mark cuban

Mark Cuban is rehearsing a mambo routine with his partner, professional dancer Kym Johnson, and his hips need to be a little looser. Kym pushes on her own to demonstrate. "You've got to push it forward and take it back," she says. "All of the action is happening downstairs."

Words to live by. They're dancing to ... actually, I can't tell you what song they're dancing to -- I'm told it's top-secret -- but appropriately, it's an ode to money. The hip action comes during a line celebrating the green stuff. Cuban tries the pelvic thrust again and nails it. "I like your face during that part!" Kym says to him. "You look so happy."

Cuban grins. "Wouldn't you be?"

Yeah, it's not exactly a hardknock life for the billionaire businessman. So how did an (otherwise) everyman known for his T-shirts and jeans end up in tight pants and sequins, sharing a stage with the likes of Marie Osmond and Wayne Newton on the new season of Dancing with the Stars (8 p.m. ET Mondays, ABC)?

Producers called Cuban a few weeks before he underwent hip replacement surgery at the beginning of the summer and, well, asked him. "I figured I was going to have to rehab it anyway," he says. "I might as well have fun doing it." He started practicing less than a month ago and already has lost 20 pounds. "He has a dancer's body now," Kym says.

A dancer's body. As if the boys in the locker room needed any more ammunition. "Jerry Stackhouse told me I had some big ones to go out and do this in front of 20 million people," Cuban says. "Dirk (Nowitzki) just smirked and shook his head." At another point, Cuban tells ABC's camera crew about his team: "These guys can't dance, so they have no room to talk. You've heard of the white man's overbite? Dirk's got the white man's bucktoothed overbite."

And if you're lucky, you might even get a chance to see Cuban incorporate that white man's bucktoothed overbite on live television this fall. Kym choreographs each dance, but as Cuban exclaims, "I help!" Their deal is that he gets to work one classic "guy" move into every routine. The foxtrot he'll unveil tonight features the "churn the butter" move; next week -- mambo week -- he'll sneak in a "snake."

This is his first go at the mambo, and, after walking through the steps dozens of times, they do it at full speed for the first time all the way through. He looks up at me when they're done: "How was it?"

"Fun!" I say.

"Fun or fun-ny?" Kym asks with a grin.

Fun, I assure her -- and it is. At one point, Cuban asks me if his performance is what I expected. "You thought I was going to be a stiff, didn't you?"

The truth is, I don't quite know what I expected, but this isn't it. Cuban is fun out there, he's charming ... and you know what, he's pretty good. Good enough to send women across the country -- and maybe even a few NBA fans -- scurrying for their phones like a bunch of American Idol-crazed preteens. As with everything else in his life, he's determined to excel at this -- he's already talking about being in the show's finals as if it's as certain as the sun coming up tomorrow.

But not yet. Their second time through with the music is a bit, uh, sloppy. "I didn't have my mambo attitude that time. I was thinking about my arm," Cuban says, shaking his head. Kym starts to give him some advice, and he gets the look of a player who's being told by his coach that he released the ball too early -- he already knows. "I was thinking about everything else," he says crisply, definitively. "Let's do it again."

Sure enough, the next time through is much smoother. "Every time, I pick up a little piece," he says, leaning on his knees, out of breath. "It's repetition, repetition, repetition." Kym nods. "It's definitely getting there."

He stands upright, the sweat dripping off his arms, and looks at Kym. "Again?" Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, indicated Monday on Fox Sports Radio that he was interested in buying the Chicago Cubs.

"I'm going to try, but that's all I can say," Cuban told the radio station. "They made it real clear that I can't comment on anything. Otherwise I would. But I had fun, I was at the game the other night, it was a great comeback. That should tell you where my heart's at."

The Tribune Company has had the club up for sale for the last year.