Is this email racist

londonfog said:
LOL...I was thinking you were talking about another sentence.
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There aren't any other sentences using those words you moron. Just admit you have the education of a third grader. Or admit you just aren't very good with words, anything but making up some stupid excuse that is easily proved wrong.
 
londonfog said:
Yeah you don't want to have an honest conversation, you just want to talk shit and raise hell..not tonight my friend
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You say its because there are no good players, the owner says its because there are no white people. Who are you arguing with?
 
I've been to a lot of Hawks games and it seems most of the fans are from somewhere else. They are consistently in the playoffs and you can walk up and purchase playoff tickets at game time. Growing up in Detroit this shocked me.

I heard people bitching because the braves only won 1 world series but all I could think was 15 straight years in the playoffs, a Detroit fan would kill for that. The Lions sell out every game if that says anything about what diehards we are.

There is no loyalty for pro sports in GA without championships. College and high school sports have way more support.

If I were the Atlanta owner, I would try to get as many of the famous people in the area to the games. That will bring casual fans just to looky-loo. There are a lot of recognizable faces in the area.

I honestly believe that the biggest issue is that most people living in Atlanta are not from there.

Edit: for London, consistently in the playoffs does mean they are a great team, I agree with you that if they were in the west, suck would be more apt.
 
NoDrama said:
So what you're saying is that all blacks are poor, isthataboutrite?
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ChesusRice said:
Another NBA owner forced to sell

From: Bruce Levenson
To: Ferry, Danny
CC: Foreman, Todd (ucg.com); Peskowitz, Ed (ucg.com)
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 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 giveways 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 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.
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There is nothing racist in that e-mail.

Racists believe that blacks are an inferior race genetically and work to separated themselves from them.

This guy is bitching because black people as a group are generally cheap and not on time... Their culture is different and it has an effect upon his *world* He is simply pointing it out and talking about it.

The problem isnt the blacks, it is the lack of demand for tickets for the games.
 
londonfog said:
Guy the Hawks have poor sales because they have a poor team ownership that does not invest in quality players. They wasted years of money on Joe Johnson, at one point paying him more then Kobe or Lebron..Dumb team with even dumber management. Ferry best move was unloading Johnson on the Nets. You don't build a fan base with a sorry team. You have to at one point WIN.
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You could be right, I don't follow the National Ballet of Africa (NBA) much.

But chappy teams in big cities have done well in spite of poor management. Cubs, Red Socks, Jets, and others.
 
ginwilly said:
I've been to a lot of Hawks games and it seems most of the fans are from somewhere else. They are consistently in the playoffs and you can walk up and purchase playoff tickets at game time. Growing up in Detroit this shocked me.

I heard people bitching because the braves only won 1 world series but all I could think was 15 straight years in the playoffs, a Detroit fan would kill for that. The Lions sell out every game if that says anything about what diehards we are.

There is no loyalty for pro sports in GA without championships. College and high school sports have way more support.

If I were the Atlanta owner, I would try to get as many of the famous people in the area to the games. That will bring casual fans just to looky-loo. There are a lot of recognizable faces in the area.

I honestly believe that the biggest issue is that most people living in Atlanta are not from there.

Edit: for London, consistently in the playoffs does mean they are a great team, I agree with you that if they were in the west, suck would be more apt.
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In order to sell tickets you have to have the someone the fans wants to see. We both agree on this. The owner does not. He does not understand his fan base and what he needs to do to build the base. The people who do come are just looking for a cheap night out or to see the other team. Getting some marquee players like the Bad Boys did would be a great start. Even the Lions have Megatron a.k.a. Calvin Johnson which is a true ticket seller. Hawks have NOTHING. GO HEAT!!!

to your Edit: I agree consistently in the playoffs in the EAST means nothing. First round exits in the East means you actually suck as an NBA team... a la Hawks. The West are beast
 
If there is one thing that says your team sucks its making the playoffs every season for 7 years in a row.

You know how you know you suck at a sport? By being invited to the Olympics but not winning the gold.
 
Know how you have a good team? Good teamwork.

You can have the most talented players in the world, but a team cannot win with a bunch of individuals out there all trying to make themselves look good. A team can only win if they work as a TEAM.

Having one or two good players on the team isn't going to win the championship.
 
Making it to the playoffs is nothing in the East. The East has been soft since after the Jordan,Ewing,Isiah, Bird days.
The West playoffs are much harder...most people who know basketball understand this and would agree.
A great NBA team can consist of two great players and a supporting cast. Example: Jordan and Pippin, Kobe and Shaq, Duncan and Parker, Karl Malone and John Stockton... in which The Hawks have none of these.

I personally just think the owner wants to sell the team seeing it as the easy way out of the struggling Hawks
Interesting read here:
http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/9/7/6117603/bruce-levenson-racist-email-hawks-owner-sale
 
londonfog said:
Making it to the playoffs is nothing in the East. The East has been soft since after the Jordan,Ewing,Isiah, Bird days.
The West playoffs are much harder...most people who know basketball understand this and would agree.
A great NBA team can consist of two great players and a supporting cast. Example: Jordan and Pippin, Kobe and Shaq, Duncan and Parker, Karl Malone and John Stockton... in which The Hawks have none of these.

I personally just think the owner wants to sell the team seeing it as the easy way out of the struggling Hawks
Interesting read here:
http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/9/7/6117603/bruce-levenson-racist-email-hawks-owner-sale
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Yeah the south has more college fans of both football and basketball than the pros because the college sport scene isn't completely run by profit and loss statements. And I think your argument has a lot of merit. I think this is mostly because the western states have all the money and can basically bribe all the talent to play for them instead of poorer southern states.

But hey, the south still has NASCAR.

The owners problem statistically points to the fact that white people buy the season tickets, and they want season tickets because they can get more ROI on a known income stream than an unknown one. which is what you get when you sell the season tickets.
 
londonfog said:
In order to sell tickets you have to have the someone the fans wants to see. We both agree on this. The owner does not. He does not understand his fan base and what he needs to do to build the base. The people who do come are just looking for a cheap night out or to see the other team. Getting some marquee players like the Bad Boys did would be a great start. Even the Lions have Megatron a.k.a. Calvin Johnson which is a true ticket seller. Hawks have NOTHING. GO HEAT!!!

to your Edit: I agree consistently in the playoffs in the EAST means nothing. First round exits in the East means you actually suck as an NBA team... a la Hawks. The West are beast
Click to expand...

Back on the topic of the Hawks ownership. I think he's approaching it a bit bigoted. He really doesn't understand the city. That's the one thing ownership in Detroit does well is put together a team that reflects the city. Detroit will always have blue collar hard working teams, LA will always try to have flashy exciting teams. Atlanta being the heart and soul of hip hop, the ownership needs to capitalize on that.

I'd sell a percentage to one of the many local legends like Usher. I'd hire a consultant to the change the uniforms to reflect more of a hip hop culture. Look what happened when the fab five came out in baggy shorts, MI unis became the number 1 sellers in the country. Court side seats with a few local celebs would fill the place. There are two ways to fill seats in Atl., have a championship team, or make it cool to be seen there.

If they could get an Iverson type personality, people would flock there. The ownership is wrong thinking about white people when he needs to be thinking about Atlanta people. If Usher, Big Boi, Andre, Evander Holyfield, Jeff Foxworthy, some country star (chose from many) among others were courtside, Hawk tickets would be like gold.
 
I dont see nothing racist in that email. I see a guys opinion about the demographics of the crowd which is empirically correct. Blacks dont have the same amount of money as other groups.
 
Cheezus, you've obviously never been to metro Atlanta. Buckhead has predominantly black neighborhoods with average incomes over 300K. There is money in the area and blacks do better than most major cities. Atlanta is a very metropolitan town. Like I said before, people move there from all over. It's easily one of my favorite cities and if not for the almost unbearable at times weather, it would be my top.

The issue isn't not enough white people coming, the issue is the product is boring to the would be patrons. Too many ways to spend money in metro Atlanta than to watch a mediocre team lose in the 4th.

When Dominque was flying, the Omni was rocking.
 
londonfog said:
In order to sell tickets you have to have the someone the fans wants to see. We both agree on this. The owner does not. He does not understand his fan base and what he needs to do to build the base. The people who do come are just looking for a cheap night out or to see the other team. Getting some marquee players like the Bad Boys did would be a great start. Even the Lions have Megatron a.k.a. Calvin Johnson which is a true ticket seller. Hawks have NOTHING. GO HEAT!!!

to your Edit: I agree consistently in the playoffs in the EAST means nothing. First round exits in the East means you actually suck as an NBA team... a la Hawks. The West are beast
Click to expand...
White people wouldn't go to Thrashers hockey games, either...
 
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