He told her to stop hanging around black guys in public, explicitly. He didn’t tell her to stop hanging around with white guys.
Let’s ease up on the tone.
Don’t insult others outside of the Pit.
…facts be damned, apparently.
Yes, it was, and team values have skyrocketed in the last few years. But there are some really important differences and he’s not getting $2 billion here. Donald Sterling owned the Clippers outright, and Levenson does not. He has the largest ownership stake, but it’s not even a majority. This team is far less valuable than the Clippers based on location, competitiveness, star power, and perhaps their TV deal. And the Clippers were sold in a crazy auction because of the other legal issues that surrounded the Sterlings. That won’t happen here.
No reason. He’s even tried and failed to sell before.
I was not aware we’d hired Acsenray as a moderator. I’m really out of the loop these days!
Apparently I am too. Maybe I missed something because I didn’t know about the distinction between a “moderator” and a “genuine moderator.”
One relevant difference is that arena seating is zero-sum; McDonald’s can sell an unbounded amount of food, but the Hawks don’t have an unbounded amount of seats for home games. Thus, it behooves them to sell as many as possible in a season-ticket format, and to people they believe will spent the most money on incidentals once they are in the arena.
I did. Levenson’s crude stereotypes targeted two groups, local black people and local white people, and both are offensive.
It’s also possible that Levenson, who is from Maryland, just assumed that the only explanation for disproportionately few white fans at Hawks games was that Southern white people are racist. It’s not like the Hawks commissioned a study or anything, per the email Levenson just asserts this as his belief. That’s my takeaway from the whole affair: I wouldn’t want this guy as the managing partner of a business I was involved with, he’s using baseless gut feelings to direct operations.
Well, then. The full quote is a lot worse by virtue of being more specifically negative. It remains puzzling when applied to Deng, unless he has a different reputation in league circles than he does in public ones.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. In no way do those phrases mean stop showing black people. They mean show at least some white people.
According to ESPN Hawk’s home attendance was 76.6% of capacity. They need to get ~5,000 more fans a game before they run into a capacity issue.
In context you could already see it was negative, and we can keep guessing at the intent but it’s still very confusing. The Bulls seemed to love Deng and I don’t think he would have won the kind of awards he’s won if people in the league felt he were somehow unsavory. Since Ferry and the Hawks are insisting he was quoting someone, I would really like to know who that is. A scout? An agent? An executive with another team? This was part of their research somehow. It’s also weird that they called him a young guy. He’s 29 and a 10-year NBA veteran. Here is the letter that kicked off the investigation. It’s from minority owner Michael Gearon. He quotes Ferry and says Ferry implied Deng was a two-faced liar and a cheat. I believe that’s his interpretation of the insult and not a summary of other stuff Ferry said.
What I’ve heard is that Ferry was (or at least claims he was) reading a scouting report on Deng. Deng actually is from Africa, and apparently whoever wrote this has an odd prejudice against Africans. As in, people born and raised in Africa, not Black people. As you note, Deng is an extremely odd choice for a racist comment. If this person is actually racist, then I’d hate to see what he wrote about the rest of hte league.
No, they mean “show more white people.” I don’t understand why I have to explain what “too” means, but Levenson is saying the kiss cam shows too many black people. It does not mean there are zero white fans on display. It means there are some of them, but not enough. So you cannot interpret it to mean “at least show some white people,” which implies they are not showing any white people. And he suggests these are problems some of the time, not all of it.
Which makes many of Levenson’s comments puzzling, but he made them anyway.
Yes, that’s what I am saying. Ferry says it was part of their research - not a scouting report specifically, but something they gathered as part of the background work they did when they were thinking about making Deng a contract offer. I want to know what the source was. And yes, the comment on its face is about Africans and not black people. It is still utterly racist.
I’m not sure why the sarcastic tone when what you describe is EXACTLY what he told her to do. Yes, Donald would have been (and was) perfectly fine with her doing absolutely anything she wanted with white people.
Some things he cites as all black (cheerleaders and on court participants) and some, as you note, he says are too black. I don’t see the practical difference. And it’s besides the point. Nothing here can be construed to imply that he wishes to stop showing or marketing to black people altogether. All he states is that promotional things do not target a certain demographic as much as he would like. That’s no different than what countless corporations do every day. The only difference in this case is that the underrepresented demographic is white people.
And, to be clear if, for example, the Hawks cheerleaders are all black, as he claims, then they don’t come close to reflecting the demographics of Atlanta. If the situation were reversed and the Hawks’ cheerleaders were all white, people would be shitting bricks.
By the way: they weren’t! Here are the 2011-12 cheerleaders, and here’s the 2012-13 team.
Granted, and that figure includes all the tickets they give away for free. I was speaking to general differences in approach, but yes, the Hawks don’t have the problem of too few seats and too many customers at this time. Which is at least a little strange, given their string of seven straight playoff appearances, and the appealing Teague-Korver-Millsap-Horford nucleus. They aren’t high-flying or star-studded, but they are a good basketball team with a distinct, appealing style of play (five three point shooters on the floor at once). I don’t know how well the Braves or Falcons do, or whether Atlanta is a good sports town.
It’s certainly worse than anything in Levenson’s email; though both are pretty appalling examples of how not to do one’s job. I have a feeling the Spurs don’t use Peter Holt’s personal stereotypes to base their arena experience on, or evaluate players based on whether they’re two-faced liars and cheats, or merely recipients of the J Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award.
The team has disciplined Ferry in some undisclosed manner.
It’s because they’re not a contending team. They weren’t when the Celtics were the best team in the East, nor Miami, and now it’s Cleveland. At no time were they anywhere near as good as those teams. At best they’ve been OK, but not great, and their best player has missed the majority of two of the last three seasons. These days I think most people see them as a pile of assets Ferry wants to use to snag some star-ish players. That’s not that exciting either. If they land someone really great who they can put next to a healthy Horford, maybe it’s another story.
Imagine if they passed on players based on stereotypes about foreign players! Or guys from France or Latin America or the Caribbean!
True, but there’s more to it than that; there are many teams far worse than the Hawks that are ahead of them in attendance. When the Kings are drubbing you in percentage of the arena filled, there’s a real problem. Atlanta had the worst attendance of any playoff team, notably.
Horford being out can’t help, nor can the Braves and Falcons; bad teams like the Kings, Magic, and Jazz are at least the only game in town.
They are so far ahead of the majority of the league in so many areas, they should probably have 7+ titles instead of a mere 5.
I actually missed this controversy on the sports pages; I read about it yesterday when Bing had a link to an article by that famous racist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:
[
](Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Bruce Levenson's Email Wasn't Racist | TIME)
Then today I saw Jason Whitlock on ESPN:
Clearly, these guys are a couple of bigots.
Whitlock also suggests what the upshot of all this is likely to be: a new owner, who will be smarter and instead of trying to attract whites to the city will just move the team to new stadium in the suburbs. The crowd will be whiter and richer organically. The Braves are dumping Turner Field because all the money is in the 'burbs, no reason the Hawks can’t do the same.
That’s ugly. And the teams that are behind the Hawks have been really lousy over the next few years and should be for at least a few more years. The Hawks aren’t that interesting, but they’re not that bad. Another problem they have is incompetent ownership. I linked to this in the Pit thread, but here’s Rembert Browne from Grantland writing about the Atlanta sports scene. He says the Falcons have not had a problem building a diverse crowd. I don’t know their demographics, but the black fans don’t seem to haves scared the white ones away. If that’s the case, the Falcons have managed to do this and the Hawks have just failed. It’s not because anybody is a racist, it’s because they suck at their jobs. That would mean Levenson is grasping at straws just like he was with the cheerleader thing.
That’s a good point.
I think you still missed it. 
The recording seems to undercut Ferry’s “I was reading from a report” theory. I don’t think it can be said to totally debunk it, but it does nothing to support it. The rest of the audio is supposedly lost.
Here are the actual Hawks documents. The statement clearly comes from someone with the Cavaliers, and it’s no better in context: