Thirty-six years is a long time to live with a broken heart. Mark Aguirre would know. Because from the time the the Mavericks’ first great star was traded away until the moment he finally returned to the fold last summer, Aguirre never stopped loving Dallas.
Why would he? His five daughters were born here. While he spends part of the year in his native Chicago, he maintains a home here. His cell phone number has a 469 area code. Dallas, he says, is where “I lost the person I love the most”—his mother, Mary, who died here, but not before Aguirre was able to fulfill one of her greatest dreams by taking her to the Southfork Ranch, back when the television show Dallas was in its heyday. And even though he’s a legend at his alma mater, DePaul, and even though he won two championship rings with the Detroit Pistons, Aguirre does not mince words about the place his professional basketball career began.
“Dallas is my lovechild,” he says. “Basketball-wise, Dallas was always my No. 1 love, and Dallas will be my No. 1 love regardless of whatever goes on. As long as I’m living, when you talk about basketball and what place meant the most to me, there’s no question that Dallas was the most impactful to me and my career.”
So when the Mavericks retire Aguirre’s No. 24 jersey at halftime of tonight’s game against Charlotte, the moment will be bigger than an honorific. It will be about healing.
Some of the ache was self-inflicted. Stories of Aguirre butting heads with the Mavericks predated his 1989 trade to Detroit by years. His bumpy relationship with head coach Dick Motta, whom Aguirre considers pivotal to getting Dallas to draft him first overall in the 1981 NBA Draft, ranked among the city’s dominant sports storylines in the mid-’80s. In the lead-up to the trade, Aguirre irked management by doing things like making an obscene gesture at a media member and benching himself during warmups for what he claimed was ankle soreness. After Aguirre ultimately got moved for Adrian Dantley and a first-round draft pick, Mavs center James Donaldson told the media in the aftermath of the deal, “We were ready to get somebody that would come in here and play hard every night. Mark would just loaf around and not give good effort in some games.”
But the idea of Aguirre, then just 29 years old, finishing out the decade in another city still seemed shocking. Less than a year prior, he was the face of a team on the come up: the 1987-88 bunch that took the Showtime Lakers to seven games in the Western Conference Finals. Dallas fell in the end, like so many of Los Angeles’ rivals, but not before Aguirre poured on a team-high 24 points in the deciding game. That’s what Aguirre did—score, better than anyone before him in a Mavs uniform and better than anyone since until Dirk Nowitzki showed up. Listed at 6-foot-6, but measuring more like 6-foot-4, he bullied smaller players on the block and outmaneuvered bigger ones off the dribble. No Maverick until Luka Doncic bettered the 29.5 points per game that Aguirre averaged in the 1983-84 season, and no Maverick other than Doncic has made more All-Star appearances in fewer seasons in Dallas. And Aguirre did all of it in the team’s earliest days, when professional basketball needed a foothold locally after the Chaparrals failed the decade prior.
“If there was no Mark, there would be no Mavericks,” says Derek Harper, the former Mavs point guard, current Mavs broadcaster, and Aguirre’s best friend.
All of that, Harper says, left the Mavs locker room with “mixed emotions” when Aguirre was ultimately moved. On the one hand, there was all that friction. Perhaps a change was best for everyone. That’s how Aguirre came to see it at the time. He yearned to be an NBA champion, so much so that he once flew on his own dime to see the Lakers and Celtics square off in the Finals, just to get a whiff of what playing on the greatest stage was like. He still considers the trip home after losing that Game 7 to Los Angeles to be “the hardest plane flight I ever took in my life.” So when the team told him there was a deal in place to send him to Detroit, Aguirre didn’t fight it. Like Dallas, Detroit was also on the rise, and the Pistons had something—someone—the Mavericks didn’t: point guard Isiah Thomas, Aguirre’s childhood friend from Chicago. “Isiah was the closest thing to family I had in the NBA, which made it a great move,” Aguirre says.
For the Mavericks, it marked the end of something. They dropped out of the playoffs in 1989, then returned the following year, only to get swept in the first round. Dallas wouldn’t see playoff basketball again until 2000, long after the likes of Blackman, Harper, and Donaldson had stopped playing.
“It was never the same,” Harper says. “We never had the same zest.”
For Aguirre, it was the beginning of many things. Four months after arriving in Detroit, he was an NBA champion, after he, Thomas, and the Pistons did what the Mavericks couldn’t and toppled the Lakers. A year later, they repeated. It was everything he wanted, even if he says the rings didn’t matter to him as much as they would have if he’d won them in Dallas. Aguirre’s premature exit became the first “what if” in a franchise that came to know so many of them, the hypothetical that predated the split of the Three J’s, Steve Nash leaving town, the dissolution of the 2011 championship team, and the trade of Doncic to the Lakers.
But Jason Kidd, the best of the Three J’s, was eventually welcomed back as a player, then as head coach. Tyson Chandler and J.J. Barea, key cogs on the title team, got their own second tours of duty in Dallas. Nash, in retirement, popped up courtside at a Mavs Finals game. Doncic was worshipped in his first game back. Everyone came home again except Mark Aguirre, even though he never left the area. For decades, his name carried a stigma, which left him out in the cold decades after anyone he had tension with ceased being involved with the organization. He watched Nowitzki live his dream of bringing an NBA title to Dallas and applauded as his contemporaries—Blackman, Harper, and Brad Davis—had their own jerseys retired. None of it added up to those who knew the man beneath the number—people like Harper, whose first brush as a rookie with the Mavericks’ star player was Aguirre lending his car to Harper for as long as he needed until he bought a ride of his own.
“If I had to choose one word to talk about it, it would be ‘misunderstood,’” Harper says. “I think when he left here and went to Detroit, somehow, he became a villain.”
Setting aside that plenty of modern players have left teams in ways that make Aguirre’s exit seem tame, his omission wasn’t fair to history. How could the organization continue to celebrate its earliest triumphs by ignoring the player at the center of it?
“I used to tell people after I got my jersey retired, I said, ‘Mark should have had his jersey retired way before me,’” Harper says. “I had a great career, but I couldn’t do what he did as a player and for the organization.”
At long last, the organization agrees, a shift in mindset that Harper attributes to Mavs governor Patrick Dumont and CEO Rick Welts. The rift finally ended on June 26, 2025—the night Cooper Flagg became the first Maverick since Aguirre to be selected first overall in the NBA Draft. Seventeen minutes before the pick became official, Aguirre took the stage in the American Airlines Center in a black Mavs polo, to the applause of thousands. “This is home,” he told them. Then the tears came.
“I never thought this time would happen,” he’d go on to say. “Because leaving the way I did, getting traded the way I did … it seemed like I was separated from Dallas. And I didn’t know how I’d get back.”
Two months later, the team announced its plan to retire his jersey. Now the day has arrived, and Aguirre, a crier by nature, is prepared to be completely unprepared emotionally for the ceremony. “It’s actually going to be too much for me,” he says. His kids will be there. So will Thomas. And, Aguirre beams, “I get to see all the guys I’m crazy about”—his old Mavs teammates.
Harper, who will be on the broadcast, is ready to reprise his role as point guard one more time. “I told him the other day, my job is simple. It’s to get this microphone to you as quickly as I can.” From there, he won’t be surprised if his old friend’s message contains plenty of love for the city that made them. They talk every day, often more than once, and “if I had a buck for every time Mark told me how much he loves Dallas, I’d be a wealthy guy,” he says. “That’s all he talks about. ‘I love Dallas, man. I never wanted to leave Dallas.’ There’s not a single conversation that we have where he doesn’t say that he needs to be in Dallas.”
The heart wants what it wants. Tonight, as he watches his No. 24 jersey ascend to the rafters, Mark Aguirre’s heart will once again be whole.
Author
Mike Piellucci
Mike Piellucci
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Mike Piellucci is D Magazine's sports editor. He is a former staffer at The Athletic and VICE, and his freelance work has been featured in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Magazine and The Ringer. A Dallas native, he is a graduate of Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas and the University of Southern California. He’s a big fan of Star Wars and Johnny Cash.