The Dallas Mavericks announced a lousy decision this week. At the direction of team owner Mark Cuban, the team will no longer play the National Anthem before its games.
Actually, they will. In a rare show of admittedly mild courage, the NBA announced on Thursday that all teams will play the anthem before their games. Still, the anthem question is a sustaining point of contention in professional sports. What began with Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling has now latched on to Cuban’s ego. The Mavericks announcement reflects Cuban’s choice of division over making lives better.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” is a special part of the American experience and tradition. It’s a song that has existed for more than 200 years and has long resounded at sporting events. Our culture and arts were a source of national pride for 85% as of 2018, according to a Gallup poll; 73% felt the same way about the country’s sporting achievements.
Cuban might present himself as a hero for civil rights, but the man who has owned the Mavericks since 2000 tends to ignore serious issues that affect cities and working people across the country. When it comes to pushing alcohol and gambling onto the masses, for example, Cuban is all for it.
A few years back, the Mavericks partnered with the Texas State Lottery for a scratch ticket game that used the team’s logo and images of some of its players. One of the prizes was also a trip to the 2018 NBA All-Star game. Scratch Off Odds noted that for every $5 ticket purchased, there was an average loss of $1.82. The lottery is a regressive funding mechanism that preys on the poor and people who suffer from gambling addictions. And yet, Cuban’s Mavericks used their platform to make the lottery more popular. Not to mention, the league has an official partnership with the sports gambling website DraftKings. Cuban is a big supporter of legal sports betting, which will likely increase the number of people with gambling addictions.
Meanwhile, Michelob Ultra is the beer sponsor of the NBA, including the Mavericks. Does Cuban have a problem with alcohol advertising at his games and on televised NBA broadcasts? Fans of all ages watch games, and children who see alcohol ads are more likely to drink to abuse alcohol when they are adults. At least, that’s what a respected Johns Hopkins study from 2006 revealed.
Perhaps Cuban’s morality meets its match with Mr. Green?
One final mark against Mark the moralist. Cuban thinks the NBA should do business with China. That’s a country that endorses forced abortion, annually steals hundreds of billions in intellectual property across the world, has thrown more than 2 million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps (and sold some for rape). Oh, and endorses a sweatshop slave labor industrial strategy.
Top line: Cuban will receive credit for being woke but apparently isn’t willing to improve lives.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
