The Winning Legacy of World Champions

It’s good to be a Lakers fan. The team doesn’t cause much heartache. In June, the NBA team clinched its second consecutive World Championship, triumphing over the Boston Celtics in Game 7. Next year, the team will vie for the coveted “three-peat,” a term Pat Riley, currently president of the Miami Heat, trademarked when he was the Lakers head coach in the 1980s. Under Riley’s watch, the Lakers never three-peated, but Head Coach Phil Jackson (whose contract was up at the end of this past season) said to count him in for 2011, so the team is in a good position to make a run for it (let’s not talk about the Heat’s new trifecta of superstars).

Jackson led the Lakers to one three-peat already, and he three-peated twice with the Chicago Bulls when Michael Jordan was his MVP. He is hands-down the best coach in the league, and on his Lakers roster, he has Kobe Bryant, currently the best player in the league.

The dedication to greatness stretches throughout the organization all the way up to the top—team owner Dr. Jerry Buss, the greatest team owner in sports history. He also happens to be one of the most unconventional, which ultimately served to redefine convention in the NBA when he bought the team back in 1979. A competitive freewheeling gambler (poker is his game of choice) with a known penchant for whiskey-fueled late nights with young, hot girls, Buss originally found the league to be archaic. A season ticket holder himself, he knew what he as a fan wanted—namely, for the game-going experience to be spiced up. So he introduced the Laker Girls dance squad and created roped-off sections patrolled by waitresses serving cocktails, which he dubbed Senate Seats. Like most innovators, he was called crazy and irrational; some other franchise owners went so far as to say he was ruining the league, but today you won’t find an arena without luxury boxes or scantily clad halftime entertainment. To ensure the team’s competitive edge, he added Magic Johnson to his roster, which already included Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and in Buss’ first year as owner, the Lakers clinched the World Champion title, only its second trophy in 25 years.

Since then, despite revolving changes in the roster and coaching staff, the Lakers racked up a record 10 NBA titles, which makes Buss not only the most successful owner in the NBA but in any professional sports league. In the 31 years that Buss has been calling the shots, the team has made it to the finals 15 times and won almost 70 percent of its games. That is an insane statistic that Buss appreciates. “It’s a tough thing in sports,” he says. “Once you’re on top, the way the system works is that they give you poor draft choices so it’s almost inevitable that you will then fall from grace.”

But the Lakers are in that rare state of grace that allows the team to be rated as the most valuable franchise in the league. Buss originally purchased the team, along with the NHL’s L.A. Kings, the Forum, and a ranch, for $67.5 million—a record transaction in sports at the time. Today, Forbes estimates the value to be more than $600 million. That’s quite a big ROI over the past three decades, not that the return will be cashed in any time soon. “The value of the Lakers is a fact that isn’t very important because we don’t intend to sell it,” he says. “We don’t really care if it’s worth $60 million or $600 million because we never plan to sell.”

It’s a sentiment that his family shares. With retirement looming, Buss asked his six children—each with a name beginning with the letter “J”— about the possibility of selling the team, and their collective response was a resounding no. “I wasn’t sure if it was my love for the Lakers that kept us working at it or if they had a love for the Lakers that was separate from mine,” he says. “When I approached them about selling, they were horrified; none of them could imagine selling the team.” The Lakers is a family business, albeit one that affects the socioeconomic fabric of the entire city. As the head of that family business approaches 80, the next generation of Busses is stepping up to live up to the legacy that their father created.

That includes Jim, the vice president of player personnel; Joey, team president of the Los Angeles D-Fenders; and Janie, the Lakers director of charitable services. Leading the Buss family charge is Jeanie, the Lakers executive vice president of business relations. She has been groomed for the position since the day that her father bought the team. Now 47 years old, she began working in the organization when she was just 19 and pursuing a degree in business from USC. Her father insisted she continue her education, although juggling the two tasks must have been quite the balancing act; she was general manager of the tennis team Los Angeles Strings when she was still a teen. But she excelled in the organization, bringing in players like John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, and Andre Agassi and winning two titles. She then took over roller hockey, indoor soccer, and volleyball, while also promoting concerts and events before being named president of the Forum in 1995. The upcoming season will be her ninth as the executive vice president of the Lakers, where, she says, she is “on the revenue-producing side of the business, whereas the basketball department is the revenue-spending side.” She handles everything that generates the cash flow (such as sales, broadcasts, and sponsorships) that allows the team to be at the top of the league. “Business for the Lakers is good, but we do have the highest payroll in the NBA,” she says. “So we have to keep finding new ways to generate revenue.”

Not that she finds that very difficult. Courtside seats at a Lakers game are more in-demand than invites to the most star-studded events in town, even though they run more than $2,500 a pop. “I get a lot of phone calls from people who want to go to the game, often times celebrities who are in town, or dignitaries, famous athletes from other countries,” Jeanie says. “It’s kind of like we are the White House of the West. Everybody wants to stop by and go to a Lakers game and be a part of that scene.” During the finals this year alone, a plethora of stars were spotted in the seats, including Jack Nicholson, who attends every home game. Also supporting the team were Snoop Dogg, Sylvester Stallone, David Duchovny, Dustin Hoffman, Hilary Swank, David Spade, Chris Rock, Kevin James, Adam Sandler, Charlize Theron, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg—all during the final series alone.

The Lakers popularity evolved naturally over the course of Buss’ reign; it certainly wasn’t his goal from the beginning. “When I took over the Lakers, it was a much smaller mom-and-pop type of organization,” he recalls. “I did think we would have success on the court but I didn’t think it would enrapture the entire city of Los Angeles, which it has done.”

That enrapture can, of course, be attributed to the team’s success. The very first year Buss was the owner, fans were treated to a dramatic playoff round that, to this day, Jeanie, who has had courtside seats to every milestone the team conquered over the past three decades, says is her favorite team memory. “In 1980, the Lakers made it to the finals against the Philadelphia 76ers. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was injured in Game 6, and we all just thought it was over. But Magic Johnson stepped up and said, ‘I can play center.’ So Magic started at center and single-handedly won the championship for the Lakers.” Her father reflects her sentiment, saying that of all the players on his roster over the seasons, Magic stands out. “Magic will always take a very special place in my heart because we started together,” he says. “We were both a little fearful to get on a national stage and compete, but as it turns out we won the championship.”

Jeanie differs from her father in one way; while Buss personally shies away from media, rarely granting feature interviews or doing photo shoots (he even missed the 2009 championship parade to play poker), Jeanie is all about being center stage. First, there was her notorious spread in Playboy in 1995 (which her father said at the time was “the only issue of the magazine I’ll never read”). Today, she has embraced social media to spread the team’s message. She has close to 30,000 followers on Twitter (@JeanieBuss), where her profile photo was once a shot of her draped over a desk wearing little more than a smile and two basketballs covering her bare breasts. Her tweets offer an insider-perspective of life at the Lakers, which is enhanced by the fact that she is dating Head Coach Phil Jackson, who is notoriously press-shy. “In our business, there’s so much need for information—true information,” she explains. “There’s need for transparency, and a lot of times, your message doesn’t get out the way you want it to because you’re going through a third party. So by being involved in having our own way to communicate with our fans without a middleman allows our message to be heard the way we want it to be heard.” Fans can’t get enough, which led to the launch of Jeanie’s Journal, a video blog featured on the Lakers’ website, where Jeanie often posts impromptu interviews with Jackson from their home and even in the car on the way to a game at the Staples Center. It’s all-access insight into the lives of the sport’s most dominant power couple.

Jeanie is certainly a powerful, if not the most powerful, woman in sports. She calls the shots, attending the NBA owner meetings where she is often the only woman in the room, but she is careful not to let that define her. “I think that if you define yourself by your gender, then that limits you. Women should never think, ok, what’s a good career for a woman? You have to look at things as gender-neutral or else it puts a limit on what you can accomplish. …You pursue your dreams based on what your passion is, not what society would dictate for you. Sports is a great business and it’s a competitive business. If you think that being a woman is a weakness, then it will be used against you. There is nothing weak about being a woman. In this competitive business, people will use whatever weakness they sense in you to get an upper hand. So if you go into something thinking that you have a disadvantage, then they will use that and it will become a disadvantage.”

These sage life lessons will be included in her forthcoming book, Laker Girl, due out in the fall. She says it will read like a diary of the past season detailing milestones from the 2009 championship team’s White House visit in January right on down to the 2010 team’s championship parade, interspersed with the history of how she climbed the ranks to the high-profile position she now holds.

When she does need advice, she turns to her father, who is still very much involved in the organization. When asked if he will ever fully turn over the reigns, Jeanie says, “There is no reason for him to ever retire, I won’t let him! He’s the visionary, he’s the one who gives us our marching orders and we fulfill that mission. We take away the mundane, irritating tasks of day-to-day business so he doesn’t have to worry about that. He sets the tone and sets the course for the team and for what he wants from us, and he’s a great leader.”

Buss is quick to share the love right back. “I’ve been lucky to turn over a family business to this particular family, who has such a passion for it,” he says. “And not only that, but then I also had the benefit to stand by and see and watch what they would do with it. I feel very comfortable that they will go forward with it and I’m very proud of what they have done with it. It is a very relaxing feeling and I can’t imagine it having worked out better.”