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Mark Cuban: Keeping it Classy

It’s no surprise that tempers run high in professional sports, but this becomes especially true when it comes to the playoffs. But tempers did more than run high during game three of the Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets NBA playoff game. After the Nuggets walked away with a referee-aided 106-105 win to make it a 3-0 series lead, tempers finally bubbled over.

After the controversial game came to a close, notoriously hotheaded Mavericks owner Mark Cuban had a few choice words for the scorer’s table. Then, after passing Lydia Moore (the mother of Nuggets forward Kenyon Martin), Cuban informed her that her son was a “punk.”

In the aftermath of the lash-out, reports have become widely varied. But whatever the exact wording of Cuban, there was definitely an exchange that was viewed as inappropriate by the Nuggets camp. As an owner, Cuban was expected not to contribute to the kind of heckling, name calling, and low class shenanigans that usually occur during these heated games. But such is the class of Cuban.

And he continued to demonstrate that highbrow level of sophistication that only $1.8 billion can buy by apologizing to Martin and his mother…via his blog. That’s right. Rather than issuing a face to face apology, Cuban simply posted a halfhearted, more than a little self-serving apology on his personal blog.

Cuban is a lot of things, but dumb isn’t one of them. He knew exactly the kind of sincerity that a blog-posted apology would contain—especially one that starts out, “It started as a smart ass comment that I know that no one heard,” and ends with, “Dinner for you and your family is on me.”

This apology is a very deliberate use of communication in the technology age. As Cuban has so eloquently pointed out, we definitely seem to have traded sincere and meaningful exchanges for convenience and speed. The only way the apology could have meant less was if he limited himself to 140 characters and posted it on Twitter…