“WE WERE LITERALLY WITHIN months of launching,” Paul McMann tells me, referring to the tipping off of the Collegiate Professional Basketball League (CPBL), which he and former CPBL investor Mark Cuban hoped would one day become a superior on-court alternative to the NCAA.
Months away, he says, but he can’t remember what year the league was supposed to launch. (It was 2000.) He’s uncertain about the timing of his national press tour, and he sounds less energetic on the phone than in the grainy YouTube clip he sends of a 1999 TV appearance. The version he offers me of his ill-fated vision for a branding-centric basketball league that paid its players and offered them an education is hazy by comparison, the details gray as McMann’s beard. He fumbles numbers he once knew by heart—it’s not that he’s lost a step but rather that
