When Sportsmen Behave Badly -- Again

Again the sports world is rattled by men behaving badly, but this time with a twist: NFL player Ray Rice tried to stay when he should have gone, while NBA team owner Bruce Levenson left despite good reasons for him to stick around.

The only good thing to be said about Rice's case is the argument it makes for security cameras.

The Baltimore Ravens terminated the 225-pound running back's contract -- and the NFL suspended him "indefinitely" -- on Monday after video was released from an elevator security camera of Rice punching Janay Palmer (then his fiancee, now his wife) with his powerful left hook.

They could have done that months ago, after a video showed Rice dragging an apparently unconscious Palmer out of the elevator in Atlantic City. But Commissioner Roger Goodell only suspended him for a ridiculously mild two games in a desperate attempt to protect his image and playing eligibility.

Amazingly, Palmer later stood by Rice in a later news conference and actually apologized for whatever role she played in Ray's downfall. This week she blamed the media in an Instagram post, according to the Baltimore Sun, for her husband's dismissal and suspension.

Whatever may be going on in her mind, the sight of her defending Rice in light of the video gives a new urgency to the countless other reported cases of abused women who nevertheless stand by their men. It also makes one wonder about the countless other cases that are not reported. For that, we can thank a security camera.

The case of Bruce Levenson, who has led the ownership group of the Atlanta Hawks since 2004, sends very different, yet similarly important messages. He appears to be a victim of his own honesty, punished for something that in my view has become a bit more of a sin than it ought to be: racial candor.

He informed NBA commissioner Adam Silver on Saturday that he intended to sell the team, ending a league investigation into an email written by Levenson. It detailed his thoughts to fellow Hawks executives on how the team could attract more white fans.

Levenson wonders, for example, whether the emphasis at games on hip-hop and gospel music, the fact that the cheerleaders are black, the kiss-cams focus on black fans, and timeout contestants are always black is a turn-off to white fans.

That may sound a lot like Donald Sterling's famously taped rant about black people at his games, which resulted his selling his controlling interest in the Los Angeles Clippers.

But, after reading the email, I agree with a better authority than I am, former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who writes in a Time.com essay that "Levenson is no Donald Sterling."

The questions Levenson raises, although clumsily at times, sound reasonable in light of marketing and racial realities. "Don't you think every corporation in America that is trying to attract a more diverse customer base," Abdul-Jabbar writes, "is discussing how to feature more blacks or Asians or Latinos in their TV ads."

Indeed, it is hard for me to tell what Levenson did that was so wrong. It seems to me as an African-American that if anyone should feel insulted by his remarks, it might be white people, particularly Georgia white people, who he suggests are more nervous about diversity than their counterparts in most other NBA cities. "My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites," he wrote, "and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base."

But Jason Walker, a Hawks fan and writer for the SB Nation Peachtree Hoops website, blames other problems for low turnout, such as high prices, Atlanta's notorious traffic jams, competition from football and baseball and, perhaps foremost, the team's lack of a riveting superstar.

That sounds reasonable, too. What troubles me most is not that Levenson raised the issues, correctly or not, but that he's being punished for it. We need more frank discussions about race between reasonable people these days, even when some of the views expressed are wrong. That's how misguided views get exposed and, one hopes, corrected.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.