The Mixture Could Really Stir the Pot at Wrigley!
“Wait till next year” came later than usual in 2007 for us Cub fans. While we’re waiting, some of us are turning our attention to billionaire Mark Cuban and his interest in buying the team. Given his success in the business world and with the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban looks like he could reverse the curse and save the lovable losers from another full century of despair.
But at what price?
Cuban, a Pittsburgh-area native, made his money in computers, but he’s equal parts aspiring jock and tinkering geek. A graduate of the University of Indiana’s Kelley School of Business, Cuban went on to create a number of successful ventures, before co-founding Broadcast.com along with fellow Kelley-grad Todd Wagner. The online service combined his passion for sports with his devotion to technological innovation, delivering game audio to fans via the Web. After four years of business, they sold their company to Yahoo.com, in exchange for nearly $6 billion in Yahoo stock. Cuban’s net worth is now upwards of 2.3 billion dollars.
Besides his recent fame from fox-trotting on Dancing With the Stars, Cuban has made a name for himself as the mercurial owner of the Dallas Mavericks, leaping from his courtside seat to kick at the shoes of NBA officials (and amassing over a million dollars in fines). Fans love him or hate him, but they all have to admit that, yes, since he bought the Mavs from Ross Perot, Jr., for $285 million, his very hands-on style has contributed to a team turnaround. That is to say, the team has made the playoffs every year since Cuban arrived, even made it to the big dance once, but no championship. During Cuban’s tenure, however, Dallas has seen new uniforms (one designed by P. Diddy), a new logo, and a new stadium. Cuban’s team/investment is now valued at $463 million.
“I love to compete,” Cuban says in an Indiana U Spotlight profile, “and business is the ultimate sport. The level of competition in the business world blows away anything I have seen in professional sports.” This passion undoubtedly stems from Cuban’s religion, Objectivism, the antifaith of the late Russian novelist ice queen Ayn Rand. Rand left Soviet Russia in 1926 and came to New York City, where she worshiped the great monuments of capitalism she found in Manhattan: “I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline, the sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?”
Working in Hollywood, she soon discovered that she was her own god and crafted a philosophical religion focused on naked individualism, self-centeredness (egoism), and a rejection of altruism (any personal sacrifice for the good of others). The sacred books of her religion came from her own hand—her best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In Randland, good is achieved when an individual says “the hell with traditions,” rationally defines his own right and wrong, then worships and serves himself at the expense of everything else. Think Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street (“Greed is good”).
Mark Cuban loves The Fountainhead so much that, when he rereads it at great length, he gets over-motivated, “jittery.” “It’s about the strength of the individual,” he told Austin’s American-Statesman. “You define yourself by yourself, not how other people see you.” That kind of self-definition is behind the Cuban branding of the Mavericks, which he sees as one of reasons his team/investment has become so profitable. The schtick with the refs, Dancing With the Stars, you name it—it’s all about maintaining his status as the team’s celebrity figurehead in order to draw attention to his investment. In addition to the money, Cuban sees the Mavericks as his own personal “emotional release.” So it’s worth spending a few extra shekels for the satisfaction of winning.
And now Cuban wants to go to the home of Elwood Blues to get a bigger fix. The Cubs are “iconic,” he told The Score’s Mike North. “When I went to the Cubbies game the other night . . . I sat in the bleachers, . . . and [if I buy the team] I’ll have a seat marked out for me and my friends.” He’s gone to Murphy’s. He even “got to meet Jerry Springer.” He loves the Cubs’ culture. He’s ready to adopt the lovable losers, throw back enemy home-run balls, and absorb the billy goat, Pat and Ron, “hey-hey!” “let’s play two,” Bartman, and the busted boom-box into the Mark Cuban universe.
Then again, he attributes his success with the Mavericks to his willingness to go in and “change the culture.” What could that mean for the Northsiders? Will night games turn into the Mark Cuban Show? Will Pat Hughes be forced to describe the fashion designs of P. Diddy after the National Anthem? Will Wrigley Field be exchanged for a mega-stadium in Elgin? That depends on whom you ask. “My personal perspective as a fan, not as a potential owner, is that you can’t change Wrigley, no matter what. . . . And speaking as Mark Cuban the Cubs fan, I hope that nothing happens to Wrigley Field.” Of course, he admitted to Mike North that Mark Cuban the Cubs fan is a relatively new creation.
Speaking as Mark Cuban the Objectivist, he gave portfolio.com’s Lloyd Grove the Ayn Rand perspective on baseball. When Grove recently asked Cuban to clarify his take on Barry Bonds, it was the voice of John Galt that replied: “In reference to exploiting any means possible, that is an individual’s choice. Each person lives with the decisions they make. The only certainty is that no one really cares about how and why others, whether it’s Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, or you-name-it, make the decisions they make, because they are nothing more or less than entertainers to us. Just because the media depends on glorifying it for ratings and sales, doesn’t make it anything more than it really is. All you have to do is ask when a scandal had a negative impact on a sport or entertainment business.”
What about all of those asterisks and boos? No big deal. Cuban’s used to that sort of thing himself, and he knows just how much the media hates an achiever who defines his own morality. Besides, “When my kids or grandkids look back on Barry Bonds, they will know him as the home run champ. They won’t invest the energy to try to find out what the context of the record was any more than any of us explore the context of when Ruth broke the record.”
Actually, Cub fans do invest energy in thinking about context. We like our culture. And we remember what happened to the last celebrity egoist in a Cub uniform who believed in “exploiting any means possible” and who tried to convince everyone that Wrigley Field was “his house.”
Aaron D. Wolf is the associate editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture (www.chroniclesmagazine.org), published by The Rockford Institute