This explains that Charlotte Hornets t-shirt Eric Church was wearing at CMA Fest last week…
It was just announced that the sale of NBA basketball team Charlotte Hornets is going through, as previous majority-owner and NBA legend Michael Jordan has been in talks to sell his majority stake in the team, which he has owned since 2010 and purchased for $180 million.
According to the NBA and Hornets Sports & Entertainment (HSE):
“Chairman Michael Jordan has reached an agreement to sell his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets to a group (“the Buyer Group”) led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall.”
And in addition, the Buyer Group also includes North Carolina natives and recording artists Eric Church and rapper J. Cole, as well as Chris Shumway, Dan Sundheim, Ian Loring, Dyal HomeCourt Partners, and several local Charlotte investors, including Amy Levine Dawson and Damian Mills.
The team was valued at over $1.7 billion, according to Forbes.
Pretty cool that Eric, who grew up not too far from Charlotte in small town Granite Falls, North Carolina as a Hornets fan is now a minority owner of the team:
Jordan, also a North Carolina native (he was born in New York but raised mostly in Wilmington) and UNC Chapel Hill graduate, will retain a minority ownership share of the team, and the transaction still has to go through the approval process with the NBA Board of Governors.
We’ve known that Eric is already good friends with Michael Jordan, as the two have been pictured hanging out together before, so it’s not too crazy to think that maybe that friendship had some influence on Eric’s interest in buying into the team.
If you follow NBA basketball in any way, then you probably know that the Hornets haven’t seen much success since Jordan took over, and even before that, so hopefully this new group can help steer the team in the right direction.
As a Hornets fan myself, I’m at least hoping that’s going to be the case.
And about that shirt Eric wore during his headlining set at Nissan Stadium last week…
