(Sports enthusiast Cuban, with someone not at all interested in his money.)
The Trib‘s Paul Sullivan must have stopped by Wiener’s Circle before he went to bed, because he wrote up an acid reflux dream he had of Mark Cuban buying the Cubs and putting Barry Bonds in right field. The column explains much of Sullivan’s writing style and it’s arguable his career would be over with one Pepcid AC. Still, Mark Cuban tells the truth when he says no one cares how you win, just that you won. Case in point: name me one steroid fueled World Series winning team of the last ten years that’s going to have an asterisk on its title in the record books:
Anyway, this idea of Cuban buying the Cubs and bringing in Bonds to play right field came to me last night in a dream, shortly after reading an e-mail interview from August between Cuban, writing from the Cayman Islands, and portfolio.com reporter Lloyd Grove:
Grove: On your blog, you seemed to suggest that Barry Bonds™ use of steroids shouldn™t detract from his accomplishment of breaking Hank Aaron™s non-steroid-enhanced home run record. œIn 25 years, any controversy associated with Barry™s quest for the record will be long forgotten, you wrote. What are you saying here? That in order to achieve our goals in this competitive world, we are justified in exploiting any advantage at our disposal, even if it™s against the rules? Where does one draw the line?
Cuban: I™m saying that the media tries to make a big issue out of things most fans couldn™t care less about. Back when Babe Ruth set the mark, there were allegations of every sort to explain why he was able to do things no other player was.
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.
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. It certainly hasn™t been during the digital era of ultracompetitive media.