta Hawks

Owner: Atlanta Spirit, LLC – Net worth: N/A

Atlanta is a special case as the team is owned by a partnership comprised of seven partners: Michael Gearon, Jr., Bruce Levenson, Ed Peskowitz, J. Rutherford Seydel, Todd Foreman, J. Michael Gearon, Sr., and Beau Turner.

The Atlanta Spirit bought the Hawks from Ted Turner in 2005. It should be noted that Beau Turner is the youngest son of Ted Turner, J. Rutherford Seydel is a son-in-law of Ted Turner., and Michael Gearon Sr. was the general manager (1977–79), president (1977–1986) and chairman of the board (1986–2004) of the Atlanta Hawks under Turner's ownership.

Michael Gearon, Jr. started telecommunications enterprise Gearon Communications in 1990 at the age of 25. In 1998, he sold his then multi-million dollar business to American Tower, one of the largest providers of communications towers in the world.

Bruce Levenson and Ed Peskowitz co-founded United Communications Group (UCG), a portfolio of professional business information companies, in 1977. UCG, which is now one of the largest privately held business information companies in the world, provides specialized information to more than two million clients in numerous business sectors, including healthcare, technology, energy, telecommunications, and financial services.

J. Rutherford Seydel is a partner in the law firm of Davis, Pickren & Seydel and is active in the firm's fast growing real estate, franchising and business transactions practices. He has been a season ticket holder of the Hawks for more 20 years.

Todd Foreman is a partner in United Communications Group (UCG). Foreman joined the company in 1992 to head their financial operations, oversee several of UCG's businesses and also focuses on UCG's acquisition strategy.

J. Michael Gearon, Sr. has spent almost 30 years in various capacities with the Atlanta Hawks, including general manager (1977-79), president (1977-1986) and chairman of the board (1986-2004). Gearon built one of the top real estate development companies in the country. Gearon & Company, which pioneered the concept of large-scale suburban office parks, was responsible for many of the business developments in Atlanta. A longtime associate and close friend of Ted Turner, Gearon is a former director of Turner Broadcasting.

Beau Turner is Ted Turner's son. He is involved in charitable pursuits. Enough said.

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/every-nba-team-owner-got-rich/

[Jo Jo English]

The slippery slope has begun. Good bye privacy.

I guess you missed the part where the Hawks owner told on himself. This has nothing to do with privacy.

It makes you wonder if he knew this story was going to get out there eventually so he just went ahead and announced it himself to take whatever control of the situation he could.

It isn't that I necessarily have a problem with Levensen's decision, or what happened to Donald Sterling, but I am beginning to wonder how many owners would still be "qualified" to keep their teams if every detail of their lives were scrutinized and made public. Or anyone for that matter.

Even if someone doesn't have a history of racist comments there is likely something in everyone's past that would be embarrassing to themselves and offensive to one group or another. Again, I don't have a problem with weeding out people with racist tendencies as they really have no place in a league like the NBA (or anywhere really), but something about this... I don't know.

**edit**

After reading the e-mail in question (posted below) it is pretty unfair to equate Levenson's words with Donald Sterling's comments and past history.

[TheStig]

The slippery slope has begun. Good bye privacy.

I guess you missed the part where the Hawks owner told on himself. This has nothing to do with privacy.

One would have to wonder about the timing of a spontaneous confession about a 2 year old email...........

I don't remember the contents of random emails from 2 years ago. I highly doubt a successful business man with countless more emails did the same. Most business emails would have been deleted by then anyway.

[23-7]

Racism is real, people. I know there are people here that try and act like this doesn't exist and minorities play the race card.

[Jo Jo English]

Found a copy of the e-mail.

http://www.ajc.com/news/sports/basketball/complete-e-mail-sent-by-levenson/nhHbD/

From: Bruce Levenson

To: Ferry, Danny

CC: Foreman, Todd (ucg.com); Peskowitz, Ed (ucg.com)

Sent: 8/25/2012 11:47:02 PM

Subject: Re: Business/Game ops

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

[musiqsoulchild]

My first impression when I read that email is "Thats not racist; its a very poorly worded business email".

He is essentially giving a rationale for why the number of repeat seasonal ticket holders is low in Atlanta.

[suckfish]

Meh not really racism, just some stereotyping. Shocked that this would cause him to lose his franchise.

[2015nbachamps]

My first impression when I read that email is "Thats not racist; its a very poorly worded business email".

He is essentially giving a rationale for why the number of repeat seasonal ticket holders is low in Atlanta.

yeah i have a few thoughts similar.

1. Very very poorly written business email...and certainly makes you cringe at least 10 times but not because its flat our racists but because you know people are going to take it as such so he should know better than to write an email like that as an NBA owner.

2. He should be more thankful of his fanbase that actually does buy tickets and show up. He doesn't seem to appreciate them and...well...thats just not cool.

3. Someone is forcing him out...someone got a hold of this email and is attempting to get him out...I would not be surprised if he has a gag order in place but they are about to leak it...maybe a friend at Atlanta newspaper has a copy...maybe someone else...its about to go public for sure...so he didn't "tell on himself."

4. Finally, this appears to be the absolute best time to sell and NBA franchise and the buzz created by coming off as racists or potentially racists created such a buzz when the Clippers sold that I think it helped drive up the price to more than twice what experts had evaluated its net worth, around 800 million, yet sold for 2 billion in weeks. So this reeks of creating some type of sales buzz to me because although the email itself is cringe worthy, the owner clearly is looking strictly to make more money. And thinks he will make more money and have more corporate sponsorship by appealing to another demographic. That's not racist...its called business and the nba and atlanta hawks are in business to make money as are just about all businesses. So as cringe worthy as this email is, I think he just wants to sell the team. unless this is just the smoke and there is more fire to this which is certainly possible...because if he was dumb enough and tactless enough to write this then he may have more skeletons in this closet far more damning.

[Bulls69]

Racism is real, people. I know there are people here that try and act like this doesn't exist and minorities play the race card.

I agree 100% with you not just this board but America itself when a person of color speaks up for wrong doing we are playing the race card I say horse hockey. If you don't speak up for yourself then you have no one to blame but yourself it's not playing the race card it's defending yourself freedom of speech is ok but you have consequences to face too.

[Ring_Me]

Awesome.

Guys,

let's all buy the Hawks together. If we all chip in, mods pay 10% a piece, Fleet pays 20% and the rest of us give .005% each, we can buy the Hawks and use their trade pieces for the Bulls.

Or if someone is friends with Oprah, then the rest of us can pay .001% instead of .005%

What if one of us is racist? Do we have to sell it again..?

[Future Coach]

The slippery slope has begun. Good bye privacy.

I guess you missed the part where the Hawks owner told on himself. This has nothing to do with privacy.

Woj has also reported that he didn't really voluntarily reveal this, and my gut feeling is he at least didn't volunteer this at first. It smells like a blackmail-type of situation where he said "f it" I would rather cash in then deal with whatever hassle. He will make money on his investment in the team, and he certainly hasn't been the best of owners, so I suppose it is good timing. Especially right before the next TV deal so prospective buyers can imagine some mythical deal being reached, and before the next lockout (which will more than likely occur soon).

But yeah I don't think he really volunteered this info.


Now when are folks going to call out the Magic's owner for being the homophobic bigot he is?

[Space Indaver]

The Sterling thing gave him the idea of how to sell his team for non-financial reasons, thus keeping the price high.

[kingkirk]

I don't really find that racist, more assumptious and over the top. But, nevertheless, i would be completely uncomfortable with someone losing a franchise over a letter like that.

I am not even convinced he is racist himself based on those comments, but more so trying to express that the white community within Georgia feel uncomfortable and perhaps racist which is hurting his business.

I don't know, this doesn't seem like another Sterling incident.

Cuban may have been right, though. That slope sure does look slippery now.

[Tenchi Ryu]

Sell them to Seattle, bring Memphis to the eastern conference. Everybody wins.

[MrFortune3]

Not really racist, dumb to say in the way he chose to word it.
But he is talking about demographics and stereotypical assumptions.
A more carefully worded email would not cause the backlash, seems as if he just wants to sell the team and drum up interest though.