Credit Mark Cuban on this: He’s owning his mistakes.
He should have been more aware at the time, but he wasn’t and that helped lead to an “Animal House” style sexual predatory environment on the business side of the Dallas Mavericks, according to a Sports Illustrated report.
One of the more damning allegations involves former Mavs.com writer Earl K. Sneed. He was involved in a domestic dispute where he beat his then-girlfriend his first season with the Mavericks in 2011, then a few months later was arrested — at the Mavericks facility — for assault, reportedly fracturing his girlfriend’s face. He pled guilty to that and went through court-mandated anger management classes, but the Mavericks re-hired him (with a clause in his contract he could not have one-on-one interactions with women). Then reportedly had another dispute in 2014 hitting a female co-worker which led to more counseling (this ordered by the team), yet he was kept on. Sneed legally was not able to follow the team when it went into Canada to play the Raptors because of the charges against him.
Cuban admitted to Tim MacMahon of ESPN keeping Sneed employed was a mistake.“I want to be clear, I’m not putting the blame on anybody else,” Cuban told ESPN. “It came down to my final decision that I made.”
In hindsight, Cuban said, “I would have fired him and still made him go to counseling” after learning details of the first domestic violence incident, expressing regret for not following up with police to discover those details...
“It was bad, but we made a mistake about the whole thing and didn’t pursue what happened with the police after the fact,” Cuban told ESPN. “So we got it mostly from Earl’s perspective, and because we didn’t dig in with the details -- and obviously it was a horrible mistake in hindsight -- we kind of, I don’t want to say took his word for it, but we didn’t see all the gruesome details until just recently. I didn’t read the police report on that until just [Tuesday], and that was a huge mistake obviously.”
It is not just Cuban who is to blame here. The head of Mavericks HR (who has been fired in the wake of this report) should have cut this off from the start. Same goes for the team’s CEO. The fact that none of those three men — Cuban included — did not step in here shows how a culture that allows predatory treatment of women is allowed to exist.
The Mavericks have hired a law firm to investigate both the incidents and the business culture around the organization. Changes are coming. And eventually, as more of this comes out, so will the wrath of the league — Cuban and the Mavericks are going to play a price for this.
