Here is a funny headline from the CBS Sports website: "Hawks will not cancel 'Magic City' event despite Luke Kornet's public plea." Dang! My faith in Luke Kornet's power to halt the promotional machinery of multibillion-dollar professional sports franchises with mildly worded blog posts may never recover from this. They just ignored his plea!
Let's back up. The Atlanta Hawks announced, a little over a week ago, that their March 16 home game against the Orlando Magic would also be "Magic City Monday," honoring what the official press release calls the "iconic cultural institution" Magic City, which the official press release carefully does not identify as, but which is, a famous Atlanta strip club, open since 1985 and closely associated with the city's hip-hop scene. Also, Drake (infamously regarded as a culture vulture to that scene) once reportedly had an armored car deliver $100,000 in cash to the club. That is just a fun factoid of dubious provenance and not relevant to this story. It is not mentioned in any of Luke Kornet's pleas.
Magic City is associated with the NBA too, in a funnier way. During the COVID-19 pandemic and abbreviated 2019-20 season, Lou Williams, then with the Los Angeles Clippers, was granted an absence from the locked-down Orlando bubble so that he could attend funeral services in Atlanta; during that absence, photos showed up on Instagram of Williams in a largely empty Magic City, in the middle of an afternoon, with the rapper Jack Harlow. Williams, who later admitted that "as far as the public safety issue goes, I probably could have made a better quality decision," explained that he'd just stopped by the club—"properly masked [...] socially distanced [...] doing everything that I thought was appropriate"—to pick up some takeout food on his way back from the wake, and happened to bump into Harlow while there.
Believe it or not, this actually was pretty credible as explanations for being photographed in a strip club at five in the afternoon during the middle of a pandemic lockdown go: Magic City's lemon pepper chicken wings are famous, and Williams, by then already a sort of Pecos Bill for the NBA, was a famous enjoyer of those wings when he played with the Hawks from 2012–14. After the Magic City incident, Williams—who had to undergo a 10-day quarantine on his return to the bubble—took on the nickname "Lemon Pepper Lou." He came back to the Hawks in 2021 and finished his career there in 2022. The wings are now called "Louwill Lemon Pepper BBQ Wings" on Magic City's menu.
So the Hawks are going to honor Magic City—they'll serve "two versions of their 'world famous' lemon pepper wings"!—on March 16. That's maybe not the very safest of promotional-night concepts, compared to like Martin Luther King Jr. Bobblehead Night: One imagines some number of dorky parents at the game might stammer a bit as they think through whether to lie and tell their kids that Magic City is a famous chicken-wing restaurant while enjoying their chosen version of those Magic City lemon pepper wings, weighed against the risk that those kids will later tell their elementary school class that their favorite restaurant is Magic City and get their parents ostracized from church services.
Still, the place really is tightly woven into Atlanta's music scene, and Atlanta's music scene is tightly woven into Atlanta's cultural identity, and Atlanta hip-hop culture is a huge mover of American popular culture overall, and also the Hawks are playing the Orlando Magic that night and look, it's fine, OK? It's fine. Except that Luke Kornet, who is not on either team, does not think so. Hence the plea.
The "Who is Luke Kornet?" part of this blog will be a bit shorter, I think. Luke Kornet is 30 years old, 7-foot-1, white, and from Kentucky. He was an undrafted free agent after a fairly undistinguished college career at Vanderbilt, and now plays for the San Antonio Spurs, his seventh NBA team in nine pro seasons; he played for two teams in the 2020–21 seasons and three in the 2021–22 season. In 405 professional games, Kornet averages 5.4 points and 3.8 rebounds. Unless he later cures cancer, Kornet's plea to the Atlanta Hawks organization to cancel its Magic City Monday promotion will be the first line in any biography ever written about him, if not the first thing mentioned in the eulogy at his funeral.
Kornet, a vocal practicing Catholic, keeps a little-used Medium blog (10 total posts over the past three years); the most notable thing he'd posted prior to this week was a list of all the Catholic churches he visited during the 2022–23 season, during which he played for the Boston Celtics. On Monday, he posted a blog titled "Concerning the Atlanta Hawks," announcing that he "would like to respectfully ask that the Atlanta Hawks cancel this promotional night with Magic City."
An excerpt from that plea:
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.
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.
I would like to aver that, aside from the slightly weird, archaic use of "esteem" as a verb, nothing in here is all that objectionable, even if you disagree with Kornet's view that the Hawks organization partnering with Magic City is in and of itself an act of misogyny. It's just sorta blandly true that women in the "adult entertainment industry" frequently are subjected to abuse and exploitation, and insofar as Kornet is sincere in his desire to call attention to that for the sake of addressing it, well, at least he is using his platform for good—though the question of whether enforcing the existing stigmas around sex work helps or harms those women is, let's just say, up for discussion.
In any case, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, USA Today, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, Yahoo, and even friggin' The Hill have all had blogs about Luke Kornet's very mild Medium post protesting an Atlanta Hawks promotional night that absolutely none of those publications would so much have acknowledged at all had Kornet not called attention to it, and which the Hawks were never going to so much as consider modifying in any way, let alone canceling, because of the opinions of a journeyman reserve goober who plays his home games halfway across the continent and thinks the NBA should do more to "esteem" women. Kudos, sincerely, to Luke Kornet for speaking his mind, and especially for having done so without dipping into the smarmy "As a Biblical Christian living Biblically through my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ..." register that the sports world's many conservative evangelicals reliably turn to when explaining why they won't wear a rainbow patch on their jerseys to support their LGBTQ neighbors. As pleas go, it could have been worse.
But on the other hand, he probably unintentionally sold some greater number of Louwill Lemon Pepper BBQ Wings than Magic City might otherwise have offloaded between now and March 16; he certainly drew infinitely greater national attention to Magic City Monday than it was going to draw otherwise. Does that redound to the benefit of Magic City's strippers? Is this funny-ironic or sad-ironic? The answer is—hey, look over there, a cool bird. Wow!
