Dallas Basketball

Cuban Praises Lakers For Returning $4.6M Loan - But For Me, This Is Personal

Mark Cuban Praises The Los Angeles Lakers For Returning Their Ill-Gotten $4.6 Million PPP Loan - But For Me, As A Small-Business Owner, This Is Personal
Mike Fisher|
Cuban Praises Lakers For Returning $4.6M Loan - But For Me, This Is Personal
Cuban Praises Lakers For Returning $4.6M Loan - But For Me, This Is Personal

FRISCO - It's Friday, May 1. The governor of Texas says we can open our restaurant "The Maverick Bar'' at 25-percent capacity as part of a hoped-for return to normalcy while also respecting COVID-19 guidelines. We will do so in large part to find a way to pay our waitresses, bartenders and cooks who have been out of work for two months.

The original concept in terms of keeping those folks afloat financially - and in keeping our establishment hanging on by a financial thread - was our qualification for a loan under the federal government's "Payroll Protection Program'' designed to help small businesses.

That's us. A trio of buddies who invested together six years ago - because "it's every guy's dream to own a bar!'' Us. A collection of hard-working helpers. And, we're proud to say, a large number of patrons to whom we owe a great deal.

We're not a conglomerate. We're not a a national chain. And we're not the Los Angeles Lakers.

We applied in the very first minute, literally, as the program launched. We didn't get our relatively tiny PPP loan, so the three of us are reaching into our personal pockets to keep the thing from folding. (Which is OK; to me, nobody necessarily "deserves'' a bail-out.)

Meanwhile, the Lakers also applied for a PPP. Somehow, they got theirs - to the tune of $4.6 million. So did Shake Shack. And Potbelly. And Taco Cabana. Each of those national chain restaurant companies got $10 million.

Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse got $20 million. A man named Monty Bennett oversees two hotel firms, of Ashford Inc., and Braemar Hotels, which collectively received $58.6 million in PPP loans.

Little wonder the $350 billion loan pool ran out of money in two weeks. Little wonder The Maverick Bar - which applied for $22,500 - was shoved out of the way. ... Leaving one to wonder just how corrupt I gotta be to get my waitresses paid.

“Good for the Lakers and other companies, once they recognized that the treasury hadn’t allocated, or congress hadn’t allocated enough money, to give the money back,'' Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said via CNN.

Cuban has spent the last two months as a strong voice for logic in the face of COVID-19, and an advocate of the underdog, too. And here? It's true, as Cuban points out, "The Treasury is the one that set the limit to 500 employees; they should have set it to 50 or 100 for the first couple trunches.''

Or ... they should have assumed that billion-dollar companies wouldn't react like your bad neighbor at the Walmart who two months ago bought every single roll of toilet paper in the store, hogging loans of $10 million and $20 million and $58.6 million so we couldn't get our $22,500.

"I'm a big fan of the (Lakers), but I'm not a fan of the fact that they took a $4.6 million loan,"  Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on CNBC. "I think that's outrageous.''

With all due respect to Mark Cuban's kind words about his old nemesis the Lakers ... I have 22,500 reasons to think it's "outrageous,'' too.

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Mike Fisher
MIKE FISHER

Mike Fisher - as a newspaper beat writer and columnist and on radio and TV, where he is an Emmy winner - has covered the NBA and the Dallas Mavericks since 1990. He has for more than 20 years served as the overseer of DallasBasketball.com, the granddaddy of Mavs news websites.

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