I still love you, Mark Cuban He yells at opponents, pretends like he's part of some sub-cultural of athletes because he owns a basketball team, he picks fights, he throws tantrums, and he will love you forever, but he reserves the God-given right to cross his arms in front of his chest, get in a huff, take his ball and go home.
We all know Mark Cubans. We've seen them, played with them, been friends with them and slowly distanced ourselves from them our whole lives.
They're the kid that will take their ball and go home. They are willing to not play at all rather than lose.
Mark Cuban HATES blogs. That's cool. It doesn't matter. What? Is he going to sue me out of my mom's basement? Hardly. All he can do is disallow "bloggers" from getting media passes and going into the locker rooms before and after Dallas Mavericks' games. And it burns the shit out of him that that's all he can do.
All the while, "bloggers" continue to write dumb-ass shit on the Internet.
In his latest little diatribe that reeks of ignorance and oozes this unquantifiable distaste for the Internet media, he takes on the media.
I don't mean hacks like me or any other asshole with a Wordpress account. I mean the Richard Durretts, Tim McMahons and other bloggers attached to mainstream media outlets.
Here's a guarantee: Some "blogger" wrote a nasty little piece about his Mavericks shitting the sheets the other night in Portland. Cuban's a vengeful, nasty little turd.
There are a few problems with his ideas.
1. Mainstream media will be blogs. They will be Twitter feeds and whatever else comes next. Texts or whatever. "Print" journalists are going online. They've been told to write more concise and shorter for the past 20 years. The convergence of media and new media was exactly what was going to happen.
2. Cuban hints at the needless journalists, saying as an organization they can get information to the fans and public.
True. That's called a PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT. Guess what? They're as full of shit as every other PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT. Send out all the press releases you want about Roddy Beaubois' "two-month injury," but we still need McMahon, Eddie Sefko and whoever digging and learning why Beaubois' not coming back until February.
3. According to Cuban (remember, this guy is a billionaire), "I’m a firm believer that their interests are not only not aligned with sports teams like the Mavs, but in fact are diametrically opposed. They tend to look at the number of page views they get for any article as ‘their ratings.' More is better. Which in turn leads them to gear their work towards generating more pageviews."
No shit. The media outlet whose "interests" (advertising dollars, readership) is every "aligned" with the Mavericks' (winning championships) are not a media outlet. It's a PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT. If the Dallas Morning News or The Big Lead had the same interests as the Mavericks, they would have told Cuban not to throw $50 million at Brendan Haywood.
4. Mark Cuban is a hypocrite anyway. He pays this douche to run this online swill.
What I truly don't understand about Cuban is that, relatively speaking, the Mavericks skate in this city, with non-media blogs and with the mainstream guys. No one hardly questions the bad drafts and bad free agent signings. No one questions why the Mavericks can't make a trade.
No one questions the abilities (or lack thereof) of Donnie Nelson and Rick Carlisle. As long as the team is winning 50 games a year, most deficiencies are swept under the rug, even by the haters.
Hating blogs and the bloggers who blog on them isn't such a bad thing. Why you rail on them over and over is a mystery. Why there must be fighting and strutting on YOUR OWN FUCKING BLOG about how you don't need the media is shockingly sad.
Cuban thinks he's proving some point, making some grand acknowledgement. Instead, he's taking his ball and going home.
While the rest of us shrugs, goes to our moms' basements and blogs about it.
