What Atlanta Hawks Owner Shows About Race

.. “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,” Levenson wrote to explain the imperative for new initiatives (among them, less hip-hop during intermissions and “some white cheerleaders”). 

.. 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 phillips 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.

.. The exigencies of profit contribute, perhaps in large part, to Levenson’s use of offensive language—language that regarded people, both players and fans alike, as instruments for delivering revenue. 

A Fighter Abroad

In 1810, a freed slave named Tom Molineaux fought in one of the most important fights in the history of boxing. This is his story.

.. The defenders of boxing thought that, first and foremost, what made the sport worthwhile was that it instilled a sense of fair play. No stabbing an opponent in the back, no attacking a defenseless man. Fight only when both men are up and ready, and in that way, with both combatants given an equal chance under the rules, you can determine which is the better man. Egan, in the dedication to his first collection of boxing writing, illustrates this ideal by telling the story of a British sailor during the capture of Fort Omoa in 1779. The sailor, who had two swords, suddenly came head-to-head with a Spaniard who had none. Rather than kill an unarmed man, the British sailor threw the Spaniard one of his swords to give him a fair chance for his life.

Live to a higher standard: black

Why do you think I’m doing this?’ ” he told me. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know—you hate football players?’ She goes, ‘We’re black, right? You have to be three times as good, so if I let you off the hook you’ll never get to where you want to be.’ ”

.. Outside California, black quarterbacks were still a rarity, and Clarkson bristled at the implicit assumption among N.F.L. scouts that he was just an athlete, not a field general. “I went to a lot of workouts where guys said, ‘Well, can you play safety?’ ” he said. “I’m like, ‘I haven’t played safety in my life.’ ” He dogged it in the forty-yard dash, on purpose. “I was capable of running, probably, a high 4.5, but I ended up running something like a 4.85, so they knew I wasn’t going to be fast enough to play outside the ball,” he said. 

.. Clarkson wound up in Saskatchewan, playing in the Canadian Football League, much the way another Los Angeles native, Warren Moon, who would become the first black Hall of Fame quarterback, had been forced to do. 

..  He was explaining why he planned to hold back his thirteen-year-old son, Connor, “a straight-A student,” having long ago missed the opportunity to postpone, like a good Park Slope parent, the start of kindergarten.