Donald Sterling must be tickled pink now that he has someone to join him in the ranks of racist former NBA team owners. Bruce Levenson, former owner of the Atlanta Hawks, sold his interest in the team after the contents of a 2012 e-mail were made public. In the e-mail Levenson had expressed concern that the Hawks crowd was overwhelmingly black, and wondered if there were a way to reverse that trend. Though Levenson voluntarily shared the e-mail with the NBA, the subsequent investigation revealed the extent to which the NBA is trying to purge their reputation as a plantation league.
Even though Kareem Abdul-Jabaar characterized the contents of the e-mail as nothing more than a business philosophy, the post-Sterling landscape changes the context of certain conversations. That's just the way it is.
In Levenson's case, he chose to voluntarily give up his interest in the Hawks before that option was perhaps no longer available to him (via Sports Illustrated):
"While Levenson exits the NBA in a way designed to save face, he was undoubtedly aware that the NBA could have forced his ouster. As explained at length during the Sterling crisis, the NBA's constitution affords the league broad discretion to remove owners."
The issue is quietly polarizing, some seeing the e-mail as insidious and much worse than Sterling's petulant whining about his unrequited love. Still others think that, while his statements are not ok, were coming from a purely financial standpoint.
In either case, Levenson has publicly apologized and has distanced himself from that rhetoric.
Here is an excerpt of the e-mail (via Washington Post):
"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... There are few fathers and sons at the games... Even [Washington], D.C., with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience."
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