OT:Hawks Owner Levensen to sell team after 2012 racist email

[5DOM]

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

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

[Prestige]

This is pretty random. The Sterling thing has set a precedent it seems.

[22haytham22]

Cuban called it and said stuff like this is going to happen....Let the Blackmailing Begin

[chuckdevlin]

E-mail not released? Hopefully they rebuild and we can get Horford or Milsap

I wrote an e-mail two years ago that was inappropriate and offensive. 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.

[BackseatBoss]

Welcome back Seattle Supersonics!

[Ackshun]

I can't wait for the season to start.

So done with all this drama

[VinBaker6]

I would love to read the e-mail.

[RandomRaptorfan]

The email was released. You can definitely see how white fans are portrayed as more valuable than black fans

1
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.

Sent from my iPad

[YoungG]

Extremely random, but hey, at least this owner recognized his idiocy and is selling the team. No need to turn this into a debacle and further irritate fans, the players as well as diminish the NBA brand. Racism at any professional level must be cut out like cancer or else it will spread and I'm happy to know that Adam Silver is making this a priority as it surfaces.

[OakleyDokely]

forcing him to keep the Hawks is punishment enough.

[VinBaker6]

-- there are few fathers and sons at the games

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published new data on the role that American fathers play in parenting their children. Most of the CDC’s previous research on family life — which the agency explores as an important contributor to public health and child development — has focused exclusively on mothers. But the latest data finds that the stereotypical gender imbalance in this area doesn’t hold true, and dads are just as hands-on when it comes to raising their kids.
That includes African-American fathers.
In fact, in its coverage of the study, the Los Angeles Times noted that the results “defy stereotypes about black fatherhood” because the CDC found that black dads are more involved with their kids on a daily basis than dads from other racial groups:

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/01/16/3175831/myth-absent-black-father/

[OakleyDokely]

NBA owners everywhere are frantically deleting emails from 5 years ago right now...

[Ahmed1212]

So I only read the first half of this letter. It doesn't seem racist to me.

It just seems like he was trying to market to a different demographic?

Anyone else get this vibe or am I tripping?

[vini_vidi_vici]

New plan guys.

Since we cant buy the team, can we blackmail the team owners?

[...c.a.p...]

I wonder what he'd think when he looks around the ACC.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Scarface844]

This is why I was against forcing Sterling out. Mark Cuban was right. It set a terrible precedent. Adam Silver is no better then David Stern.

[vini_vidi_vici]

One other random thought about the email.

Come to ATL, where "Our kiss cam is better done than any in the league."

[Throwback24]

If Rogers did this we could finally get rid of them.

[Ganjamayne]

He should of added (No racist) at the end of the email to prevent this from happening.

[OakleyDokely]

the hawks haven't been playing the white way