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Jerry Buss Dead at 80

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Jerry Buss Dead at 80
« on: February 18, 2013, 08:14:32 PM »
He was one of the bootstrappers.


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From bread line to Lakers owner, Jerry Buss left a lasting impact on the NBA
By Steve Springer | Yahoo! Sports – 8 hours ago.


Few have ever succeeded at making such a daunting climb, from the nightmarish depths of utter poverty and hopelessness to the soaring heights of unimaginable wealth and power.
 At the age of 4, Jerry Buss was standing in a bread line on the frozen soil of Evanston, Wyo., a gunny sack in hand, waiting for the food that would keep him and his single mother, Jesse, alive for another day.
 
It was 1937, the lingering effects of the Great Depression still gripping parts of the nation.
 
By the time he had turned 6, Buss' duties had expanded to include trekking around town in search of old telephone books or other paper products that could be stuffed into the fireplace to provide warmth in a house devoid of heat.
 
By the time he was 34, exactly three decades after he had stood in that bread line, Buss had made his first million.
 
By the age of 46, Buss and his business partner, Frank Mariani, had parlayed that million into a real-estate empire that was spread over three states – California, Nevada and Arizona – and was worth an estimated $350 million.
 
[Related: Jerry Buss' legacy from those he influenced]

Buss died Monday at the age of 80. For most men, such a swift and impressive rise would have been enough to savor for a lifetime.
 
Not Jerry Buss. He had his eyes on bigger prizes.

That same year, 1979, he pulled off arguably the most complicated and lucrative transaction in sports history.
 
Buss' savvy real-estate investments helped make him a fortune. (Getty Images)Supported by an army of approximately 50 lawyers and accountants, Buss purchased the Lakers, the Kings hockey team, the Inglewood Forum and the 13,000-acre Raljon Ranch in the Sierra Nevada mountains from Jack Kent Cooke for $67.5 million. The deal broke down to $33.5 million for the Forum, $16 million for the Lakers, $10 million for the ranch and $8 million for the Kings.
 
Cooke, in exchange, received the lease to the Chrysler Building in New York, and properties in Virginia, Massachusetts and Maryland.
 
When the deal was done, 12 separate escrows finalized, Buss spent his first day at the Forum inspecting the crown jewel of his properties.
 
As the workday ended and the arena emptied out, he lingered, surrounded by only a few security people.
 
With no event that night at the Forum, Buss took a chair and walked down to the empty floor where he was surrounded by silence and darkness, except for a few scattered lights.
 
He sat down at what would be mid-court or center ice, took out a cigarette, lit it and inhaled the magnitude of his surroundings.
 
In his mind's eye, he could see the seats packed, his Lakers and Kings moving up and down the floor or ice, his championship banners on the wall.
 
Smiling, Buss told himself, "You’ve come a long way, baby."

It was never an easy path.

When his mother remarried, Buss found himself in Kemmerer, Wyo., under the yoke of a tough stepfather, Cecil Brown, who ran a plumbing business.
 
"He was a very tight-fisted guy who had all kinds of weird ideas," Buss once said. "He wanted me to get up at 4:30 in the morning [often in temperatures of 15 below] and go out and dig ditches in frozen ground so he could lay the plumbing. That was my contribution to the family. Then, after three or four hours of this, I was supposed to go to school."
 
Buss also worked at a local hotel where he made $2 a day.

[Also: Jerry Buss helped build 10 championship Lakers teams]

Seeking a better life, he quit school after his junior year of high school to go to work for the railroad. After three months of up to 14 hours a day for little money, he returned to school and went on to the University of Wyoming and eventually USC where he earned a doctorate in physical chemistry.
 
That earned Buss a job at the Douglas Aircraft Company where he was paid $700 a month.
 
He decided to put aside $83.33 from that monthly paycheck in order to raise a thousand dollars in one year. Mariani, a fellow worker, did the same. Getting four other investors to join them, Buss and Mariani put down $6,000 in 1959 to buy a 14-unit apartment building in West Los Angeles for $105,000.
 
It was from that single structure that Buss and Mariani began amassing holdings that would eventually spread across the Southwest.
 
Buss always said with pride that he knew what he didn't know. He knew real estate, he knew economics and he knew how to sell a product, but he didn’t know basketball, not at a higher level than that of the average fan.
 
So when he took over the Lakers, he had no intention of being a Jerry Jones by meddling in the intricacies of personnel decisions. For that, he had Bill Sharman, Jerry West and a string of competent coaches.
 
Buss focused instead on marketing the team. Magic Johnson had already been drafted by the Lakers by the time Buss took over the club, but it was Buss who envisioned that the unorthodox point guard with the brilliant ball-handling skills, flashy style and ebullient personality could not only be the central figure in a championship run, but also for a unique brand of basketball that combined sports and entertainment.
 
Long a fervent supporter of his alma mater, USC, Buss took two successful elements from Trojan games – cheerleaders and a band – to build his brand.
 
Jerry Buss won 10 NBA championships as owner of the Lakers, including the 1985 title. (Getty Images)Like any successful product, Buss' brainchild needed a name. For that, he reached back to his nights at a Santa Monica nightclub named The Horn. The evening's entertainment there would begin with one, then two, then three singers rising from tables spread around the room, each proclaiming, "It's Showtime."
 
So Showtime it would be for the Lakers.

"At that time," Buss recalled, "people were saying, 'Don't bother to go to the game. Just pop in on the telecast for the last three minutes and you can see the whole thing.' We wanted to change that, and one way was to have entertainment all the way through the game."
 
By making the Forum the place to be, Buss knew that he would attract the Hollywood crowd, and that, in turn, would guarantee that fans would come to see the stars as well as the show on the floor.
 
When Buss took over the Lakers, courtside seats were $15.

[Also: Marcus Jordan wants to be same kind of dad as his famous father]

"Originally, I wanted to free up some floor seats," he said, "so that not only myself, but my friends – a lot of attorneys and accountants who helped me put together the deal to buy the Lakers – could enjoy them.
 
"I had been trying to buy floor seats for perhaps 10 years before I purchased the team, but there were never any for sale. So, I thought, they must be underpriced. I figured I'd increase them from $15 up to $30. Nobody cancelled. I then decided to go to $60, figuring that, for sure, we would get eight or 10 cancellations."
 
Eventually, when the price went over $100, Buss found some seats for his friends. But not many were available – even today when those seats are more than $2,700 for the regular season and more than $3,000 for the playoffs.
 
Along with marketing and finances, Buss understood, as have few, if any, other owners, the importance of favorable press and the duties and obligations of the media.
 
Buss' first championship parade came after the Lakers won the 1980 title. (AP)When I wrote an investigative story in the Los Angeles Times concerning Buss' and Mariani's financial dealings, Buss didn’t hold a grudge. After joking that he would have paid me $100,000 not to run the story, he gave me all the time I requested for a book I was writing about him and his team. Buss understood that I had just been doing my job.
 
Speaking at a time when newspapers were king, Buss once said, "I never get in pissing matches with people who buy ink by the barrel."
 
Back when the Forum press lounge was the prime watering hole after games, he would sit there with media people until 4 a.m., soliciting their opinions and offering his own on the state of his team, the NBA in general and the L.A. market. But Buss knew, of course, that the glow of the entertainment elements he had instituted would soon dim if the excellence of the team wasn’t equally as bright.
 
So he spared no expense in building teams capable of plastering the walls with banners. The Johnson/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar dynasty of the 1980s was followed by the Shaquille O'Neal/Kobe Bryant championship teams at the turn of the century and the Bryant/Pau Gasol clubs that reached the NBA Finals three times and won two championships.
 
[Also: Top 50 Michael Jordan moments: Nos. 10-1, including 'The Flu Game']

"He is a master at building a team," said Johnson at the time of Buss' induction into the NBA Hall of Fame in 2010. "He has put the Lakers right up there with the New York Yankees as the top brands in sports.
 
"He has been able to do so because he is one of the shrewdest businessmen you will ever meet. With him, it's never been about putting money in his pocket. It's always been about putting it back into the team."
 
In all, Buss' Lakers have won 10 NBA titles, making him the single winningest owner in sports history.
 
And with that success has come the financial rewards. The team that he purchased for $16 million was recently valued at more than $1 billion.
 
Not bad for a kid who once considered success being a gunny sack full of food.
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Re: Jerry Buss Dead at 80
« Reply #1 on: February 19, 2013, 09:21:35 AM »
Simmons weighs in...

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/51360/the-lakers-lose-buss-the-nba-loses-a-titan

Quote
The Lakers lost their way right around the time Dr. Jerry Buss started dying. This wasn’t a coincidence. Within NBA circles, everyone respected Buss so deeply that something relatively impossible happened. Here was the greatest professional basketball owner who ever lived, an influential power broker who controlled one of the league’s wealthiest franchises … only word never really leaked about Buss’s grave condition. He spent the past year fighting cancer in a hospital bed, somehow keeping his privacy (and his dignity) in our Twitter-fueled, rumor-soaked media climate. Nobody would write about it. Or mention it. Everyone respected him too much.

Like every other NBA fan, I believed for years that Buss was a renegade playboy billionaire, someone who almost seemed like a parody of a sports owner. After he dropped $67.5 million for a Los Angeles winter sports monopoly in 1979, the ensuing Sports Illustrated feature carried the subhead, "Jerry Buss has always had a way with a chick, a cue and a buck. Now he'll have his way with the Lakers, Kings and Forum." What else did you need to know? Over the next few years, his Showtime Lakers captured the 1980s better than just about anything — smoking-hot cheerleaders, courtside celebrities, flashy fast breaks, genuine star power, excess, excess and more excess. They were the hottest ticket in town, the best basketball team of that decade, a team that partied almost as extravagantly as their owner did.

The Lakers remained relevant for three solid decades (and counting), reinventing themselves three different times and winning Dr. Buss 10 championships along the way. Thanks to Dr. Jerry's vision, the experience of attending Laker home games over that stretch had nothing in common with any other sports fan experience, as I tried to capture in a column three springs ago. He also never received enough credit for recognizing the NBA's most important currency: star power. Not just finding those stars and building around them, but empowering them, even making them feel like they were part of the team’s decision-making process. Even as the league’s salary cap and luxury tax worked against him, Buss kept stacking the Lakers with superstars, knowing that Los Angeles remained his biggest weapon — the weather, the beach, the celebrities, the ladies, the ritzier neighborhoods, the privacy, the Hollywood connections. Players wanted to play for the Lakers. They wanted to play for Dr. Jerry Buss.

When it became clear that Dwight Howard was pushing his way out of Orlando, an inordinate number of NBA fans just assumed the Lakers would get him, if only because that’s what always happened. That’s what Buss built in Los Angeles. Maybe he had his way with a chick, a cue and a buck, but owning a professional basketball team? Nobody was better.

I first learned of Buss’s declining health in London, during the Summer Olympics, when league officials were already using the word "when" and not "if." Within NBA circles, there was real fear about a post-Jerry world — not just for what it meant for the Lakers (one of the league’s crown jewels), but what it meant for the league itself. We forget sometimes that 30 owners run the NBA, for better and worse, with David Stern and Adam Silver carrying out their wishes. Their influence drifts into three different groups (old guard, new guard and totally useless) and three different economic realities (small market, big market and middle class). From what I’ve been told by multiple people who have participated in those owners meetings, Buss might have been the single most respected person in the room. Maybe he was a big-market/old-guard guy, but he cared about the league as a whole, and he was willing to discuss any idea as long as it made sense. He had a knack for staying quiet for hours, then somehow making the most salient point of the day.

One time within the last couple of years, when the small-market owners were pushing hard for revenue sharing, Buss waited for everyone to make their case before weighing in. He mentioned how one owner had juggled multiple businesses over that time — making hundreds of millions beyond basketball — whereas Buss had thrown his life into running the Lakers. Now that owner wanted Buss to share his NBA profits with him? Buss maintained that he wasn’t against revenue sharing; if anything, he believed the idea made sense. But could they at least agree that, had the other owner devoted all of his time and resources to his team like Buss did, his franchise would be doing better? What if they struck a deal — all the full-time NBA owners shared their NBA profits, but only if the part-time NBA owners shared the profits from their other businesses with the full-time NBA owners?

The room fell silent. He had totally defanged the other owner — not to embarrass him, but to prove a point. If the league was gravitating toward revenue sharing, he just wanted to make sure it was for the right reasons, not because a handful of unsuccessful, part-time NBA owners were trying to game the system their way. And yes, Buss eventually agreed to revenue sharing. But he made everyone think about it, too.

So over these next few days, when you hear other NBA people talk reverentially about Dr. Buss, it wasn’t just about titles for them. It was about those moments behind closed doors, when something happened and everyone realized, "Oh yeah, that’s why he’s been so successful." That’s what the NBA is losing — not just a shrewd billionaire who transformed the Lakers into a perennial contender worth billions, but a visionary, a thinker, someone who made the league better and smarter and bigger and richer and, over everything else, a little more interesting. Nobody tapped into the sweeping potential of a professional basketball franchise quite like Dr. Jerry Buss did.

His final major decision ended up being his worst: Jerry passed the Lakers off to one of his sons for sentimental reasons, not logical ones, and now that same son is running Jerry’s beloved franchise into the ground. For only the third time since 1976, they might miss the playoffs. They might lose a marquee free agent (Howard) for the first time in the history of the franchise, which would really mean that an All-Star looked at the NBA landscape and said, "All things considered, I’m better off not playing for the Los Angeles Lakers." And if it happens, just know that it never would have happened on Dr. Jerry Buss’s watch. I believe these next few years will cement his legacy. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
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You meet a man on the Oregon Trail. He tells you his name is Terry. You laugh and tell him: "That's a girl's name!" Terry shoots you. You have died of dissin' Terry.

WiregrassTiger

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Re: Jerry Buss Dead at 80
« Reply #2 on: February 19, 2013, 11:00:20 AM »
Simmons weighs in...

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/51360/the-lakers-lose-buss-the-nba-loses-a-titan
Great article. The one thing that I took away from this is the the following quote:"He had a knack for staying quiet for hours, then somehow making the most salient point of the day." I think this does a good job of conveying how eerily similar Dr. Buss was to meself.
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