Longtime Lakers Owner Jerry Buss Dies At 80
One of the people who fundamentally transformed the National Basketball League has passed away:
Jerry Buss, who bought the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979 and turned them into the N.B.A.’s glamour team, winners of 10 league championships and the cornerstone of his Southern California sports empire, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 80.
His death was announced by the Lakers. He had been hospitalized with cancer for much of the last 18 months.
A child of the Depression, Buss obtained a doctorate in physical chemistry and later prospered in real estate ventures, enabling him to pursue his love of sports.
He paid $67.5 million to buy the Lakers from Jack Kent Cooke in a deal that included the Los Angeles Kings of the N.H.L., the Forum sports arena in Los Angeles and Cooke’s California ranch.
In January, his Lakers were valued at $1 billion by Forbes magazine, second in the N.B.A. to the Knicks’ $1.1 billion valuation.
Buss spent heavily for marquee lineups headed by Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. Jerry West, the Lakers’ former star guard, orchestrated their success as general manager together with two of pro basketball’s most renowned coaches, first Pat Riley and then Phil Jackson.
Buss made it clear he was a big spender when he gave the charismatic Johnson a 25-year, $25 million contract after his second season.
“Anybody who makes an outlandish salary obviously attracts attention,” Buss told The Los Angeles Times Magazine in 2009. “That was what was behind my contract with Magic. I think it created a lot of attention for the Lakers.”
As Johnson told the magazine: “He has put the Lakers right up there with the New York Yankees as the top brands in sports.”
Buss was an innovator in melding basketball brilliance with show business dazzle. His 1980s teams, known as the Showtime Lakers, thrilled the crowds with their fast-paced style. His Laker Girls provided high-octane dancing. Hollywood stars, most notably Jack Nicholson, held courtside seats that went for thousands of dollars a game.
Buss was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010.
Affecting a western style with his customary jeans and an open-neck shirt, dancing at discos, and known for his eye for beautiful women, Buss was a celebrity in his own right. He once owned Pickfair, the Mary Pickford-Douglas Fairbanks mansion in Beverly Hills, and he loved to throw parties for the Hollywood crowd.
Buss did not attend any Lakers games this season, presumably because of his failing health, as the Lakers struggled, despite a lineup filled with star power.
But he had set in motion his family’s continued operation of the Lakers. His daughter Jeanie, who became engaged to Jackson in December 2012, runs the business operations. His son Jim oversees basketball decisions together with General Manager Mitch Kupchak.
Gerald Hatten Buss was born on Jan. 27, 1933, in Salt Lake City, but grew up in Kemmerer, Wyo., raised by his mother, Jessie, who was divorced and worked as a waitress. At times, the boy waited for food on Depression bread lines.
“I can remember standing in a W.P.A. line with a gunny sack and I remember having to buy chocolate milk instead of white because it was one cent cheaper,” Buss told The Boston Globe in 1987.
He was a good student and obtained a scholarship to the University of Wyoming, then earned a chemistry doctorate from the University of Southern California. Through his years in the sports world, he liked to be called Dr. Buss.
Buss worked in aerospace technology for Douglas Aircraft in California as a young man. But his life changed in the wake of a small investment he made in 1959 to buy a West Los Angeles apartment building together with a former college friend, Frank Mariani. Profiting from a Los Angeles real estate boom, their company eventually owned hotels, office buildings, apartments and one-family homes.
Buss was the founding owner of the Los Angeles Strings of World TeamTennis in 1974, then stepped up to the N.B.A. and N.H.L. when he bought Cooke’s sports holdings five years later. He had also owned the Los Angeles Sparks of the Women’s National Basketball Association and the Los Angeles Lazers of the Major Indoor Soccer League.
“In big-time sports the day of individual owners like Jerry is fading fast,” David Stern, the N.B.A. commissioner, told Sports Illustrated in 1998 as the Lakers prepared to leave the Forum for the Staples Center, which opened the next year.
“He’s sort of wealthy, but he’s not extraordinarily wealthy like some of our owners,” Stern remarked. “Given the size and risk of the asset, we are moving toward a combination of the Forbes 400 and the Fortune 500,” he said, envisioning the club ownership of the future.
On Monday Stern called Buss a “visionary owner whose influence on our league is incalculable.”
I’m not much of a basketball fan, but it’s hard to deny the influence that the Lakers, and the Lakers-Celtics rivalry of the 1980s, had in turning the NBA into a massive national, indeed international, brand, and Buss was a large part of that.
He was a visionary and here is his take on his politics…this from an intereview in 1980…my how the GOP HAS NOT changed….
“Buss is not so sentimental in matters of money. Orthodox liberals, he believes, are simply deficient in common sense. “On the other hand, I would find it very difficult to take any pride in being a Republican, because Republicans are bigoted and ignorant,” says Buss, in describing his simplistic political philosophy. “Do you know how discouraging it is to go to a political banquet and have six idiots tell you something like, ‘Yeah, but that’s a nig*ger’? That’s why I won’t be labeled politically. I find myself running with Democrats, but thinking in conservative terms.”
LA will miss this man mucho…..