ClearedForTakeOff
11-01-10, 12:47
When Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks, one of his first moves was to upgrade the team plane. So it was that he laid out nearly $50 million for a Boeing 757, flush with a weight room and facility for trainers to provide medical treatment. But the Mavericks' previous team plane had a unique feature as well: The front tire was painted in the manner of a roulette wheel. Why, you ask? When the players boarded the plane for road trips, an employee handed them envelopes containing their per diem meal money in cash. For a road trip of decent length, that could come to more than $1,000 per player. The players then pooled their money and selected a number to correspond with the roulette-wheel numbers on the plane's front tire (javascript:newwind('http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/jon_wertheim/01/10/nba.gambling/','131')). When the plane finally landed and stopped at the airstrip, an attendant inserted a peg into the tire. If the peg ended up wedged into your number, you won the pot. SI.com (javascript:newwind('http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/jon_wertheim/01/10/nba.gambling/','131'))