Picture this: You just won your first NBA championship. You're at a Miami Beach nightclub celebrating with your team. Someone offers you a 15-liter bottle of champagne. Dirk Nowitzki says yes. You hand over your credit card. And then it gets declined.

That's exactly what happened to Mark Cuban after the Dallas Mavericks defeated the Miami Heat in the 2011 NBA Finals. The billionaire owner found himself in the back room of LIV nightclub, on hold with American Express customer service, trying to explain that yes, he really did want to spend $90,000 on champagne.

The whole thing started when David Grutman, the nightlife impresario who runs LIV and caters to celebrities and billionaire partygoers, offered up a 15-liter bottle of Armand de Brignac. Cuban recalled in a 2019 Fox Sports 1 interview: "Dirk's like 'Yes,' I'm like 'Okay,' and hand him my credit card. 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, better known as the Black Amex, isn't actually a credit card in the traditional sense. It's a charge card, which means there's no preset spending limit but you're expected to pay the balance in full each month. There's no public application process either. The invite-only card typically goes to ultra-wealthy clients who've already spent hundreds of thousands with Amex. According to Credit Karma, U.S. Centurion cardholders pay a one-time $10,000 initiation fee on top of a $5,000 annual fee.

So why did Cuban's card fail? Simple: he 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?'" After some basketball conversation and back-and-forth negotiation, an Amex rep eventually pushed the transaction through.

Grutman remembered the scene vividly. "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?'"

The irony here is pretty thick. 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 philosophy, 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 has been repeated endlessly since, summing up his view that interest rates are wealth killers.

But in 2011, there he was, fighting to get a transaction approved on what's arguably the most exclusive card in the world.

Cuban ultimately paid $90,000 for the champagne — a price Grutman confirmed, slightly less than the $140,000 sticker price Cuban remembered — and tipped 22%. That still makes it 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.