In one corner, it's Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO.
In the other corner, it's Mark Cuban, the tech giant, who sold his video outlet, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999—and never looked back.
Now, the billionaire NBA team owners—Ballmer being the new owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and Cuban being the longtime owner of the Dallas Mavericks—find themselves embroiled in the middle of a bitter basketball feud with one way to resolve their issues ... by kissing and making up.
The tech billionaires found themselves on the Staples Center's Kiss Cam in Los Angeles on Thursday night, Oct. 29, when their Clippers and Mavericks played against each other. Usually, when fans appear on a Kiss Cam, it's all in fun and not much of anything else. But Thursday night's appearance of Ballmer and Cuban on the Kiss Cam had a deeper meaning—as in kissing to make up.
That's because, over the offseason this past summer, Cuban got a verbal agreement from then-free agent Clippers center DeAndre Jordan to join the Mavs. However, within days of striking the handshake deal, Jordan went back on his word and spurned Cuban to re-sign with Ballmer and the Clippers.
Although it has been months, Cuban hasn't forgotten about being slighted, disparaging the Clippers franchise seemingly every chance he gets, even telling Yahoo Sports on Thursday: "You can change the owner, you can change the players, but the Clippers are who they've been for the past 30 years."
Ouch. Well, maybe appearing on the Kiss Cam is the beginning of forgetting about the past, as the two billionaires seemed to laugh off whatever lingering tension they had toward each other, even blowing kisses in the other's direction.
Too bad for Cuban that his Mavericks took a 104-88 trashing at the hands of Ballmer's Clippers.
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