Atlanta Hawk's majority owner Bruce Levenson is the first owner to be claimed by the slippery slope Mark Cuban alluded to after the Donald Sterling situation. If all of the NBA owners are going to be forced to give up their teams for wanting their arena to be "less black," grab some popcorn. This is gonna get good. They are claiming Levenson self-reported, but he only self-reported after an investigation was launched into the Hawks after Danny Ferry read aloud a
racist scouting report of Luol Deng on a conference call. Ferry is quoted, "He's got some African in him. And I don't say that in a bad way." I'll start the countdown on Ferry's numbered days with the Hawks, and I think a fair over/under would be opening night of the NBA season. I'll round up to Halloween 2014 with my guarantee that Danny Ferry is history.
Everyone knows I especially appreciate it when scumbags attempt to take the high road after being caught red-handed, and Levenson's self-reporting is case in point. Adam Silver is lucky Levenson wanted out of the organization, because the discovery process would surely portray David Stern & the NBA in an awful light regarding these exact topics. Just ask for the emails from right before the new NBA dress code "Allen Iverson Rule" was enacted in 2005.
Nevermind... You can keep your team.
Levenson's email is clearly offensive (Read: no fathers & sons), but for the most part, he just seems like a desperate marketer. That he wrote this essay on his iPad is the craziest part to me.
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 offering 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 significant season ticket base.
Please don't get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arena
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 giveaways 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 winning 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
