Buss--The Next Generation

The most powerful female sports executive in the country was sweating profusely in the wilds of Montana, part of a month-long vacation at her boyfriend’s lakeside retreat. During an afternoon outing picking huckleberries, she found herself playing a role--a sort of Beverly Hillbilly in reverse--that didn’t come naturally, though she was coping. The former Playboy model could handle the sun beating down on her no-longer-fancy hairdo, the dust spoiling her usually flawless makeup, the shrubs scratching her nails. There are hardships you endure for love. But she’d become separated from her boyfriend in the woods, and suddenly he was talking about bears.

“I did tell you what to do if you run into a bear,” he called.

“Uh, no.”

“If it’s a black bear, play dead. If it’s a grizzly, climb a tree.”

She felt the panic rising and snapped: “How do I tell the difference?”

“The grizzly,” he said vaguely, “is bigger.”

The moment underscores the paradox that is Jeanie Buss--girlfriend of Lakers coach Phil Jackson, daughter of team owner Jerry Buss and administrative vice president and likely future president of one of the richest and most successful teams in professional sports.

Jeanie Buss plays many roles. She can be the damsel in distress with her boyfriend, as she was that summer day in 2001, or the nervous child with her father, as she was when she first told him about her budding relationship with Jackson.

But beneath the giggly, vivacious personality and stylish clothes is a former model who can talk basketball with NBA owners, finances with Staples Center officials and marketing with television executives. She has proven that she can handle tough situations, as she did when she dealt with the funeral of broadcaster Chick Hearn, and she has shown that she has a few things left to learn about basketball, as she did when she initially opposed the hiring of Jackson as the Lakers’ coach.

Jeanie Buss is preparing to sit at the helm of a sports empire that some estimate is worth half a billion dollars. Is she ready? Is Los Angeles?

Jerry Buss has been the majority owner of the Lakers for 23 years, but at age 69, he is gradually turning over the reins of power to his four adult children. Along with Jeanie (41), there is Janie (39) and sons Johnny (46) and Jimmy (43), the four children he had with his wife, Jo Ann, from whom he is divorced. He’s also making room in his operations for three boys from another relationship, two of whom, Joey (18) and Jesse (14), the couple had together, and a third, Sean (31), who is the woman’s son from a previous relationship. Buss considers him a stepson and employs him as a Lakers scout.

“All of them will someday play a role in the Lakers if they so desire,” Jeanie says.

But with Buss removing himself from the day-to-day operation, rarely even coming into the office, and with Jeanie’s two older brothers making it clear they prefer smaller roles, and with a sister who places homemaking first, Jeanie has already assumed command of the day-to-day operations of the Lakers, the crown jewel of the Buss sports empire.

Some find it hard to take Jeanie seriously in this role, and she’s certainly not the first heiress apparent to face such skepticism. On the day in 1996 when Irvine’s St. John Knits announced that daughter Kelly Gray was taking over the presidency of the family enterprise, the company’s stock dropped 7.5%. Skeptics grumbled, too, when Christie Hefner took over the executive role that her father, Hugh, a friend of Jerry Buss, had long played in the Playboy empire.

Critics still think of Jeanie Buss as the girl who posed nude in an eight-page Playboy spread, including a photo in which she hid her breasts behind a pair of basketballs; as the girl who shopped and hung out with her father’s college-age girlfriends when she was also that age; as the girl who cruised around town in fancy cars and was romantically linked with various sports celebrities. Although her father is a well-known adherent to the Playboy philosophy, Jeanie says she realizes adopting that lifestyle in her younger days was an open invitation to the tabloids. “I’m disappointed so much of that stuff got put in the media,” says Jeanie, who concedes that detractors have called her “Jeanie the Bimbo.” “But I understand people like to gossip.”

While it’s hard to find a discouraging word among other NBA team executives about Jeanie’s fitness to eventually run the Lakers, it’s also hard to find an encouraging word. Most plead ignorance simply because they haven’t dealt with her on major decisions. The truth is, it’s one thing to handle daily operations as Jeanie is doing, and quite another to oversee a management group that, for example, must continue to obtain superstars such as Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, while at the same time needs to find unheralded stars among low draft picks. Those are decisions her father still reserves for himself. How will she handle life in the wider world of sports, which is dominated by men who don’t necessarily appreciate Jeanie Buss for her management skills?

“I don’t really know how good she’ll be as an executive,” says one rival club official, “but I’d sure love to marry her.”

Those who watched her this past summer saw a mature, focused Jeanie Buss. Despite the Lakers’ third straight championship, it was a stressful time in the front office because of the death of longtime broadcaster Chick Hearn. When the 85-year-old Hearn died from head injuries after a fall in August, Jerry was in Europe. He remained there, confident his daughter could handle the situation.

And she did. Jeanie was at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, orchestrating the press conference to announce Hearn’s passing. During the next five days, she spearheaded arrangements for one of the most elaborate funerals in this city’s history--a private service for 400, televised live, and a reception that followed at Staples Center. The organization invited fans to Staples to file by Hearn’s broadcast perch above the court, and about 18,000 of them showed up. Jeanie also handled the sticky negotiations with Hearn’s successor, Paul Sunderland, who wasn’t happy with a contract offer of only one year, but accepted it when Jeanie held firm.

Earlier in the season, when the Lakers decided to honor the Hall of Famers who led the Lakers to five championships while the team was still in Minneapolis, Jeanie and her staff decided to publicly present those former players and their coach championship rings, which weren’t given out half a century ago when they won those titles. And last month, when the Lakers received rings for their latest championship, Jeanie insisted that the Minneapolis players also get rings, a decision that brought emotional calls from some of the players and established her as someone with a deep understanding and respect for the game.

“We in the NBA know how much she knows,” says NBA commissioner David Stern. “She has an intimate [knowledge] of the business.”

“She always had a vision,” says Linda Rambis, who has been working alongside Jeanie for two decades and is married to Kurt Rambis, the former Laker player and head coach who now is Jackson’s assistant. “But she was insecure. She didn’t always have the confidence to stand up for what she believed in. She always had to deal with that backlash of being the boss’s kid. She has really had to work her way in and there has been a lot of resistance. But she’s poised. She’s smart. If she was a man, she might have been accepted 20 years ago, but sports is the last frontier for women.”

While Jerry Buss has stepped into the background, he’s not about to step out of the picture. “I just can’t visualize myself walking away, relinquishing control,” he says. “My relationship with this team is a lifelong marriage.” But while he approved Sunderland as Hearn’s successor, it was up to Jeanie to make it happen.

She has learned from watching her father operate, and can lean on his longtime business partner, Frank Mariani, and attorney Jerry Perzik, but she also has a style and staff of her own. Her smile is bigger than his, her eyes wider and softer, her clothes flashy--an obvious departure from her father’s preference for jeans and cowboy boots. She spends time honing her body in the gym while he gravitates toward smoke-filled poker parlors. But their creed is the same: “Never take no for an answer.”

With the passing of the years and the gradual passing of the torch, Jeanie has won over some skeptics. When she first attended a meeting of the NBA’s Board of Governors, she put her normal wardrobe in the closet, picked out a conservative business suit and carried a briefcase. Then she sat by her father’s elbow for three years of meetings, listening, learning, but never speaking to the group as a whole. Finally, when her father left the room and a minor matter came up that required input from the Lakers, all eyes turned to Jeanie. “I’m just so glad I finally get to say something,” she said, and laughter filled room.

Other team owners and NBA executives soon found she had a lot to say. “She’s a smart businesswoman with good marketing ideas,” says Brian McIntyre, head of media relations for the NBA. “When they first met her, some people were struck mostly by her looks, and she had to overcome some of that.”

Stern echoes that opinion. As an example, he recalls that the Lakers had an exhibition game scheduled for New Orleans for the recently concluded preseason. He says Jeanie anticipated that the Charlotte team might be moving to New Orleans for this season, making that city the Hornets’ exclusive territory and possibly creating legal and logistical problems that could have cost the Lakers a lot of money. “So she was on the phone lining the game up for Oklahoma City instead,” Stern says. “She has been really involved in the operation of this franchise for several years on matters ranging from television to the building to scheduling. There is no subject involved with the team that she can’t deal with. Actually, at this point, I think she is more knowledgeable than her father. She can’t say that, but I can.”

“Who would have thought George Bush would be an effective president?” says the vice president of an NBA club who asked not to be identified. “I think those are awfully big shoes that Jeanie would have to fill. I think Jerry is doing the right thing by bringing her in now, but whether she will be capable of carrying on with the operating blueprint he is giving her, I don’t know. If it happened tomorrow, it would probably make a lot of people nervous.”

He added that “I don’t know what more he could do to prepare her. She has been raised in the business, which gives her a lot more experience than an outside buyer coming in. Disney and Fox, big corporations, got into sports, and they haven’t had a painless entry. [But] let’s just hope she is not required to fill those big shoes any time soon.”

Jerry’s kids may be inheriting an empire, but there were no such riches on his horizon when he was a kid. When he was 4, growing up in the midst of the Depression in Wyoming, the only thing he could count on was a meal at the end of a bread line. He dug ditches, worked on the railroad, and eventually got a PhD in physical chemistry from USC.

While working as an aerospace engineer, Buss and a fellow worker, Mariani, each put aside $83.33 from their monthly paychecks until they had accumulated $1,000. Then, in 1959, they invested in an apartment building in Santa Monica. Drained of funds, they even did their own repair work at night after working in aerospace all day. Twenty years later, after riding Southern California’s real-estate booms, their empire was worth about $350 million.

With such wealth at his disposal, Buss moved out of his house and into a lifestyle that emulated that of Hugh Hefner himself, dating women no more than a year or two on either side of 21 and even acquiring his own version of the Playboy mansion in the 1980s when he lived in Pickfair, the former home of actress Mary Pickford and actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

In 1979, Buss, whose first sports venture was the Los Angeles Strings of World Team Tennis, pulled off the biggest transaction of his life, a $67.5-million deal with Jack Kent Cooke to buy the Lakers, the Kings hockey team, the Forum and a California ranch in exchange for the lease to New York’s Chrysler Building (which Buss obtained at Cooke’s request) and several other properties. In all, the deal involved nine pieces of property, 12 escrows in three states, and more than 50 lawyers and advisors.

It was Buss who ascribed the term “Showtime” to the Lakers’ entertaining fast-break offense during the 1980s, Buss who raised the cost of courtside seats tenfold but kept them filled, Buss who for years handed the basketball decisions over to NBA talent guru Jerry West (now with the Memphis Grizzlies), Buss who paid the price for developing championship teams beginning with a groundbreaking 25-year, $25-million contract for Magic Johnson in 1981. But Buss was not content with just having a winner, or even a dynasty.

He wanted to create a family business.

His children, though, had their own ideas. one by one, they let their father know, in various ways, that maybe leading a Los Angeles sports dynasty wasn’t their thing. All except Jeanie.

Her brother, Johnny, the oldest son, learned how harsh the sports business could be at a young age when his father traded Johnny’s fiancee, Diane Fromholtz, a member of the Strings, in 1976. “He was a wreck when he had to tell me,” Johnny recalls. “When I came into his office, he was chain-smoking. ‘What if I told you I had a chance to get Chris Evert?’ he asked me.”

Johnny knew where his father was going with that question. Fromholtz went to the Indiana Loves, and Johnny went with her. But their relationship ended soon after and Johnny returned to L.A. He resumed working for his father, first in the real-estate business and then running the Lazers, his father’s entry in the Major Indoor Soccer League, in the early 1980s. But after the 1984 season, with the team struggling financially, Johnny resigned. “I felt I had put so much effort into it, given up my life and when it didn’t work out, it hurt,” he says. “It hurt very badly. I felt as if I was a failure.”

For all of the next-generation Busses, failure in their father’s eyes--real or perceived--is the ultimate horror. Although Johnny says his father never made him feel that way, he couldn’t be talked out it. Needing to find his own identity, Johnny tried auto racing, but eventually was lured back into the family business to run the Los Angeles Sparks, his father’s team in the Women’s National Basketball Assn. Johnny’s team has won the league championship each of the last two seasons, but Johnny remains a reluctant owner. He says he’d really like to return to his first love, real estate, far from the glare of the Buss spotlight.

Jim Buss followed Johnny as president of the Lazers. When the MISL folded in 1989, Jim also wanted to prove he could make it on his own. “I was tired of the feeling of taking a paycheck from Dad,” he says.

He found his niche training racehorses and did it for seven years until Dad again came calling. “He told me it looked like Jerry West [who built the Laker dynasty in the 1980s as well as the current three-time NBA championship team] was looking to retire,” Jim recalls. “He wanted me to learn the business.”

So Jim became West’s shadow, traveling with him to colleges and basketball camps, watching West zero in on the players he felt were NBA material. Jim saw some similarity with his previous job evaluating and buying racehorses. “When you watch an athlete in motion, there are some of the same tendencies,” he says. “I’m not comparing horses to people. That’s not fair. But with what I had done, it was easy to relate to scouting.”

Jim ran into many of the same doubters as Jeanie--those who considered him little more than the boss’s privileged son. Now that West has left for Memphis, Jim, the Lakers’ assistant general manager, feels he has found his role. He sees himself as a middleman between his father and general manager Mitch Kupchak. “If my father sees a player he likes and asks if we can do anything, and Mitch doesn’t feel it’s a good fit, I can go back to my father and [explain] why.”

Janie, the youngest Buss daughter, stayed home in an unincorporated area of Riverside County the night the Lakers beat the Sacramento Kings to win the Western Conference Finals last spring, and when the game was over she put her two young kids in the bathtub. “Family is definitely my priority,” says Janie, who lives with her husband of 11 years, David Drexel, her children, 9-year-old Riley and 5-year-old Sierra, several horses and a handful of dogs and cats.

But, she says, don’t think she’s not part of her father’s grand scheme. Janie handles the finances for the Los Angeles Lakers Youth Foundation and various other nonprofit team endeavors, from youth centers to educational projects. In all, she oversees contributions of several hundred thousand dollars a year. “The media don’t know me,” she says, “but I’m just as involved. It’s just with things you don’t hear a lot about.”

Perceiving that Jeanie was the logical choice to fill his shoes, Jerry Buss tested her early. When Jeanie was 19 and one year into her pursuit of a business degree at USC, her father gave her a summer job: general manager of the Strings. He immediately told her to call up McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, then two of the best tennis players in the world, and get them to play a match at the Forum.

An impossible task for a 19-year-old? “I didn’t know any better,” Jeanie recalls. “I figured, ‘If Dr. Buss [she refers to him by his preferred title] says he thinks I can do it, I must be able to do it.’ If he never doubted me, how could anyone else? It was only later that I thought, ‘What the hell was I doing?’ ” It took a couple of years of being “annoying to the point of being ridiculous,” as Jeanie now concedes, but Connors and McEnroe finally agreed to the match. It grossed $462,000, establishing a new gate-receipt record for the Forum.

Life was pretty good. She was a teenage executive living at Pickfair and hanging out with her father’s girlfriends. “Because they were my age,” she says, “they were girls I could relate to. We would go to the movies and go shopping together.” Jeanie married volleyball player Steve Timmons in the spring of 1990 and moved to Italy with him. The marriage ended in 1993. “Everybody can look back at failed relationships,” she says. “I never put my marriage first. I don’t cook. I’m not the greatest homemaker. It was always business which attracted me.”

During her marriage, she had continued to work long-distance for her father, in tennis as well as volleyball, roller hockey and indoor soccer, all of the minor sports he had added to his burgeoning empire. In 1994, Jeanie became more involved than ever in her father’s enterprises, joining the NBA hierarchy as an alternate governor. That year, she also fulfilled a long-harbored dream to pose in Playboy. “It was about celebrating women,” she insists. “It’s not like I wanted to be naked in a magazine.” Her father expressed his mixed emotions by saying, “This is the first issue of Playboy I will not read.”

By early 1995, as Jeanie was about to splash across the pages of Hefner’s magazine, the job of running the Forum opened up. “As your employer, I am offering you this position,” Jerry told his oldest daughter. “But as your father, I am advising you not to take it.” Jerry was thinking of the magnitude and complexity of the job, a job which required 12- to 14-hour days. She took the job, but the timing was terrible. Jeanie was stepping into an important administrative position, trying to earn the respect of her employees, and at the same time was appearing in a skin magazine.

She also stepped into the middle of a labor dispute involving Forum stagehands. It got so bitter that Jeanie was advised, for safety reasons, to stop driving her own car to work. Just down the freeway, the nonunion Arrowhead Pond was opening up, offering lower production costs and stiff competition for the Forum.

She stayed on the job for four years and successfully handled the union negotiations. “She’s sharp,” says Lon Rosen, an agent who has negotiated with the Buss family over the years while representing clients ranging from Johnson to Rambis. “She has learned the ropes. Her dad has made her work very, very hard. People thought she wasn’t anything more than just the boss’s daughter, but I’ve seen her grow.”

Finally, in 1999, with the Lakers abandoning the Forum for Staples Center, her father told her she was ready to take on the Lakers. “Have you proved to yourself that you can do this?” he asked. “Because you never had to prove it to me.”

All of her siblings say they are pleased with Jeanie’s front-and-center role. “My dad likes a system of checks and balances,” Jim says. “Jeanie has more of the administrative part. We all have a good relationship. There’s no jealousy or envy. It’s very smooth.”

Jackson spent the year between his head coaching jobs with the Chicago Bulls and the Lakers trying to keep his 27-year marriage to his second wife going, but it didn’t work out and they are now divorced. Jackson says he wasn’t looking for a relationship when he joined the Lakers. “It caught me off guard,” he says, echoing Jeanie’s sentiment as well.

“When I heard we were talking to Phil, I said, ‘That is not what we need, another big personality around here, another big ego,’ ” she says. “Fortunately, this was one time Dr. Buss didn’t listen to me.” She says Jackson came into her office shortly after his arrival and invited her to dinner. “Pretty soon,” Jeanie says, “somebody I didn’t even want here became somebody I wanted to spend more and more time with.”

Jeanie had been out to dinner with Jackson several times before she decided it was time her father found out she was dating the man he was paying $30 million to coach his basketball team, and who also is 16 years her senior. “Before I met with my father,” says Jeanie, “I told [brother Jim] about Phil, knowing he would go to Dr. Buss. I wanted him to have time to think about it, time for the shock to wear off.”

Finally, Jeanie nervously faced her father in his office. Before she could speak, she says her father smiled and said, “I’ve always thought you should date someone older, someone who would finally appreciate you.”

What else could he say?

Jeanie Buss and Phil Jackson ride motorcycles, play Scrabble, travel abroad in the off-season and spend a month each year at Jackson’s cabin on Montana’s Flathead Lake. When the Lakers are home, they and the Rambises gather every day in Jeanie’s El Segundo office after the team practice, order take-out and eat with plastic forks and knives. “We talk more at lunch as couples than at any time else,” says Linda Rambis. Jackson says he and Jeanie “don’t talk X’s and O’s” but adds “she has spent a great portion of her adult life involved in sports and she knows the territory.”

Jeanie recently bought a house next to Jackson’s in Playa del Rey and has learned not to discuss the team’s performance on the drive home from Staples Center after games. Jackson likes to pop in a jazz CD, pull out a cigar and mellow out. If Jackson sometimes gets his way, there are other times when Jeanie gets hers. Once, after the huckleberry hunt, she says she insisted that Jackson take her to a preserve near his cabin to see its captive bears. Although Jackson dislikes the idea of seeing the animals in captivity--and refused to even speak with the people who work there--he finally gave in and took her.

Will they ever marry?

“I would very much like to get married again, but I’m not going to put any pressure on Phil,” Jeanie says. “If we don’t get married, that’s OK. We have a wonderful relationship and my feelings for him are unconditional. But whatever we do, it has to work for both of us.”

Jackson, she says, lives only for the moment. She, on the other hand, is “committed to this job and to living in Los Angeles. I have no idea how long he will coach, or what would satisfy his competitive instincts if he wasn’t coaching. As it is, when we play Scrabble, he not only has to beat me, but he has to double my score. If he didn’t have basketball, he would be mean to me. I want him to coach forever.”

Jackson seems determined to walk away from coaching when his contract is up in three years, but he sidesteps questions about marriage and how it might affect his future with the Lakers. “We’ve kind of left that alone,” he says, adding, “I may need to divorce myself from basketball to live a normal life. It seems like I’ve been doing this forever. I think I will eventually find a different arena of competition.”

The Lakers without Jackson is a jarring thought, but no less so to Jeanie’s brother Jim than the thought of the Lakers without his father. To him, it seems his father will always be there. “I keep forgetting he’s aging,” he says, “because the girls he dates never age.” But there was inevitable speculation over the future of the Lakers ownership after Jerry suffered a pinched nerve in his neck at a charity ball at the Beverly Hilton last month. He was taken from the event on a stretcher, and Jeanie was angered by the questions that followed her father’s collapse.

“They were asking me, ‘If anything happened to Dr. Buss, would anything happen to the team?’ ” she says. “How could they ask me that? This is my dad. Do they think the organization would go down the drain? Do they think the house would burn down? We are business people.”