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		ALSO SEE Web entrepreneur poised to buy Mavs Mavs say they must meet with Rodman first Gugliotta home for 30th birthday, two days after seizure Aldridge: Who won, lost in the lockout Aldridge: Best of the Millennium Aldridge: Tale of two (different) coaches

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NFL

Friday, January 21
Mavs hoping Cuban can solve their problems

By David Aldridge
Special to ESPN.com

My new best friend is Mark Cuban.

There are some NBA owners who I still haven't met, 12 years after I started covering the league. The Mavericks' new boss, though, called back about 20 minutes after I left him an e-mail. You've gotta like that.


	Cuban is hoping to get help for Michael Finley and other Mavs.

Cuban, who helped start Broadcast.com and has gazillions on paper, has big hopes for the Mavericks and the league. "The sky's the limit," Cuban told me. "It's an international league with an international fan base."

Which may explain Wang Zhi-Zhi, I smart-alecked. "But if you do some of the research," Cuban countered, "what percentage of second-rounders actually make it? It's minuscule. So why not take a chance?"

Sounds like Nellie's got to him already.

Those pitter-pats you hear, though, may be the Mavs backing away from Dennis Rodman. Cuban acknowledged that he has never actually spoken to Rodman and has no idea what kind of shape the Weird One is in. (It is my personal opinion that Rodman has no interest in playing and will ultimately make up some excuse even more lame than not wanting to miss Super Bowl parties.)

Still, "the one thing I learned in the business world is you never say never, and you explore all your options," Cuban said. "Like I told his agent, nothing happens until we see him and see where his head's at."

But isn't Cuban a little worried about whether Rodman's using the Mavs? "Don't know and don't care," Cuban continued. "It's not like we're trying to figure out who's my prom date." And besides, Cuban pointed out, there wouldn't be an internet business anywhere that didn't have its share of employees with "blue hair and pierced tongues."

Cuban said he won't make any decisions on the fate of Nelsons pere et fils for some time. "There's an absorption period going on right now, where I'm trying to learn as much as possible. There's a lot of parallels with my other business. The variables change every day. You have to learn the culture of the organization." The Mavs' culture has been a losing one for a long time. But Cuban says he can deal with the pressure.

"It's much tougher when you have to talk to a fund manager who has a million shares of your stock and it's down 60 bucks," he said. "Or the lady who says she has every penny she owns invested in your company, and when is the price of the stock going back up? I've taken those calls in the last few years."

The Googs story
When Tom Gugliotta woke up on Dec. 18th, he was in a strange room with a tube stuck down his throat. Disconcerting to say the least, since the last thing he recalled from Dec. 17th was being on his team's bus after the Suns defeated the Portland Trail Blazers, and he didn't feel well.

"I could still remember that I was progressively getting sick, and that's where I picked it up at," Gugliotta said last week. "Like, they asked me, 'Do you know what happened?' And I just kinda nodded, like, 'Yeah, well, I remember getting really sick.' And um, so yeah, it was kind of an awkward situation. I could still remember parts of the episode that I didn't really want to remember."

"The episode" was a grand mal seizure Gugliotta suffered that almost killed him. The Suns suspect the cause was a chemical supplement known as GBL, which Gugliotta took with the mistaken impression that it would help him sleep. It would have been a terrific shock to anyone anyway, but it was especially jarring to Gugliotta, who doesn't even like taking Advil for a headache.

"I didn't really understand what that stuff can do to someone who's not drinking or not doing drugs at the time," Googs said. "So I thought just taking it, you know, how could that happen? This stuff is on the market."

Gugliotta had just boarded the team bus after Phoenix's victory in Portland and was on his cell phone to his wife, Nikki, who was standing in the couple's kitchen in Phoenix, a thousand miles away, when he began to feel strange.

"It's not anything I've ever felt before," he said. "I didn't feel nauseous. The way I tried to explain it was, I've never been electrocuted, but a low voltage of electricity was going through my body, kinda like this real weird sensation, just all through my body. I was trying to kinda fight it off. I felt it going up and up, and I just thought if I could just stick with it, it would go away and come down."

It didn't go away. After a few moments on the phone, Nikki Gugliotta couldn't understand what her husband was saying.

"He was really excited, because they beat Portland, and because they always struggled against Portland for a long time," Nikki Gugliotta recalled. "He had a good game, Jason (Kidd) had a great game, all the guys played real well. We were talking about that, and all of a sudden, he ... I thought he was talking to someone else, he just wasn't quite making sense ...

"I was waiting for him to start talking to me again, and I was actually kind of like, I waited for a while, and he still wasn't (talking to her), and then I thought well, this is sort of weird. And he said 'I have to go,' and ... he told me later, he was trying to disconnect (the phone), 'cause he knew something was wrong, and he didn't want me to hear it. And I heard the tones. He was missing, and he couldn't hit the right buttons." Seconds later, Gugliotta collapsed. Teammate Toby Bailey saw him fall and got the attention of strength and conditioning coach Robin Pound, who was sitting at the front of the bus.

"I go back there and I see Googs, and he's just sweating profusely, I mean, soaked in sweat," Pound recalled. "And I look at him and I kneel down and I go 'Hey Googs, you all right, you OK?' And he goes 'Yeah, yeah. What's up?,' and he's looking around like, what's the big deal?" While Gugliotta drifted in and out of consciousness, Nikki Gugliotta was frantic, trying to piece together what the increasingly alarmed voices were saying through the phone.

"They were yelling his name," Nikki Gugliotta said, "and you could tell within a minute or two that they were, they went from kind of concerned to 'Get him a drink' to complete panic, and calling for the strength coach, and literally screaming for paramedics, and it was just completely surreal. I couldn't even feel. I was standing in the kitchen and I couldn't even feel my body at all. It was the scariest thing I had ever been through."

During his transport to a Portland hospital, Gugliotta stopped breathing, and had to be intubated.

"They got him off the bus and they got him breathing," Kidd said. "It was just a scary situation to see a guy who's 6-10, who just played an outstanding game, and now (he's) fighting for his life. It was a scary situation for all of us ... this wasn't an IV they were putting in his arm."

But Gugliotta was lucky. Paramedics were still at the Rose Garden 45 minutes after the game and were immediately able to begin resuscitory measures. The Suns' team doctor, Richard Emerson, was on the trip. Nikki Gugliotta knew what her husband had been taking and was able to pass the information on to Emerson and the paramedics on the scene through Luc Longley, who wasn't even on the trip, but who had his cell phone on and was able to call Rex Chapman on his cell phone.

Most importantly, a postgame meeting that Kidd had with his shoe reps ran long, delaying the team's trip to the airport. If the bus, and subsequently, the team plane, had left on time, the Suns may have been 30,000 feet in the air when Gugliotta had his seizure. While NBA teams are now being required to carry defibrillators on board their plane, that equipment is for starting a stopped heart -- not someone who isn't breathing.

"On an airplane, it would be virtually impossible to provide that kind of assistance," Emerson said.

Because the half-life of GBL is extremely short, once Gugliotta was stabilized, the drug left his body quickly. A series of spinal taps induced migraine headaches for almost a week, but Gugliotta returned to action Jan. 4 and is back in the starting lineup. He's grateful for his good fortune.

I asked him if he was angry.

"I was angry -- at myself, mostly," he said. "For the fact that I took something, and if I had done the research -- not the research for how they advertise the product, but how the doctors advertise or explain the product -- if I had known the other side of it, I would never have taken it. And I didn't, and that's something I blame completely on myself. I should have known what I was taking ...

	ALDRIDGE'S RANKINGS
	THE TOP 10 1. L.A. Lakers 2. Portland 3. San Antonio 4. Utah 5. Miami 6. Indiana 7. New York 8. Seattle 9. Sacramento 10. Phoenix THE BOTTOM FIVE 25. Houston 26. L.A. Clippers 27. Washington 28. Chicago 29. Golden State

"So yeah, you ask yourself, why, OK, it happened, why did all the breaks go my way? It's kind of a weird situation. You know, a lot of people say different things, like luck, or God was with you. But there's a lot of other people who get sick and it doesn't work out like that, and they die. What, God wasn't with them? Why was he with me? Or not? All those things run through your mind, like, uh, too many breaks went my way to get through that."

Around the League

The Hornets had better come correct to Eddie Jones this summer. A source close to the Charlotte guard says that Jones would very much like to join Riles and Friends in Miami next year. The Heat don't have cap room to make Jones a big-time offer now, but clearing the decks for him would be facilitated if Miami doesn't re-up Tim Hardaway.

The Nets are still shopping Kendall Gill in the hopes of getting a low-post scorer before the trading deadline. New Jersey is wondering if Isaiah Rider will be put back on the block. Nets had interest earlier in November, but Hawks pulled him off the block when he started playing well in December. That was before his profanity-laced tirade against his teammates, though.

Grizzlies' four-game winning road trip coincides with continuation of sales talks with Bill Laurie, who had a deal in principle last fall to buy the team. That fell through, though, when Laurie let it be known to NBA owners that he would move the team to St. Louis in two years. Also, Grizzly management's hoping that if the team can play decent for the next month that the "interim" label will be removed from coach Lionel Hollins.


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