WOMEN OF THE PEOPLE
The new owners of the Sparks walked right past the floor seats set aside for them last Saturday night in Arco Arena.
Carla Christofferson and Kathy Goodman, longtime Sparks season ticket-holders, instead veered to their right and climbed up an aisle behind the Sparks bench toward the upper reaches of the arena’s lower bowl, cheerily settling in among two busloads of Sparks fans who had made the trip from Southern California.
Christofferson and Goodman, who bought the team from Lakers owner Jerry Buss in December, are fans as much as they are businesswomen and they wanted to support the supporters by sitting and shouting among them, which they did passionately and unabashedly from opening tip to closing horn.
Earlier, they’d arrived not in a limo but squeezed into a cab.
No divas, these two.
“We are part of this community,” Christofferson said.
Only later, after the Sparks had dropped a hard-fought 88-85 decision to the defending Western Conference champion Sacramento Monarchs, would the new management team take advantage of the perks of ownership.
Christofferson and Goodman -- a lawyer and a high school English teacher, respectively, living out the ultimate fantasy of sports fans everywhere who dream of running their favorite team the way they want it run -- sat down in a cozy lobby bar in a downtown hotel after the game and chit-chatted with a group of staffers and friends that included former Laker Michael Cooper, their handpicked coach.
At that moment they had separated themselves from the team’s more casual fans, literally and figuratively, a point made clear by the gleam in Goodman’s eye when she was asked to identify the coolest thing about owning the Sparks.
“If I’m going to be a geeky fan about it, I would say, the players saying hi to me,” she said. “And hanging out with Michael Cooper. It’s very cool.”
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Christofferson, who turned 40 last Saturday, and Goodman, who turned 44 last Friday, are more than business partners.
They’re best friends.
They’re not a couple.
This is not to say they’ve gone out of their way to end the speculation about the nature of their relationship that has swirled since it was announced last fall that they’d led an investment group that paid $10 million for the Sparks.
“I think actually it raises my stock significantly,” Goodman said, laughing at the conjecture, “so I don’t see any reason why I should deny it. I joke with Carla all the time about it. I’m like, ‘I’m going to say it’s true because I think it makes me look really good. You’re in trouble. You should deny it. But not me.’ ”
Her business partner is a former Miss North Dakota. Twice divorced, Christofferson is dating Adam Shell of Encino, a 31-year-old businessman, filmmaker and singer-songwriter who in December released his debut album, “Vacant Room.”
But even Shell, whose company installs home audio systems, believed when he first met them a year ago that Christofferson and Goodman were a couple.
“It’s a running joke,” he said.
Goodman finds it curious.
“One of the things that I think is really interesting is that, whenever women do things together, there’s an assumption that they must have a romantic relationship,” said Goodman, who is single. “But when men do things together, no one makes that assumption. People assume because all of these women come to WNBA games with their female friends that they’re in romantic relationships with them.
“But I’ve been to a lot of Laker games and there are lots of guys there with their guy friends and no one says, ‘Oh, my God, look at all these gay guys.’ ”
Noting that, “I have a lot of friends who are gay,” Goodman said that she and Christofferson simply “share a very uniquely compatible vision of the world, which always surprises me because we come from two very different places.”
Christofferson, literally a farmer’s daughter who said she cannot ever remember wearing a dress before she was coerced into entering her first beauty pageant as a high school senior, grew up about 15 miles outside tiny Tolna, N.D. (population: 240). She was a tomboy growing up and an all-state basketball player in high school, but it was her success in beauty pageants -- her talent was playing the flute -- that brought scholarship money and allowed her to further her education, first as an undergraduate at North Dakota and later at Yale law school.
“Between that and an Elks scholarship, suddenly I got to go to college,” said Christofferson, whose father lost the family farm before she bought it back a few years ago. “It went from, ‘How do I go to college?’ to, ‘No problem.’ ”
Initially a reluctant participant, she was Miss Teen North Dakota in 1985, first runner-up in the Miss Teen USA pageant the same year and Miss North Dakota four years later. Fiercely proud of her home state, she has kept the North Dakota license plates on her cars since moving to Southern California to join the law firm O’Melveny & Myers 15 years ago. And she stays true to her tomboy roots each fall by making an annual deer-hunting trip to North Dakota.
“I know it’s not popular in California,” she said, “but I’m a bow hunter. Bow hunting is very relaxing because you just sit in a tree silently. It’s very serene.”
Goodman, whose parents are UCLA graduates, grew up in a suburban, upper-middle class setting, mostly in Ohio, New Jersey and upstate New York, where she graduated from a high school in Syracuse before moving on to Harvard.
Like Christofferson, Goodman comes from a large family -- she has five brothers and sisters, Christofferson has four -- and she too became a lawyer.
She was not athletic but still longed to be a player, in Hollywood, that is, which is why she moved to Los Angeles after studying law at the University of Chicago. She took a legal job in film financing and later helped launch Intermedia Films, an independent motion picture production and finance company that made her rich when it went public in May 2000.
It wasn’t Mark Cuban money, she said, “But I did well enough for a single woman in Los Angeles to know that I never needed to work again.”
It was then that she switched gears and, after taking two years to goof off, became a teacher. She teaches at HighTechHigh-LA in Lake Balboa.
“I spent 10 years in the film business working with adults who act like children,” Goodman said. “Now I spend time working with actual children.”
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Christofferson and Goodman met 6 1/2 years ago, when Christofferson was part of a team of lawyers representing Intermedia in a lawsuit. “It was the first and last time I ever got to boss Kathy around,” Christofferson said, laughing.
The women soon bonded over their shared fondness for women’s basketball and the Sparks. One day Goodman invited Christofferson to a game and was surprised to learn that Christofferson had season tickets of her own.
Eventually they moved to adjoining seats -- they sat courtside, opposite the visitors bench at Staples Center -- and in 2005 began plotting their takeover.
“It was a lark,” Christofferson said of her initial idea of buying the team, “but what I started thinking was, ‘People do things all the time that they have no business doing.’ That’s how entrepreneurs make their living. They do things people don’t expect them to do. And it was really just a matter of saying, ‘Well, why not?’ ”
Said Goodman: “I have a tendency to sort of think, ‘Yeah, that would be kind of fun.’ Carla’s the one that says, ‘We’re going to do this.’ ”
They made a pitch to Buss and started recruiting investors.
“If there’s one thing that the film business taught me,” Goodman said, “it’s that you can afford anything. You’re basically borrowing against the future.”
Within months of taking over, they made a difficult move by dumping former coach Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, Kobe Bryant’s father and architect of a best-in-the-West 25-9 record last season, and rehiring the popular Cooper, who guided the Sparks to WNBA championships in 2001 and 2002.
Not surprisingly, their top priority seems to be the fans.
“I feel like I’m responsible for them,” Goodman said. “Like, ‘OK, they need to have a good time and it needs to be a good game.’ I sort of feel like I’m throwing a party and if people don’t have a good time, I’m not a good host.”
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