April 5, 2001

Fighting the Human Struggle on the Field

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“All sports are contrived,” or at least that’s what Dallas Mavericks owner and technology mogul Mark Cuban said in Dan Patrick’s Outtakes from the April 18th issue of ESPN the magazine.

And no other person would understand the triviality of athletics better than Cuban. He wallows in the media circus around his team creating controversy on a regular basis. He storms the court, fights with the refs, accumulates more fines than Darryl Strawberry, and celebrates with the team, all in the hopes of living out his childhood fantasy.

Isn’t that what you would expect from a nouveau riche bachelor, whose head was chained to a laptop until a few years ago? He was that dorky kid who stood on the sidelines during recess, never allowed to enter a pickup game. Now the same social reject sits courtside and forces his presence over one dozen of the most popular people in the U.S., perhaps the world.

Of course his assertion can quickly be supported in the mockery he makes of his ownership on a weekly basis. You know you’ve reached a new low when Dennis Rodman publicly criticizes your behavior.

But are sports really contrived? They’re entertainment, perpetuated by the gazillion dollar market it spawned.

Yet there is more than that —