In the fall out of the Donald Stirling
tape-gate scandal where racism in the NBA was bought forth there is a new
scandal involving an email from two years ago by soon to be ex-Atlanta Hawks
owner Bruce Levenson.
Levenson released
the email for NBA investigation two months back and recently has apologized for
what could be hurtful and misguided comments in his email.
As a result he has also decided to sell his
portion of the Hawks. But was his email
racist, or are we too hyper-sensitive now that every observation made on an eco-sociological level can’t not be said in
public?
USAToday’s Nancy Armour, in her article found
here,
calls Levenson’s email “just as hateful, ignorant and damaging — maybe even
more so because they were couched as being somehow well-intentioned” in comparison
to the audio tape of Donald Stirling’s comments.
On the flip side of this is NBA legend Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar.
He has claimed, for an
article in Time, that
Levenson’s email isn’t racist but rather just him being a business man asking
questions about how to sell seats for his team.
He thinks Levenson’s only problem is misguided white guilt.
Below is the full context of the email written by Bruce
Levenson to the Hawk’s General Manager Danny Ferry. Is it racist?
Or is it just business and a lot of hullabaloo over nothing?
FULL TEXT OF THE E-MAIL (via the Hawks):
From: Bruce Levenson
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.
Sent from my iPad
