Luke Kornet vs. Magic City: An Atlanta Hawks Controversy

When Luke Kornet Became the League’s Moral Voice?

While some monitor trivial events like the Iran War, I’m here to relay word of the Luke Kornet vs. Magic City strip club imbroglio. It’s almost an AI generated perfect controversy. We’ve got Kornet, a central casting stiff White guy Spurs center speaking out against the Atlanta Hawks promoting a famously Black strip club.

Summary via Dr. Perplexity:

San Antonio Spurs center Luke Kornet publicly condemned the Atlanta Hawks for planning a “Magic City Night/Magic City Monday” promotion honoring Atlanta strip club Magic City, arguing in a blog post and subsequent comments that an NBA team aligning itself with a strip club disrespects women, undermines the league’s family‑friendly image, and amounts to tacit approval of potential exploitation, while critics accused him of moral grandstanding and defenders of the event framed Magic City as a legitimate and influential part of Atlanta’s cultural and musical scene.

I think Kornet is largely correct, but it’s uncool to earnestly talk about this situation, let alone blog about it. Considering how easy a target he is (White role player speaking out to criticize promotion of Black strip club), I was surprised to see pockets of support for his message across racial lines. Magic City is cool and Luke Kornet is not, Kornet was voicing a sane objection here. I was happy to see some reasonable people react reasonably to it.

And I say that as someone who respects Magic City. No, I’ve never been there, but I’m impressed by how they have the strippers do NBA-style walk-ins. Seriously. There’s a marketing/artistic brilliance to portraying the strippers as though they’re high level athletes, sauntering in to compete as sexual gladiators. Magic City must be doing something right because it’s about as famous as a strip club can get. An explicit NBA promotion of the club is a little too mainstream, perhaps. From Kornet:

This week the Atlanta Hawks “announced a special one-night collaboration to celebrate the city’s iconic cultural institution Magic City” during the team’s home game against Orlando on Monday, March 16. In its press release the Hawks failed to acknowledge that this place is, as the business itself boasts, “Atlanta’s premier strip club.” Given this fact, I would like to respectfully ask that the Atlanta Hawks cancel this promotional night with Magic City.

The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love.

This is where Kornet was particularly controversial. While we theoretically want men to “protect and esteem women,” there’s a modern stigma against overtly stating that as a goal. There’s an even bigger stigma against men voicing opinions about women’s occupational choices, as we saw with Harrison Butker’s speech. We’ve got a doublethink on “sex work” where there’s social pressure to either affirm, or at least not criticize, a woman’s decision to do it, but deep down, 99 percent of people wouldn’t want their family members engaged in it. It’s a classic case of “luxury beliefs,” where pundits find public virtue in being non judgmental about activities they privately avoid at all costs.

Kornet continues:

Allowing this night to go forward without protest would reflect poorly on us as an NBA community, specifically in being complicit in the potential objectification and mistreatment of women in our society.

Regardless of how a woman finds her way into the adult entertainment industry, many in this space experience abuse, harassment, and violence to which they should never be subjected.

Well yes. While it’s theoretically possible that a woman strips in the evenings to put herself through business school, it’s far more plausible that she strips in the evenings as a prelude to cocaine addiction and escalating forms of drug seeking degradation. Hollywood can put a sanitized gloss on stripper life, but it’s a pretty rough way to make a living, one that doesn’t typically select for people who have it together. Draymond Green perhaps disagrees with that sort of framing, though. His comment on Kornet:

I think to point out that they have esteem issues because that's the line of work they chose, I actually think is less protective of women because you're condemning something – it's actually an art. I don't know if you've ever been, but if you see it in action, it's actually a form of art – that some choose to indulge in and some choose not to indulge in.

From what I read, Magic City is higher class than other strip clubs and has made a brand about being more Atlanta networking institution than strip club. Still, it appears to be a strip club, and we typically don’t see “sex work” centrally promoted NBA games.

For a comparison, Cigars can be a fun high status vice, but I couldn’t see myself taking my son to “Cigar Night!” at Chase Center. I say it with the understanding that there are gambling ads everywhere now, but there’s a subjective limit to how much vice we tolerate around kids. When the game night revolves around promoting the greatness of strippers, it’s reasonable to say that’s too much.

Perhaps the more compelling case from Kornet wouldn’t be about protecting “women,” but instead one of appropriateness. Big league sports are supposed to be family friendly entertainment. Sure, nobody is forcing you to attend Magic City Night with your children, but this sort of gambit is something we’d typically associate with an age limited venue.

But why are the Hawks going through with this? Well, there’s an aspect of just trying to be cool, I guess, but this franchise has its own particular predicament. When I was at ESPN, we had access to fascinating survey data. One detail that stuck with me was just how amazingly unpopular the Atlanta Hawks were with Black NBA fans. In 2010, our research showed that among Black Atlantans who described themselves as “avid NBA fans,” only 14 percent were fans of the Hawks. I’ve heard explanations floated for how this happened and the Dominique Wilkins trade gets brought up, but the bottom line is that this franchise has been in a long rut with the city’s majority demographic.

When I see the Magic City promotion, I read it as just more evidence of a longstanding desperation. The team hasn’t connected locally after decades of trying. The Hawks have never been truly great, but there have been long stretches of competence that barely moved the needle at home. So this is a wild play for some semblance of connectivity. It won’t work because it’s the Atlanta Hawks, but they are doing it because they’re the Atlanta Hawks.