Owner of Atlanta Hawks self admits to NBA that he wrote a racist letter and "outs" himself.

League is looking for a new buyer.

Here is the email he sent in 2012

meh

I think we should punish him by giving him ****loads of cash for his team.

This is just LOGICAL and INTELLECTUAL commentary. Move along everyone.

To be clear, i think its pretty meh, i only skim read but it seems to me that he is saying that his main base are a bunch of racists and they need to do something to attract them back. I don't know why you want racists at your game, but isn't as bad as the sterling crap.

He was probably just playing Devil's Advocate for his management team of mensa's.

I don't think this letter is racist.

Are we allowed to discriminate against blacks to boost the bottom line?

Isn't this what David Stern has been doing to the NBA for the last 30 years? Trying to attract more affluent whites to the games and raising revenue?

I don't think it's racist. Of course, I'm considered a notorious apologist for racists in some quarters, so grain of salt.

This all stinks of ulterior motive as others have noted. He wants to sell the team.

Based on the Commissioner's statement: I was expecting something much more blatantly offensive. On the one hand, it sounds pretty nefarious that the white owner basically said, "We've got 70% black people at our games - let's institute policies to get that number down below 40%." On the other hand, his motivation is clearly financial - he thinks they can sell more season tickets if they provide a more "comfortable" game experience for white fans. Verdict: meh.

Yeah, taken in a vacuum it's pretty bad, but as you say, the reason he wants to do that is because he can't think of any other way to get more people/white people to show up. He seems completely confounded at the idea of white people not wanting to go to a game lots of black people are at, but seems to be spitballing trying to come up with causes/solutions. "White southerners are racist," doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption given history. And the present.

I think there's a lot of value in seeing these types of opinions.

Not really racist, but a good reflection of the draconian economic realities created by racism.

It's an interesting parallel to the WWE, which caught some heat recently for never having had a champion who self-IDed as black (The Rock is part black, but doesn't really ID as such). Part of that is just some overt racism, but a huge part of that is that they know they'll make less money from their fan base with a black champions.

At the same time as a lot of idiots are trying to claim that racism isn't a problem, we still have major organizations making decisions based around catering to racist fans.

A good reminder we've still got some work to do.

Didn't Booker T win the championship at one point?

Bitching that the "kiss cam" is too black is still pretty racist.

Why this and not just "trying to attract moire affluent people"?

Story was about the WWE belt, not the former WCW belt, which Booker did win.

I mean the guy is super likely to be racist, but I read that as "not because it personally offended me, but because it bothered our white fans". It's still horrible, but I guess for me "old rich white guy is racist" is a lot less interesting takeaway than "look at what people with money and power do and say because they have to cater to racists, who still exist you stupid mother****ers arguing otherwise".

I thought he said it was the best in the league?

Stern pretty unambiguously was appealing to whitey with his dress code changes. It's a fair read to suggest that he was specifically concerned with growing/maintaining his white fan base.

Is bitching about having late arriving fans his codeword for CPT?

Representing the racist pov(?). I'm more interested in the letter being 2 years old. Who released the letter?

Fans are late and they don't wear jerseys is a pretty funny thing to worry about. What does that affect other than his image around other owners?

Do advertisers pull out because ticket sales are up but so is tardiness?

He self-reported this email.

My guess is that this would have been part of discovery in Sterling's complaint against the NBA.

I think the best-case scenario for team executives is to always have a packed arena of boisterous superfans wearing team jerseys. Even if a lot of tickets are sold, it looks bad if the TV audience sees an mostly empty arena at the end of the first quarter.

In the letter he even says "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."

https://sports.yahoo.com/news/source...162901096.html

Yes, he probably is racist.

I agree with you, except that the NBA dress code was definitely ambiguous. I doubt Stern would ever, even in closed door, all-white deliberations, say anything like "We've got to appeal to white guys!" That may have been his intent, but he wasn't dumb enough to ever say it.

Well it would be something worth discussing when your team is bottom in the league in attendance rankings (25th over 10 years), your ticket prices suck and you're desperate to try any angle.

No...This just seems to be a ploy to get MAX value for his franchise when he is 'forced' to sell it.