Bruce Levenson's Atlanta Hawks email was bad, but it takes silver to Sterling

There was an unexpected development in the basketball world on Sunday, when news broke that Bruce Levenson was selling his share in the Atlanta Hawks.

The story, according to the NBA, was that the controlling owner’s decision came after he self-reported the fact that back in 2012, he wrote a racially insensitive email.

This latest NBA shakeup comes only months after the league essentially ousted Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, for making racist statements. The Clippers were subsequently sold to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Levenson is part of a seven-man ownership group called Atlanta Spirit; it is not known if the rest of the group will remain or if entirely new owners will be sought. Until that is resolved, Hawks chief executive Steve Koonin will operate the team.

Levenson’s departure, however, raises questions about the circumstances that led to it, the future of the Hawks and the state of the NBA.

How racist was Levenson’s email?

This is a matter of some debate. The Hawks have released the full email, and placed next to Sterling’s vile comments, Levenson’s words seem offensive more in how they accept and seek to exploit commonplace, everyday racism than in exemplifying it themselves.

The email begins with Levenson trying to deal with the Hawks’ attendance problems. He gets himself in trouble when he thinks he’s stumbled upon the main problem:

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.

Levenson says he is simply taking into account the bigotry of the fanbase, writing: “My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant [sic] season ticket base. Please dont get me wrong … 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.”

At one point he even – rightly – notes that certain fan complaints are “racist garbage”.

As the Toronto Star’s Bruce Arthur points out, as Levenson wrote that email he was diminishing:

… southern white fears, while recognizing them. He sounded a lot like a businessman dealing with market realities, while also painting those realities with a broad, insensitive brush.

In fact, at times Levenson sounds less like Donald Sterling and more like a cruder version of the former NBA commissioner David Stern, who, in answer to complaints that the league had become “too hip-hop”, established a “business casual” off-court dress code for players. A particularly cynical person could argue that Levenson’s biggest sin was his failure to use the correct racist dog whistles.

In an editorial for the Nation, occasional Guardian contributor Dave Zirin argues for this perspective:

The fact that the NBA operates this way should not excuse Levenson. Instead it should shine a spotlight on how widespread this kind of thinking has been in the league’s corporate offices.

In Levenson’s case, however, the email doesn’t really sound like an unfortunately worded marketing strategy. It’s hard not to flinch when encountering lines like “I have even bitched that the kiss cam is too black”. At points, the email is just too unnecessarily ugly.

Instead, it reads like something forwarded into your inbox by an uncle who gets all his information from Fox News:

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 [sic] to some whites at our games.

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 [hockey] games sales were nearly triple what they are at hawks games.

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 [sic] seem to go as crazy cheering (another one of my theories) as whites.

If one were asked to offer some sort of defense of the whole exercise, Levenson does show some awareness throughout the email. He throws in a “this is obviously a sensitive topic” and ends with “I am rambling and could probably go on forever”. That closing line, at least, is something everyone can agree on.

But he should be commended for self-reporting, right?

If that’s what happened, sure, maybe a little.

Levenson’s apology seems to show genuine remorse:

If you’re angry about what I wrote, you should be. 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.

The story that the Hawks owner turned himself over to the mercy of the commissioner, however, doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny. Yahoo Sport’s Adrian Wojnarowski, who has more insider knowledge than any other NBA writer out there, cast doubt on this almost immediately:

The NBA and Levenson say he self-reported the email, but a high-ranking league official with direct knowledge of the probe told Yahoo Sports on Sunday that wasn’t completely accurate, that the email had come back to haunt the owner within his organization.

“Semantics”, the source called the NBA’s insistence of a self-reporting scenario.

Wojnarowski’s version of events was backed up by an ESPN report. According to Brian Windhorst of that organisation, the whole affair began after a meeting where Hawks general manager Danny Ferry quoted an uncensored racial remark from an outside source. (Koonin has said that Ferry will also be disciplined.)

This was soon after the Sterling scandal had broken. So there was an investigation within the Hawks organization, to root out any damaging dirt. It was, reportedly, during this investigation that the offending email was uncovered.

Almost certainly, this was about getting ahead of the story, knowing the email in question would, inevitably, leak. By all accounts, however, Levenson’s decision to sell off his share of the team was in fact his own.

Wait, what’s actually going on here?

— Jeff Zillgitt (@JeffZillgitt) September 7, 2014

Even before Sterling situation erupted, there was some talk that Bruce Levenson would explore selling his controlling interest of Hawks.

Well, it certainly seems doubtful that Levenson would have been so ready to resign had the Hawks not been lagging behind other NBA franchises in turning a profit. Levenson has attempted to sell his portion before, to LA businessman Alex Meruelo in 2011, a transaction which fell through.

The NBA landscape has changed since. The Milwaukee Bucks, the worst team in the league last season, were sold for $550m in April; a few months later, Sterling’s Clippers sold for a record-breaking $2bn. It’s a seller’s market, to put it mildly.

All of this points to the possibility that Levenson has discovered an unprecedented, if embarrassing, new type of exit strategy. Knowing the email would make remaining part of the Atlanta ownership difficult, he may have seen this as an ideal time to cash out while ahead. He may not be the last owner to do so in the post-Sterling NBA. If so, it’s hard to blame him.

So the Hawks are moving to Seattle, right?

At first glance, it looks like a perfect fit. Attendances have long suggested that Atlanta might not be the right place for a professional basketball team. Seattle has been desperate to replace its departed and increasingly romanticized SuperSonics ever since Oklahoma City rechristened them the Thunder in 2008. In 2013, the city almost acquired the Sacramento Kings from the Maloof family, before the NBA rejected the deal.

Plus, Atlanta Spirit eventually sold the NHL Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg, a much more logical hockey market, where they became the Jets. The company would not be afraid to move a second professional team to a more appropriate environment.

As seems to be the case with everything about the franchise, though, money might make such a move unlikely. For starters, whoever owned the Hawks would owe Atlanta a $75m early termination fee if they left Philips Arena before the 2018-19 season. Oh, and they would have to pay off some outstanding bonds too. Barring a substantial overpay, it looks probable the Hawks will stay in Atlanta.

The next owner or owners would then have to deal with the same attendance issues with which Levenson attempted to deal in his email. One hopes that when such new owners do emerge, they take a different approach.