Another Jewish guy is being run out of the NBA for noticing stuff. Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson is selling his team after his private thought s about the black people he owns were made public.
Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson is selling his controlling interest in the team, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced Sunday.
In July, Levenson self-reported an email he wrote to the team’s co-owners and general manager Danny Ferry in August 2012 that he called “inappropriate and offensive.” The league commenced an independent investigation after being made aware of the comments.
Levenson writes in a statement that the racially offensive comments came as he pondered ways to bridge Atlanta’s racial sports divide and increase fan attendance at Hawks’ games.
“In trying to address those issues, I wrote an e-mail two years ago that was inappropriate and offensive,” he said. “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.”
“If you’re angry about what I wrote, you should be,” Levenson continued in the statement. “I’m angry at myself, too. It was inflammatory nonsense. We all may have subtle biases and preconceptions when it comes to race, but my role as a leader is to challenge them, not to validate or accommodate those who might hold them.”
Levenson notified Silver on Saturday night of his intentions to sell.
“I commend Mr. Levenson for self-reporting to the league office, for being fully cooperative with the league and its independent investigator, and for putting the best interests of the Hawks, the Atlanta community, and the NBA first,” Silver said in a statement.
Levenson had presided over the Hawks’ ownership group since 2004. Over the past decade, the team has never ranked higher than 18th in attendance and is largely overlooked in a market that also has the NFL, Major League Baseball and a passion for college football.
Atlanta CEO Steve Koonin will now oversee all team operations.
The Hawks become the second NBA team to hit the market this year. The Los Angeles Clippers were sold for an unprecedented $2 billion earlier this summer to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer after former owner Donald Sterling was banned for life by the league after his racist rant to a woman became public.
It should be noted that one NBA owner is a Russian mobster and one of his partners got rich convincing young black males to slaughter one another. But at least they don’t notice stuff, which is about the worst thing a person can do these days.
I’ve just read Levenson’s email, the one people are claiming is racist. As I suspected earlier, it’s all about the Benjamins. In the email Levenson just laid out the B&W facts about the demographics of Atlanta and the Hawks fan base. Atlanta is a Chocolate City. The Hawks’ fans are overwhelmingly black. (Heck, basketball is a black sport. The NBA is a black league.) If anyone could be offended over what he wrote, it would be the southern whites he theorized were too “uncomfortable” being the minority in a black majority crowd at the arena to buy season tickets or… Read more »
Best to shut down the league for a few months and send everyone out for a mandatory diversity training course.
Levenson is getting out while the getting out is good. This probably has less to do with race than with money. With the Clippers being sold for an unprecedented price to an overly rich guy who didn’t know what the f**k to do with his immense fortune, maybe Levenson thought now was the time to get a good price for the Hawks before the sports market crashed. Being run out of the League? Naaah. That’s just the pretense to cash in.
The urge to self-mortification is so deep that some persons confess in the absence of any threat.
I must be a psychopath. I just say “f… ’em.”
A self-reporting Jew, eh? Maybe this is the next thing. An NBA owner schul with Rabbi Silver presiding. Well, Sterling did indicate that the entire congregation was guilty.
It’s ironic that the American street game where kids can soar out of Cabrini-Green and Bed-Stuy on the strength of mental toughness and suburb athleticism is being squeezed to death by a bunch of spineless little pussies.