Indiana Alumni Magazine
IU’s own maverick mogul modestly says he's just 'the luckiest guy in the world.'
By Tracy Dodds
Reflecting his many commercial, professional, and personal pursuits, Cuban’s home office is also his high-tech sanctuary.
When Mark Cuban blogs, people listen. Three weeks after Cuban, BS'81, casually chatted on his Web log about his purchase of stock in Mamma.com, "the mother of all search engines," the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating trading in the firm. It seems news of Cuban's acquisition of 6.3 percent of the company's stock drove traders wild and rocketed Mamma's stock up 24 percent.
That's the kind of influence a guy has when he's known as an Internet billionaire. Yet Cuban insists that he's not a computer geek. He's an entrepreneur, a product of Indiana University's Business School.
Staring out from the cover of Forbes magazine, he seems to be all business, despite the absence of jacket and tie. He's wearing a black T-shirt promoting his newest venture, HDNet, and his expression is serious.
At 46, Cuban has a lot of responsibilities. He has a lot of money to manage, business ventures to oversee, and employees to consider. He's a family man now, with a wife and a baby daughter.
But check him out on The Benefactor. On this ABC reality TV show, which debuted Sept. 13, he'll give away $1 million just because he can. He gets to make the final call. Why have money if you can't have fun with it? He has described the casting of the show as a "frickin' blast."
Not surprisingly, he is the star of the show he dreamed up, constantly interacting with the 16 contestants. So he's not just an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur whose bold and brash personality plays a role in his game plan. When the TV cameras show Cuban, the owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, clowning around with his players on the court before a game or reacting in disbelief to a call during a game, he looks like a big kid, happy with a very expensive toy.
In January 2000, when Cuban shelled out $285 million to buy the Mavericks from Ross Perot Jr., the team was one of the worst in the NBA. But Cuban also got a piece of the new American Airlines Center, so it was quite a deal. And it gave him the right to shoot around with the players, work out at the arena before games, host his own TV show, and let his opinions be known to the NBA commissioner.
Before long, Cuban had used his bold and brash ways to transform the once deadly quiet games into festive events and to build the Mavs into a playoff team. Seeing to it that the team is winning and the arena is a fun place to be — well, that sells tickets.
Cuban was a season ticket holder long before he was the owner. From his courtside seats, Cuban made himself known to the Dallas players, to visiting teams, and to the officials with his explosive involvement in the games. He knew the team should be better, the atmosphere should have more electricity, and the refs should be better schooled.
"I've been a basketball junkie as long as I can remember," Cuban says. "One day, at the start of the season, I was at a game that really wasn't much fun and I thought that I could do a better job running the team."
That was when he put his big money where his big mouth was.
A hands-on owner, Cuban has a reputation for bending over backwards to keep his players happy. Along for the piggy-back ride is the Mavericks star center Dirk Nowitzki.
After he bought the team, he didn't move to the privacy of the owner's suite. Ignoring decorum, he kept his seats near the team bench and continued to shout running commentary on the game and the officiating. Unless, of course, he was sitting with fans in the far reaches of the arena to boost enthusiasm.
Columnists who consider themselves clever have noted that this maverick bought the right team.
Cuban doesn't consider too many columnists clever. In fact, he is known for taking sportswriters to task in his e-mails and in his blog, a fascinating series of columns that cover the gamut of subjects.
In addition to assailing the sorry state of sports journalism and discussing every detail of pro and college basketball, the blog has critiqued Donald Trump's reality show The Apprentice and lauded as "brilliant" Major League Baseball's aborted idea to place ads for the flick Spiderman 2 on bases. Cuban has even recommended a book you absolutely must read before investing in the stock market.
His blog includes reader responses that go on forever and show that he has quite a following of people who feel that they know him personally. They're on a first-name basis with a billionaire. A sports-team-owning, TV-starring, movie-producing stock market genius who shares his everyman thoughts on all of the above.
Meanwhile, besides composing on his laptop, Cuban's been traveling: with his team, to casting calls, to the star-studded red carpet for the opening of Godsend, the movie which he and partner Todd Wagner, BS'83, produced.
A year ago Cuban and Wagner bought Landmark Theatres, the biggest art-house theater chain in the country. With Cuban's interest in producing high-definition movies for HDNet and Wagner's TV production studio, 2929 Entertainment, the purchase makes a lot of sense.
But…
Where does he get the time? When asked, he says simply: "I do what I have to do."
That response came by e-mail, of course. Cuban tries to do everything online. Part of his legend is that he shopped online for his first plane, a $41 million Gulfstream V. It's a story that's often told.
It has to be — it's so fitting. Cuban made his first millions via the Internet. Certainly he should spend millions via the Internet.
His Internet ventures began at a true entry level. After graduating from IU, Cuban moved to Dallas and took a job selling personal computers. In the early '80s, not too many people were aware they needed personal computers. He explained it to them (after sitting up all night reading the manual). He also convinced one of his customers to advance him $500 to start a computer-consulting business, MicroSolutions, which he later sold to CompuServe for nearly $6 million. He made $2.2 million on the deal, a day before he turned 31.
So Cuban was already a millionaire before he and Wagner teamed up to become billionaires. "(Wagner) is the only true entrepreneur I knew," Cuban says. "I knew lots of lawyers, venture capitalists, but he was the only one who had actually run a company."
In a 60 Minutes interview on CBS last February, Cuban gave credit to Wagner for the big idea: "(Todd) said, ‘Look, I've got this idea where I think we can listen to Indiana basketball, sporting events, anywhere in the world by using the Internet.' We went out and bought a $3,000 Packard Bell computer and, in the second bedroom of my house, hooked up some software and started this little company."
That company became AudioNet, which became Broadcast. com, which Cuban and Wagner sold to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in 1999. Timing was everything for that pre-dot-bomb deal. Cuban and Wagner became billionaires and about 300 employees became millionaires. They were paid in Yahoo! stock; Cuban, naturally, sold his shares as soon as he could.
A year later Cuban bought the Mavericks. He also bought a $15 million home that was way too big for him at the time, leaving him with nothing better to do with the chandeliered ballroom than make it the Wiffle Ball room – which in turn only got him more attention from Sports Illustrated and other national media.
In fact, the media can't resist this guy. And why not? He makes for good copy and good video clips.
He has both played against and officiated for the Harlem Globetrotters. He went to the mat in a World Wrestling Entertainment event held in the American Airlines Center in November 2003. (Seems as though Cuban talked trash about Stone Cold Steve Austin's team crushing a team led by Eric Bischoff. From ringside Bischoff called Cuban out until the IU grad assented and entered the ring. Cuban promptly shoved Bischoff, triggering a retaliatory move by Bischoff pal Randy Orton, who subdued Cuban with his eponymous signature move, the dreaded RKO. "I've always been a fan [of WWE]," Cuban later told WWE.com. "I've been a fan since I was a kid.")
He is highly sought after as a speaker and regularly visits campuses to share his business insights. This spring, for example, Cuban spoke to Kelley School students at the IU Auditorium, urging them to "test conventional wisdom and challenge the status quo." Earlier, he sat on a panel with Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars owner Tom Hicks and Minnesota Vikings owner Red McCombs at the University of Texas business graduate school. For that audience Cuban stressed the importance of promotion, calling it a 24-hour-aday job.
Promotion seems to come naturally to Cuban, who seems to follow P.T. Barnum's old adage that the only bad publicity is no publicity.
Case in point: the DQ caper. As he so often does, Cuban sparked an uproar with a flippant remark in January 2002. Venting his frustration after his Mavs lost to San Antonio on a foul call at the end of a game, Cuban said NBA head of officiating Ed T. Rush "might have been a great ref, but I wouldn't hire him to manage a Dairy Queen."
The NBA fined Cuban a record $500,000 for that one. And to put a cherry on top of the fiasco, Dairy Queen managers were insulted. One even challenged Cuban to manage a DQ.
Cuban did it right, of course. He arrived at the DQ in Coppell, Texas, at 6 a.m. to learn his way around and to practice making the little curly top on the cones.
That day the Dairy Queen in Coppell had a line a half-mile long from 9:30 a.m. until 3 p.m. There were TV helicopters in the air and eight TV trucks on the lot. The stunt gained Cuban interviews on NBC's Today show and ABC's Good Morning America, and gained Dairy Queen, some analysts estimated, at least $5 million worth of publicity.
Coppell Mayor Candy Sheehan told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "We had Gov. George Bush in for a parade one time, but it was nothing like this."
Cuban draws a lot of attention — purposely — and then uses it to promote his team, further his other business and personal causes, and raise money for charity. Soon after he bought the Mavericks, for example, Cuban was quoted in the business pages of the Dallas Morning News explaining that his goal was to invigorate the team's marketing and bring back the crowd, with a longer-range strategy of using such new technologies as high-definition television and the Internet to target programming to consumers. "Basketball is the most international of all the major sports," he said, "and the Internet is the most international medium."
Obviously Cuban has had a plan from the start, and he opened that plan up for public appraisal. After buying the Mavericks, Cuban made public his e-mail address and encouraged fans to correspond. He has answered thousands upon thousands of e-mails from fans and has implemented some of their suggestions.
He also let it be known that reporters should reach him in the same way, promising to respond to media questions within 24 hours. He is true to his word.
Even the Mavs' coach, Don Nelson, a graying, old-school guy if ever there was one, has become comfortable with firing off an e-mail when he wants to communicate with his team's owner.
In turn, Cuban is remarkably responsive to his coaches and players; he considers it part of his duty as an owner. He's a man who sees to the details. If he wants them to be their best on the court, he needs to provide the best facilities, the best catered food, even the best towels.
And considering the toll that playing on the road takes on a team, he should provide the best mode of travel. On that count, his private ride wasn't quite big enough, so he bought another plane, a $46 million Boeing 757 with custom-made seats so that even Mavericks who top 7 feet tall can travel in comfort. (Alas, the second plane wasn't available on the Internet.)
Spending like that to take care of his team? Just smart business. He has a lot invested. But is entrepreneurial acumen the only key to his success? In April 2003, Cuban was the subject of Fox Sports Net's documentary series Beyond the Glory. In that interview, Cuban reduced it all to lowest terms: "Somebody had to be the luckiest guy in the world. I'm just glad they picked me."
Luck? Maybe to some extent. But Cuban also knows that using the "luckiest guy in the world" line makes him all the more fascinating. No one wants to hear a curmudgeonly, "I have this because I'm smarter than the rest of you and I work harder than the rest of you." Not so endearing.
But not without a grain of truth, either. Since Junior Achievement age, maybe even earlier, Cuban has seen himself as an entrepreneur, and he's shown a talent for making money.
When the Mavs road-tripped to Cleveland a couple years ago, Cuban invited some old friends to bus over from his hometown of Pittsburgh and share a suite during the game. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette made use of the gathering to do the hometown-boymakes- good story. With his buddies helping out, Cuban put together an impressive list of early enterprises for the article:
- As a kid in Mount Lebanon, Pa., he sold candy and trash bags door-to-door.
- Later he operated a slicer at Isaly's, a regional deliproducts company, and worked for $1.60 an hour at Ralph's Discount, a general-supply store in Pittsburgh.
- He collected and sold rare stamps.
- He ran the canteen at Emma Kaufmann Camp in West Virginia.
- When the Pittsburgh newspaper went on strike, he and a friend drove to Cleveland to buy copies of the Plain Dealer to sell back home.
- In college he gave disco lessons at sororities, and he says he paid for his junior year with a chain letter.
And then came the bar, which he bought when he was 21. Motley's Pub, a popular college hangout on Kirkwood Avenue in Bloomington, was a good venture until the awkward incident in which a wet T-shirt contestant, and several other patrons, turned out to be underage.
(Now Dallas Mavericks fans can stop in at a bar on the terrace level of the American Airlines Center called — you guessed it — Motley's Pub.)
His time in Bloomington thus marked a crucial point in Cuban's development as a businessman. But why IU? "I wanted to go to business school," he says. "I saw a list of the top 10 schools, and IU was the cheapest. So off I went, sight unseen."
Which, of course, worked out for him. "I learned how to challenge myself at IU," he says. "There were so many resources. Not just in the classroom, but the libraries, the city, the profs. I knew someday I wanted to run my own business, so everything I did was geared toward getting there."
One of his instructors at IU, Wayne Winston, a professor of decision sciences in the Kelley School of Business, remembers being impressed that Cuban was running a business at the age of 21, playing rugby, and going to school full time. "He always had a commitment to hard work," Winston says. "From what I know of him, he still just works all the time. I don't think he sleeps much."
Winston and Cuban were reacquainted a few years ago when Winston took his son to an Indiana Pacers game in Dallas. It was Cuban who recognized Winston as his former professor and, more recently, as a champion on Jeopardy.
Cuban had taken Winston's graduate-level statistics class many years before and remembered that Winston used sports in a lot of his examples. They talked about ways to compile data about the Mavericks and about the league.
As a result of that talk, Winston and his partner, college football rankings guru Jeff Sagarin, MBA'83, contracted with Cuban to collect, analyze, and provide the Mavs owner with data that had previously been considered the "intangibles" of sports. Cuban is serious about studying these things.
"Mark is a neat guy to work for in that he enjoys getting down to the detail level," Sagarin says. "I remember once where he had asked for a particular file to be created, and we worked back and forth till about 2:30 in the morning through e-mails until the file was just what he wanted. It is very satisfying to work for a client who's willing to put in that kind of effort in the trenches."
Cuban needs that information, especially the data revealing the tendencies of game officials, to make his points — points that often aren't well received. While he's never said referees favor one team over the other, he has numbers to show that they all have certain inclinations, and he thinks he's spotted a star system in which some refs just like certain players better than others.
As a result, Cuban has lobbed such a stream of criticism at referees that the league has tried to cool him down with massive fines — more than $1 million so far.
No problem. He considers the fines a "business expense." He pays the fines and he matches the amounts to charity. Then he continues with his campaign to make the officials accountable for their calls.
He subscribes to Referee magazine, posts changes in ref tendencies, and often comments on controversial calls. He puts his comments on his blog, so sportswriters can't miss the finer points.
The time and effort he puts into monitoring the officials would be a full-time job for other people, but not for Cuban. Besides, he's busy with his high-def project.
His company, HDNet, is a three-year-old network that provides 24-7 content for high-definition TV. According to the March issue of Forbes, Cuban's HDNet reaches 66 million homes, about 60 percent of U.S. television households, via DIRECTV and Dish satellite networks and most of the big cable systems.
There are others offering high-def content, too. But until the majority of consumers own the expensive HD sets, it remains to be seen what the demand for that content will be.
Cuban, however, is sure it's the next big thing. He's betting millions on it.
Maybe he'll get lucky. If he does, you can bet lots of other people will be listening. 
Tracy Dodds, BA’74, is best known as a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times. She also was sports editor at the Austin American-Statesman and is a past president of the Associated Press Sports Editors. She is now a sports enterprise reporter for The Indianapolis Star.