Jordan said that he wanted to be wooed. Parsons and his friends jumped in his car immediately after returning home from a trip to Vegas with several Mavs staffers and drove from Dallas to spend the weekend with Jordan in Houston. This was June 19, more than a month after the Clippers had been eliminated in the second round of the playoffs by the Rockets.
Parsons and Jordan had exchanged hundreds of text messages and FaceTime calls during that time. It was time, Parsons thought, to get some real face time. And it was such a priority to him, he didn't mind making the four-plus-hour drive while running on fumes after a few days of Vegas fun.
Parsons and pals arrived in Houston a little before midnight, checking into the Hotel Zaza. Jordan, accompanied by some high school buddies and other acquaintances, picked them up in a party bus.
"The atmosphere is crazy, the music is loud," said Pausha Haghighi, Parsons' childhood best friend and personal assistant. "There was no room on that bus. I remember thinking, 'Oh, this is where the night's gonna go?' It was a fun night."
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the group went on an epic romp. On June 26, they all met up in Los Angeles with another of the Mavs' free-agent targets,
Wesley Matthews. The trio worked out with trainer Robbie Davis at his gym near LAX and made plans for the evening.
The night started with dinner at Boa on the Sunset Strip and ended across the street at a swanky club called Bootsy Bellows, where Cuban just happened to be entertaining a group of associates from his TV show, "Shark Tank." With Cuban across the club, Jordan, Parsons and Matthews sipped on drinks and discussed the possibility of playing together in Dallas.
The next night they ate dinner at Baltaire, a steakhouse in Brentwood, and clubbed at Hyde in Hollywood. A few days later, Jordan invited Parsons and his entourage over to his house in the Palisades. They ordered pizza, watched a movie and played basketball in the swimming pool with Jordan's football-playing brothers.
