Sticks and stones may break your bones, but if you’re an NBA owner, words can get you thrown out of the league, as Golden State Warriors owner Peter Guber may surely knows. Guber is the latest NBA exec to be targeted after he used the word “hoodish” in an email.
Guber responded to a release from the league noting that the NBA would boast a record 101 players from foreign countries on opening night. The NBA mentioned the five international players on the Warriors roster: Ohnjen Kuzmic and Nemania Nedovic, both from Serbia; Andrew Bogut, from Australia; Leandro Barbosa, from Brazil, and Festus Ezeli, from Nigeria.
Guber emailed: “I’m taking rosetta stone to learn Hungarian, Serbian, Australian, swahili, and hoodish This year. But it’s nice.” Employees of the franchise forwarded the note, which angered one employee, who found it “offensive.” When confronted with his faux pas, Guber, who seems language-challenged, lamely explained, “Someone just brought to my attention that an email I responded to earlier contains the word ‘hoodish,’ which I don’t even think Is a Word, and certainly not the one I intended to use. I intended to type Yiddish. Either my mobile fone autocorrected or it was typed wrong. In any event I regret if anyone was unintendedly offended.”
The same PC monitors targeting Guber already have some notches on their guns, including: Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson, who said he would sell his stake in the team because of racial quotes attributed to him in a 2012 email; Hawks general manager Danny Ferry, who took an indefinite leave of absence after describing Miami Heat forward Luol Deng as a player who “has a little African in him…. Not in a bad way, but he’s like a guy who would have a nice store out front and sell you counterfeit stuff out of the back,” and, most infamously, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, banned from the league and forced to sell the team after the release of a recording in which he told his girlfriend he did not want her taking her black friends to games.
Guber is a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
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