Atlanta Hawks Owner Sells Team After Furor Over Racially Charged Emails
The NBA’s Atlanta Hawks are set to be sold to a group led by businessman Tony Ressler, the team announced on Wednesday, in a deal precipitated by the release last year of a racially charged email by the team’s current owner.
The deal, which must be approved by the NBA Board of Governors, comes after the team’s majority owner, Bruce Levenson, put it on the market after an email he sent to team officials complaining of black fans driving down white attendance at games became public.
Terms of the deal, which includes operation of Philips Arena, where the team plays, were not made public. But the sale price was reported by news outlets as between $730 million and $850 million.
“We are honored and thrilled to have been chosen to become the new stewards of the Hawks,” Ressler said in a statement. He is the co-founder of Ares Management LP, an investment firm.
Former NBA All-Star Grant Hill and Spanx founder Sara Blakely are among the minority shareholders in Ressler’s ownership group.
The sale, if approved, will mark the end of a saga that began with the publication last September of a 2012 email from Levenson, in which he said the team’s ticket sales were lagging because its black fan base was keeping whites away from games.
The comments came to light as the NBA was embroiled in a scandal over recordings of then-Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist comments to a female friend. Levenson had emerged as a major Sterling critic.
The Hawks’ general manager, Danny Ferry, has also been on indefinite leave since last September after making racially insensitive remarks during a conference call.
After Levenson’s email became public, he quickly handed control of the team over to its chief executive officer, Steve Koonin.
The NBA in January approved plans to sell the franchise and it was announced the team would remain in Atlanta.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s office declined to comment on word of the deal.
Ressler, co-founder of Ares Management LP, an investment firm, was a finalist to purchase the Clippers last spring.
The Hawks are in the first round of the NBA playoffs after finishing first in the Eastern Conference.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
