The NBA continues zero-tolerance policy on racism
After Donald Sterling was forced to sell the Los Angeles Clippers in light of racist comments caught on tape, another NBA owner is now in the hot seat over an email sent two years ago. Bruce Levenson has now decided to sell the Atlanta Hawks and taken responsibility over comments made in 2012, coming forward to Adam Silver and agreeing to sell his controlling share of the organization.
The email talked about how the demographic of his fans had changed and ticket/merchandise sales were down and how he wanted to fix things.
You can read the entire email HERE and an excerpt below:
“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).“
Adam Silver also responded to Levenson’s situation by releasing his own email, stating that Levenson contacted him back in July about the comments made in the email and the NBA launched their own investigation on the matter. The league is now taking the proper steps to sell the team.
Hawks CEO Steve Koonin will now take over and oversee the operations of the team until a new owner is found and the franchise works out the sale of the team.
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