Put yourself behind the microphone of WGN Radio sports-talk host David Kaplan.
You’re interviewing the NBA’s most audacious maverick, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, reportedly worth as much as $2.5 billion. You’re at the WGN studios, he’s on a cell phone at the United Center minutes before Monday night’s tip-off.
You kid Cuban about offering a Dallas radio host $50,000 to change his name legally to Dallas Maverick. Cuban fires back that he’d do the same deal for you and your partner, ex-Bear Tom Waddle but that you’d have to call yourself “Dallas Maverick Pork and Dallas Maverick Beans.” Waddle quickly bows out as he realizes his daughters would become Georgia, Angela and Lea Maverick Beans.
But then Cuban gets serious, David Lawrence Kaplan. Change your name to Dallas Maverick for one year, Cuban says, and he’ll pay you $100,000 plus give $100,000 to the charity of your choice. OK, you blurt. “Done deal,” Cuban snaps.
As you drive home, your imagination runs Cubs-in-the-World-Series wild. What if you had your agent call Cuban and negotiate? What would it be worth to Cuban to have “Dallas Maverick” as host of the most listened-to sports-talk show in Chicago on one of the country’s best-known stations? Three-hundred grand? Five-hundred?
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As the dot-com billionaire told Sports Illustrated: “Let’s say . . . through a series of incredibly moronic moves, I lose $100 million. Oh, gee! What does that leave me?”
Something like $2.4 billion, or 2,400 million. For Cuban, paying you $500,000 and your charity $500,000 would be like you paying the kid next door $50 to mow your lawn and $50 to get a haircut.
Besides it’s not like Cuban is asking you to call yourself Charlotte Hornet, a name that would beg all sorts of sellout jokes. Dallas Maverick isn’t a bad radio handle. Dallas, as in Green, as in 1984 Cubs. Maverick, as in guts. Lots of radio personalities use stage names. It’s just for a year.
You imagine the national publicity Cuban craves and you’d get. He’s making this kind of offer because no sports owner ever has, because he wants free agents to keep hearing how rich and clever he is, because he can. You wish one Chicago team had an owner with Cuban’s three-comma chutzpah. You know accepting Cuban’s offer would make Jerry Reinsdorf squirm.
What if you could split $500,000 with the ad department? You just turned 40. You could put away your windfall for your 6-year-old son’s college fund. Here’s the perfect punch line. Your boy’s name is Brett. He could be Brett Maverick, like James Garner in the old TV show.
Tuesday you bounce Cuban’s offer off your bosses. They don’t say no, just that they’d have to check with the station’s legal counsel. You’re bombarded with e-mails from listeners who say you’re nuts if you don’t do it. You experience your own Cuban missile crisis.
But you decide not to sell your naming rights. No cigar, Cuban.
“I’d be saying I’d do anything for money,” you say, “and that bothers me. My name is my birthright. I’d like to preserve my integrity and credibility.”
“Presuming you have any to begin with,” debate-partner Waddle chimes in.
Yet Kaplan and Waddle don’t resort to the “guy talk” that has taken some sports-talk shows to record lows in search of higher ratings. They pretty much stick to entertaining but informed arguments punctuated by respectful interviews with big-name guests. They don’t allow callers to use nicknames such as “Dallas Maverick.”
So WGN program director Mary June Rose said she would have been “very disappointed and surprised” if Kaplan had pursued Cuban’s offer. “Your father,” she told him, “would be proud of you.”
Kaplan’s father died last year.
But Cuban’s offer inspired debate around the office and on WGN airwaves. What would be worse, selling your name to Cuban for a year or your body for a night to Robert Redford’s character for $1 million, as Demi Moore did in “Indecent Proposal” to aid financially strapped husband Woody Harrelson?
“This wasn’t indecent,” Rose said, “just inconvenient.” When Kaplan asked if she would have accepted Cuban’s offer for $1 million, she said, “Maybe.”
So you’re David Kaplan, driving home Tuesday night. You know you did the “right thing.” But you can’t help wondering how high Cuban would have gone–and how many calls Cuban will get Wednesday from radio hosts all over the country, especially Chicago.