Mark Cuban is one of the most opinionated owners in all of sports. Let’s not sugarcoat it — he’s downright obnoxious at times. However, the Chicago Bulls would tell you that the Dallas Mavericks owner can also be incredibly generous.
On Saturday night, the Bulls were flying to Indianapolis for their Sunday game against the Pacers when they had some frightening mechanical issues with their plane.
“Apparently a compressor in engine No. 3 had some trouble, and it sounded like it exploded, but I guess it’s like a jet engine backfire, which is very loud,” Bulls radio analyst Bill Wennington told ESPN 1000’s “Waddle & Silvy Show” on Monday. “Sparks fly out of it. It happened actually right after … the captain thrusts the engines forward and it revs up and starts to go, about three seconds after that you hear a ‘Boom!’ ‘Oh, what was that, are we stopping?’ The plane keeps going down [the runway] and you’re thinking, ‘Oh no, why aren’t we stopping?'”
Fortunately, the plane’s pilots were able to safely turn around and get the team back to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, where they were sent home and returned the next morning to use the Chicago Blackhawks’ plane to get to Indianapolis. They used their hockey compadres’ plane to get back to Chicago after a loss to the Pacers, but Cuban came to the rescue after that.
According to ESPNChicago.com, Cuban lent the Bulls the Mavericks’ plane to fly to San Antonio on Monday night and return after their game against the Spurs on Wednesday. Bulls forward Lou Amundson tweeted the following photo from on-board the Mavericks plane and thanked Cuban for his generosity.
Cuban is one of the most competitive people in sports, but kudos to him for helping an opponent in need. From the sound of it, he helped the Bulls after they went through a legitimately scary situation.
“I’m not going to sit up here and lie, if I had a teddy bear, I probably would have been grabbing it,” Bulls television analyst Stacey King explained. “It was a frightening situation. Our pilots did a good job of getting us back down. You can fly with one engine. We had an extra engine, so they had two engines left. So we weren’t in any kind of danger as far as doing a nose dive. Whenever you see flames come out of an engine, that’s a little bit scary.”
Cuban may not be shy about expressing when he wants other teams to fail, but that doesn’t mean he’s above lending a helping hand.
