By day, Gary Boren plays angel and rainmaker for the Dallas deal community. By night, he’s the secret weapon that gives the Mavericks hope for an NBA championship.

Gary Boren, who is on a mission, cannot at the moment seem to complete it. It’s March 28, 2007, an hour and a half before tip-off, and Erick Dampier, the starting center on the hottest team in the NBA, is in dire need, Boren believes, of a little shooting advice.

We’re somewhere in the bowels of the American Airlines Center, a sprawling edifice with an Art Deco façade, home of Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks. During the day, Boren, 68, is an independent investment banker, a kind of local rainmaker for early-stage Dallas companies. At night, he’s the only dedicated free-throw coach in the NBA.

When Boren is at the arena, he effortlessly flips the switch from dealmaker to shotmaker. "When Cuban first bought the team," Boren says, "he put me in the first row behind the bench." But from that low vantage point, staring at the shoulder blades of the Brobdingnagian men arrayed in front of him, Boren couldn’t get a good view of the action on the court — a professional necessity, at least for his part-time job.

"So I said, 'Mark, I gotta' see their feet.'" And he was duly relocated a dozen rows higher. The problem with Erick Dampier isn’t his size 161⁄2 feet, exactly. He is, at 63 percent, the worst free-throw shooter by a wide margin among the Mavericks' starting five — and is, as such, a perpetual drag on the team’s 81 percent season-long average from the line, which ranks tops in the NBA. He is one of Boren’s most challenging projects.

(Continue reading this story on Dealmaker)

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