Mark Cuban interview from portfolio.com

[J.R.]

Portfolio.com's Lloyd Grove penned this excellent, wide-ranging interview with Mark Cuban.

 

He didn't say much of anything about the Cubs, but the piece lends some valuable insight into his thinking.

 

Some excerpts ...

 

He apparently still has enough left over to bid on the Chicago Cubs, recently put on the block by the Tribune Co., though he's uncharacteristically mum about his plans. "If I told you I would have to kill you," says Cuban, who last month officially joined the list of prospective buyers by applying to Major League Baseball to examine the team's books. "I'm sworn to secrecy."

 

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.

 

L.G.: What gets you out of bed in the morning, and what makes you enthused?

 

M.C.: All of it. I love challenges. I love challenging conventional wisdom. I love the satisfaction of being right and the motivation of being wrong.

[DivineBovine]

I actually like what he said about Bonds.