When Mark Cuban agreed to a $140,000 bottle of Armand de Brignac to celebrate the Dallas Mavericks' first NBA title, he didn't expect to be hustled into the back room of a Miami nightclub — on hold with American Express. But that's exactly what happened after the 2011 NBA Finals when his freshly issued Black Card flopped at LIV.
The irony? Cuban has spent years warning people to stay far away from credit cards. In a 2014 appearance on "The Dave Ramsey" Show, he doubled down on his anti-debt stance, telling Dave Ramsey, "The best place to invest is to pay off all your credit cards and burn them." He added, "If you use your credit cards, you don't want to be rich." That quote — now repeated endlessly — summed up his philosophy on interest rates being wealth killers.
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But just a few years earlier, in 2011, Cuban was in a very different situation. After defeating the Miami Heat in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, Cuban and the team hit LIV, a high-end nightclub in Miami Beach run by nightlife impresario David Grutman — a hospitality mogul known for catering to celebrities, athletes, and billionaire partygoers.
Grutman offered up a 15-liter bottle of Armand de Brignac champagne. "Dirk's like ‘Yes,' I'm like ‘Okay,' and hand him my credit card," Cuban recalled in a 2019 "Fair Game" interview on Fox Sports 1. But there was a problem. "I had just gotten a new Black Amex, and I hadn't called in to get it registered and authorized — and I got declined."
The American Express Centurion Card, known as the Black Amex, isn't a credit card in the traditional sense.
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It's a charge card — meaning it doesn't come with a preset spending limit, but the balance is expected to be paid in full each month. There's no public application process. Instead, the invite-only card typically goes to ultra-wealthy clients who've spent hundreds of thousands with Amex.
Credit Karma reports that U.S. Centurion cardholders pay a one-time $10,000 initiation fee on top of a $5,000 annual fee.
So why did it fail? Cuban hadn't activated it. "They put me on the phone, I called American Express, and they're like ‘Sorry sir, this hasn't been authorized,'" Cuban said. "I was like, ‘Can I talk to your manager please?'" Eventually, after some basketball banter and back-and-forth, a rep pushed it through.
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Grutman remembered the chaos. "We were in the back because his credit card was denied," he told ESPN in 2013. "So he called up the people at the Centurion Card and said, ‘This is Mark Cuban. We just won the championship. Can I please spend some money?'"
Cuban paid $90,000 for the champagne — a price Grutman confirmed — and tipped 22%.
While the bottle was slightly discounted from the $140,000 sticker shock Cuban remembered, it still made for one of the most expensive, and temporarily embarrassing, celebratory purchases in NBA history.
He may not like credit cards — but at least when they work, he tips well.
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Image: Imagn
