FORT WORTH, Texas -- Exactly six months from last Friday, an estimated 10,500 athletes from 204 nations will march into the new stadium in east London.
Flags will be raised. Anthems will be sung. And Queen Elizabeth II, who last performed this chore 36 years ago in Montreal, will utter the 15 words, officially opening the Games of the XXX Olympiad.
I'm going to guess that Mark Cuban won't be watching.
Quite the contrary. The owner of the NBA champion Dallas Mavericks made headlines last week when an ESPN website quoted him as calling the NBA's endorsement of the Games' basketball competition "the epitome of stupidity."
The crux of Cuban's problem, it seems, is that he and his fellow NBA owners are forced to allow the Olympics to use the services of their star players. And if a player should get hurt while competing for his country, it's the NBA owner -- not the queen nor the International Olympic Committee -- who still has to pay the player's multimillion-dollar salary.
I'll save my rebuttal for later. But for now, let it be noted that a goodly number of U.S. media folks leapt to Cuban's defense.
You'll hear no such discouraging words these days, of course, in London and the United Kingdom. The budget for the London Olympics, which begin July 27, has soared over the $3 billion mark.
Venues are undergoing their finishing touches, including the new Olympic Stadium, centerpiece of a 617-acre park built on what was once an industrial waste site.
With the notable exception of 1984 in Los Angeles, where hot pink Hollywood scenery scrims and flats transformed existing stadia into Olympic venues, the Games have always been a catalyst for urban revitalization.
Before the 2000 Games, Sydney Olympic Park in Homebush Bay was the site of both a weapons depot and a beef slaughterhouse.
London's new Olympic Park will be the site of nine venues, including the main track and field stadium, and will introduce Games tourists to a previously industrial sector of the city that they probably have never seen.
On TV, the London Games figure to be dazzling, as are most sporting events beamed from the former fiefdoms and kingdoms of the Old World. Expect plenty of NBC intro shots of Buckingham Palace, the Tower Bridge, Big Ben, etc.
But not all the Games events will be staged in the new Olympic Park. Spectators will be forced to navigate the labyrinth of London streets or the city's semi-antiquated subway system.
Could be fun. Could also be a test of the legendary British stiff upper lip.
The hottest ticket? Other than the opening ceremonies, featuring the queen and (probably) Paul McCartney, it likely will be Olympic tennis, which will be played on the historic grass courts at Wimbledon.
Will it all be safe? London organizers answer that fair question by pointing to the record $1.6 billion that is being spent on security.
Cuban, meanwhile, need not worry about his Mavericks superstar, Dirk Nowitzki. The German team did not qualify for a place in the Olympics tournament field.
The Mavs' owner is on record as saying, more or less, that the Olympics is nothing more than a contrived hypefest that wrongly preys on national pride in the pursuit of TV dollars. Easy for him to say, because he has not only a dog in this fight (Dirk), but also a back yard (his hi-def network) that butts up against a broadcast rights-holding competitor.
But Cuban owns his players' NBA rights, not their 365-day rights. And not their hearts, as the NBA's foreign-born players have frequently illustrated.
Most Olympics critics wisely stopped playing the amateur card long ago. Olympic athletes these days are mostly older, more experienced and, yes, better financially able to support themselves.
The Games should match the best athletes in the world, whether they be gymnasts, swimmers, soccer players or basketball players.
Six months from last Friday, the best of those athletes will march into the stadium in east London. And for two weeks most will be housed in the same Olympic Village and compete peacefully on the same playing fields.
In a lot of ways, the Olympics were TV's first reality show. No scripts. Real cheers, real tears.
It's no Shark Tank, maybe, but 4.7 billion viewers watched the last Summer Olympics.
And this one will have a real queen.
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