The Column I Didn't Want to Write

I might be okay but I'm not fine at all

Most (all) of you found me because of our shared love for the Texas Longhorns.

College sports bonds us because it is our very identity — on my professional resume, or CV, if you are a fancy pants, it says it right there.

Graduate of the University of Texas.

I’m not a Longhorn fan because I grew up as one, which I did. I’m a Longhorn fan because it is my very soul. I can’t escape it even if we wanted to, it is who we are.

That is how I felt about the Dallas Mavericks.

Felt.

I grew up in the Dallas area in the 1980’s and 1990’s — in the 80’s the Mavericks were the fun team in the NBA, with stars such as Derek Harper and Rolando Blackman they were never seriously expected to contend for a title — although there was that magical year where they took the Lakers to seven games in the Western Conference Finals. In the 1990’s, the Mavericks were the laughing stock of the NBA, where several years the talk was of breaking the league record for fewest wins, which they never did, thank God.

They were the worst team in the NBA in the 90’s.

And never had the first pick in the draft. They picked second one year, but other than that, never picked higher than fourth.

Then came Dirk Nowitzki.

Dirk was a perennial All-Star, a unicorn in his style of play. He put the Mavericks back on the map. He was ours, and there was nobody in the league we would have rather had.

We listened to the national pundits talk about him being soft and how the Mavs would never win a title — but we knew in our hearts that was a lie. But we started to believe it after the 2006 NBA Finals, when the Mavericks were up 2-0 with a healthy lead in Game Three but ended up getting screwed out of losing the series.

And we believed in more the following year, when the Mavericks became the first team ever to lose as a #1 seed in a seven game series to the #8 seed.

In 2011, the Mavericks finally broke through — they won the first title in team history.

We cried. Not because the team finally won.

Because Dirk finally won. And he cried.

NBA playoff series are a grueling test of wills — usually lasting two weeks if the series goes a full seven games. You become intimate with the other team, you come to hate the other team.

And you come to love your team even more. And your players even more.

And your players come to love your city.

Mavs fans today drive on Nowitkzi Way and walk by the statue of Dirk Nowitzki in front of the American Airlines Center.

The inscription at the bottom?

Loyalty never fades away.

That was Dirk.

Enter Luka Doncic.

The year that Luka made himself eligible for the NBA Draft, I fell in love with the idea of having him on the Mavericks. Doncic left his home country of Slovenia when he was 13-years old to play basketball in Madrid. At 16, he made his professional debut in the second toughest league in the world.

At 18, he was MVP of that league.

It was a no-brainer to me. The American basketball system of AAU basketball and one and done college years was a toxic mess. And here was Luka, playing by himself in a foreign city, the best player in the league at such a young age.

And then it happened. The Mavs lucked out.

Luka was ours.

He made the All-NBA team five of his first six years in the league. He made numerous All-Star teams. Led the league in triple doubles by a wide margin.

And he made other teams absolutely detest him.

Because he absolutely detested them, too.

I was going though tremendous personal strife in 2020 when in the bubble he put on a show against the Los Angeles Clippers. For two and a half hours every other day I got to forget.

The Mavs fell short, but for lack of a better word, they had an absolute motherfucker.

Two years later, he led his team to the Western Conference Finals. They got there by winning by about 50 in Phoenix in the Western Conference Semi-Finals. Luka made Devin Booker and Chris Paul look foolish.

And just last summer, Luka led the team on a magical run to the NBA Finals. They fell short again, but I had just lost my job, and again, Luka provided the magic to forget all about it for two and a half hours every other night, making Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns in Minnesota and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in Oklahoma City look like fools.

He was 25-years old and is destined to rule it for the next 10+ years.

But now it won’t be as a Dallas Maverick.

In fact, if the Mavericks do get back to the playoffs, he will be standing in the way as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers.

I was winding down by playing a video game late Saturday night on my couch when I heard the ESPN alert on my phone.

Thinking it was another UFC result for which I have zero knowledge about, I absent mindedly picked up my phone.

My stomach literally dropped.

I wanted to throw up.

There was little sleep that night.

I have listened to Nico Harrison, the Mavericks GM that will forever go down as a villain in the lore of the city. I listened to his reasons.

They just didn’t make any sense.

And I can live to be 1,000 years old and it will never make sense.

Even beyond basketball, Luka WAS the city of Dallas. The city has the most valuable franchise in sports located just down the road, but Luka was the face you saw when you got off the plane in Dallas, or driving down one of its many highways.

He was OURS.

Dallas is not a free agency destination for NBA free agents. The Mavericks famously cleared the decks after that 2011 championship, clearing the salary cap to entice free agents to relocate to Dallas.

Nobody ever did.

So when the Mavericks lucked upon Doncic, they had it made. With all due respect to Dirk, Luka was destined to be the best player to ever lace it up here. He was marketable, not only in Dallas but across the country and across the WORLD. Entire countries in Europe had kids wearing 77 Mavericks jerseys.

He’s the most competitive player in the league. Luka famously mocked Vlade Divac (who was in charge of player acquisition in Sacramento and famously passed on Luka). He lived to embarrass other players.

He is in commercials. People talked about him being the best player on the planet. The tip of the proverbial iceberg was all we have seen.

And he wanted to be here forever.

Luka was due a massive Supermax extension this summer. Ever since the day the Mavs acquired him, people around town had been fearful of him leaving. Roster moves were made with the fear of him leaving. Numerous hours were spent in the media talking about him leaving.

“Absolutely not. Easy answer.” was Doncic’s response this week when asked if he ever gave any indication that he wouldn’t sign the deal.

It doesn’t matter what the Mavericks got in return. It’s not enough. The details about the trade are enough to make you mad. But the Lakers could have included 10 draft picks and it wouldn’t have been enough.

Because you would have just been hoping to find another Luka Doncic.

I said in a column in this space a few weeks back, why do we follow sports when all it does is shatter our hearts more often than not.

Even though the wins are great, we don’t follow sports because of those.

We follow because certain players, certain teams, win our hearts.

It’s not about that shiny trophy sitting in the glass case, it is the journey to get there, the stories you make with friends, the step-back fadeaway in your eye three-pointer to win a playoff game that you remember vividly five years later.

The story doesn’t always end with a pretty bow, but when it makes it so much sweeter when it finally does — those tears streaming down the face of your superstar tell the story so much more than the trophy sitting in his arms.

There is a reason action movie stars don’t typically die in the middle of the movie.

This isn’t how all of this is supposed to go.

The new owners of the Dallas Mavericks came to Texas chasing dreams of casinos in downtown Dallas. That will not happen because Dan Patrick is still in charge of things in this state.

They will sell the team and go on to their next business deal. Not in the city of Dallas, because they have zero history here.

Nico Harrison will lose his job in the next two years. He’ll move to another city because he has zero connection to the city of Dallas. He’ll fall upwards into another job and fail at that one too.

Luka Doncic will win titles in Los Angeles.

That’s plural.

Mavs fans?

They are left wondering, for the rest of their time on this planet…

What if?

Loyalty never fades.

Until it does.