Hawks GM/Owner racist e-mail/phone controversy

[Fafnir]

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/an-exclusive-look-at-hawks-gm-danny-ferry-s-fateful-phone-call-180253404.html

Is the latest information to break, lets keep this one more on topic.

[Donoghus]

Pretty much every party in that article sounds like a scumbag. 

[Endless Paradise]

Pretty much every party in that article sounds like a scumbag.

Yep.  Hence why I said this might even turn out to be worse than the Clippers situation since it seems like an issue permeating the whole front office as opposed to just a single crazy owner (and his wife).

[D.o.s.]

Every NBA front office is now terrified of their jilted minority owners -- Ross Perot Jr. must be pleased.

[Celtics4ever]

I never have liked Ferry and I like him less after reading this article.  Make them both banned from the NBA.   I'm sure Ferry has sn education being a Dukie, their guys that stay usually get a degree.  The owner will get a pile of money and the world is a better place without these two making decisions in the league or anywhere in public.

I read some crazy stuff in one article about the owners thought on the arena attendees.  Here is the offensive email.

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 Edited.  Profanity and masked profanity are against forum rules and may result in discipline.ed 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 p---es 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.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/hawks/2014/09/07/bruce-levenson-racist-email-atlanta-owner-sell-team/15241591/

[D.o.s.]

I'm still with Kareem when it comes to Levenson's email -- although it should be pointed out that his extrapolations make him, at best, an idiot. Ferry's comments (or the scout's comments as read by Ferry) are significantly worse, IMO.

[Endless Paradise]

I'm still with Kareem when it comes to Levenson's email. Ferry's comments (or the scout's comments as read by Ferry) are significantly worse, IMO.

Absolutely.  Levenson's email was merely ignorant, but Ferry's comments were inherently offensive.

[Eja117]

If I'm an NBA team I might want to hire an outside firm to do a private internal audit, and God forbid you find something self report immediately and very contritely. Get ahead of the story before somebody does it for you. And do it now. In the offseason when it affects the team least, and there's the most time to deal with it.
It would be a disaster for the Celts if Danny Ainge were in a situation even slightly like this around the time of the trade deadline or when trying to get free agents.
Given Boston's history and perception it would be even worse for us. Maybe even ask the Governor's office or the NAACP for help and ask for recommendations.

[D.o.s.]

If I'm an NBA team I might want to hire an outside firm to do a private internal audit, and God forbid you find something self report immediately and very contritely. Get ahead of the story before somebody does it for you. And do it now. In the offseason when it affects the team least, and there's the most time to deal with it.
It would be a disaster for the Celts if Danny Ainge were in a situation even slightly like this around the time of the trade deadline or when trying to get free agents.
Given Boston's history and perception it would be even worse for us. Maybe even ask the Governor's office or the NAACP for help and ask for recommendations.

It's probably unrelated, but nestled in one of Zach Lowe's stories about the offseason was an open question about why Atlanta was striking out so hard with free agents -- it's possible that this has been a little more of an open secret than the newest bout of stories would have us believe.

[fairweatherfan]

If I'm an NBA team I might want to hire an outside firm to do a private internal audit, and God forbid you find something self report immediately and very contritely. Get ahead of the story before somebody does it for you. And do it now. In the offseason when it affects the team least, and there's the most time to deal with it.
It would be a disaster for the Celts if Danny Ainge were in a situation even slightly like this around the time of the trade deadline or when trying to get free agents.
Given Boston's history and perception it would be even worse for us. Maybe even ask the Governor's office or the NAACP for help and ask for recommendations.

It's probably unrelated, but nestled in one of Zach Lowe's stories about the offseason was an open question about why Atlanta was striking out so hard with free agents -- it's possible that this has been a little more of an open secret than the newest bout of stories would have us believe.

It's possible but I think it has more to do with the chaotic mess of a power structure they have over there, which has been pretty well-known since the Joe Johnson signing.  And the extremely tepid fan base which has been around a lot longer than that.

[Eja117]

If I'm an NBA team I might want to hire an outside firm to do a private internal audit, and God forbid you find something self report immediately and very contritely. Get ahead of the story before somebody does it for you. And do it now. In the offseason when it affects the team least, and there's the most time to deal with it.
It would be a disaster for the Celts if Danny Ainge were in a situation even slightly like this around the time of the trade deadline or when trying to get free agents.
Given Boston's history and perception it would be even worse for us. Maybe even ask the Governor's office or the NAACP for help and ask for recommendations.

It's probably unrelated, but nestled in one of Zach Lowe's stories about the offseason was an open question about why Atlanta was striking out so hard with free agents -- it's possible that this has been a little more of an open secret than the newest bout of stories would have us believe.

That's a good point and it made me wonder if Deng had actually gotten the offer and it turns out he did. Can't exactly claim discrimination when you're getting the offer, but just because you make an offer doesn't excuse you or anything. You may absolutely be right.

One interesting thing will be if free agents go there if they really clean up their act. I don't remember free agents going there before.

Now that I think about it I don't think this could have played too much into free agent's decisions because they were going to the Clippers previously and supposedly people knew about Sterling.

Idk. But I definitely think this will get deeper before it goes away.

[Endless Paradise]

Recording of the conference call:

http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/atlanta-hawks/2014/sep/11/exclusive-audio-tape-hawks-conference-call/

Edit: there's absolutely no effing way anyone's going to convince me that those weren't Ferry's interjections.  I call complete BS on "I was reading a scouting report!"

[indeedproceed]

After hearing that, I don't think Ferry can at all hide behind the 'it came from another scout's report' bull.

And it just goes to show you, don't use racially charged phrasing. If you take out the African stuff, and keep the rest of it, the report doesn't lose anything aside from a wink wink nudge nudge between some of owners. And assuming the scouting report is reliable, those other concerns are real concerns.

[Ogaju]

listening to that is so much worse than reading about it

[indeedproceed]

Here's a take from Masai Ujuri, who also has a bit of African in him. A different perspective if nothing else.

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/sports/basketball/masai-ujiri-weighs-in-on-the-danny-ferry-controversy/article20558085/?service=mobile