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  "path": "/the-road-to-magic-city-monday-is-paved-with-good-intentions",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-06T18:02:01.000Z",
  "site": "https://defector.com",
  "tags": [
    "NBA",
    "atlanta hawks",
    "Lou Williams",
    "luke kornet",
    "magic city",
    "Pleas",
    "the CBS Sports website",
    "the official press release",
    "later admitted",
    "explained"
  ],
  "textContent": "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!\n\nLet'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.\n\nMagic City is associated with the NBA, too, in a funnier way. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the abbreviated 2019-20 season, Lou Williams, then with the Los Angeles Clippers, requested and 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.",
  "title": "The Road To Magic City Monday Is Paved With Good Intentions"
}