Professional Courtesy

What an interesting way to start getting ready for the upcoming NBA season—Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has agreed to donate $10 million to various women’s causes.  Cuban is doing this either out of the goodness of his heart or to avoid an NBA fine of that or a greater amount.

It seems that people—males, specifically—in the Dallas front office have had a hard time distinguishing between sexual harassment and the pick-and-roll.  There’s been a shakeup, individuals hired and fired, along with promises the Mavericks will do better by women in the future.  Cuban, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, admits he should have been paying greater attention to what was going on with his team.

Yes, he should have, just as the media should revisit all the attention it’s showered on Cuban as an “outside the box” businessman and team owner.  Sportswriters could never get enough of the opinionated Cuban, who has been fined in excess of $2.2 million by the NBA for comments and actions the league has deemed detrimental to the game.  Let it be noted I think Cuban has a right to say what he wants about basketball and not be fined for it.  It’s not like he’s shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

I also think the media—sports, news and entertainment combined—likes nothing so much as an oversized personality.  Donald Trump made reporters’ job easy as well as entertaining, at least in the beginning; the serious journalism kicked in later, too late, some would say.  It’s the same with Cuban, yet another dot-com billionaire who draws cameras and mics like bees to pollen.

Cuban threw money at his team, and they won a championship in 2011, so he’s a genius (whose teams have lost in the first round of the playoffs four times since).  He has ideas he’s not afraid to share about how making money, so he gets a spot on reality TV, Shark Tank, to be exact.  And he talked enough to be considered worth putting on either national ticket as vice president in 2016.  It’s reasonable to assume he would have approached national office the way he has the Mavericks, in which case, Heaven help us.

The San Antonio Spurs are zen to Cuban’s chaos.  They’re owned by an entertainment group headed up by a woman, Juliana Hawn Holt, and coached by Gregg Popovich, who has no problem employing a woman—former WNBA star Becky Hammon–as an assistant coach.  To the best of my knowledge, no one has complained about the Spurs’ front office the way they have the Mavericks.’

Why do you think that is?