It's more than a game. An NBA playoff game is a community experience. It's a time to bring people together, a time to remind us all - young and old, black and white, short and tall - why we're here and why we care and why we put down all that hard-earned cash just to go to a game: so that we, as fans, can be part of something greater than ourselves, so that we can be bound together in a common cause, so that we can, if absolutely necessary, show the strength of that bond by, yes, agreeing to pour beer on Kenyon Martin's mom.
It apparently happened in Dallas during Game 4 of the Nuggets -Mavericks playoff series, but it could have happened anywhere. Don't blame the Dallas Mavericks' fans. Blame, of course, the Dallas Mavericks' owner.
And if you're a fan - a sick fan, a way-more-than-swine-flu-sick fan - you wish that Mark Cuban owned your Basketball team, because you know that, if you had a spare billion dollars or two, that's exactly what you'd want to do with it - if not exactly how you'd want to do it.
Along the way, Cuban has, of course, raised bad sportsmanship to an art form, and that was before he had ever thought to insult Kenyon Martin's mother on Mother's Day Eve. If you missed it: As Cuban left the arena floor at game's end - certain his team had been cheated - he told Lydia Moore, Martin's mother, that her son was a punk or a thug, depending on which version of the story you believe. In either case, that's considered bad form in virtually all corners of the mother-loving world.
Charles Barkley, who calls himself a friend of Cuban's, said on TNT on Monday night that if Cuban had committed a similar offense in the 'hood - his term - "We'd kick his (butt)." If it happened in my neighborhood, we'd probably turn him in to the Homeowners Association, but still, you get the idea.
A game later, on Monday night, came the alleged beer-on-Martin's- mother incident, as well as separate incidents involving Martin's girlfriend and Carmelo Anthony's fianc?e. It got to the point where Cuban apparently had no choice but to issue an apology, and so, finally, he did - on his blog.
As apologies go, it wasn't exactly the way Saint Augustine would have crafted it. Maybe that's because Augustine never had a blog. On Cuban's blog - blogmaverick.com - he began by saying that nobody could have heard what he said and that, besides, whatever he did say, a lot worse things have been said to him on opposing floors. He also implied, in his bloggish way, that his friends and family have been spat upon at the Pepsi Center during this series, an offense he had apparently failed to mention before.
But then, to make matters much better, he offered the Martin clan his personal suite - or another suite - in Dallas for Game 6. He didn't mention that, to get to Game 6, the Nuggets would actually have to lose Game 5. Game on?
If you're surprised by any of this, you don't know Cuban, who is a different kind of owner, and not only for his insistence on dressing like a sportswriter or in sitting by the team bench. He made his money the new- fashioned way. He invented something on the Internet - how to stream radio broadcasts - and cashed in for a couple of billion dollars, back before the bubble burst, and he's been laughing all the way to American Airlines Center ever since.
He bought the Mavericks in 2000 from - get this - Ross Perot Jr., and since then, he has shown the sports world how to be, uh, passionate. Of course, Genghis Khan was also passionate.
Cuban has been fined more than $1.5 million for criticizing referees, whom he critiques with as much nuance as Wanda Sykes employs in critiquing Rush Limbaugh. Cuban has said he matches each fined dollar with a dollar for charity. And one time, when he said a referee couldn't get a job managing a Dairy Queen, he worked in a Texas Dairy Queen for a few hours in atonement.
If he left it there, or left it just on his blog, he'd be the owner as folk hero. But he's also the owner who charges the floor and screams at J.R. Smith or screams at NBA commissioner David Stern or screams at, well, whoever is handy. Or pushes a cameraman out of the way, as he did Saturday, on the same day as Yourmommagate. A few years ago, Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki publicly lectured the team owner on self-control, which may have been a first in the sports world.
I called my friend Mark Heisler, the Hall of Fame NBA writer for the Los Angeles Times, to ask him about Cuban. Heisler said he was "complex" and laughed. When I asked him to explain, he said, "He's a very interesting guy unless you disagree with him. On anything."
Nuggets fans won't get the opportunity to disagree with Cuban tonight, because Cuban isn't expected to be at the Pepsi Center for Game 5. He says he has a previous commitment in Las Vegas. It's probably just as well.
You have to hope, whatever happens tonight - when the Nuggets could clinch the series - that what happened in Dallas stays in Dallas.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Reach him at 303-954-5428
or mlittwin@denverpost.com
