R.I.P Lakers owner Jerry Buss, 80, has died of Cancer!
Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who was hospitalized with cancer, died Monday morning at 80 years old. (Buss died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, his assistant, Bob Steiner, confirmed. Buss had been hospitalized for cancer, but the immediate cause of death was kidney failure, Steiner said.
"We not only have lost our cherished father, but a beloved man of our community and a person respected by the world basketball community," the Buss family said in a statement issued by the Lakers.
Under Buss' leadership since 1979, the Lakers became Southern California's most beloved sports franchise and a worldwide extension of Hollywood glamour. Buss acquired, nurtured and befriended a staggering array of talented players and basketball minds during his Hall of Fame tenure.
"I really tried to create a Laker image, a distinct identity," Buss said, according to the Los Angeles Times' obituary. "I mean, the Lakers are pretty damn Hollywood."
Few owners in sports history can even approach Buss' accomplishments with the Lakers, who made the NBA Finals 16 times during his 32 years in charge, winning 10 titles between 1980 and 2010. The Lakers easily are the NBA's winningest franchise since he bought the team.
And few owners have ever been more beloved by their players than Buss, who always referred to the Lakers as his extended family. Former and current players, including Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant , reportedly visited him in the hospital before All-Star Weekend.
"He meant everything to me. He took a chance on a 17 year-old kid from out in Philadelphia. No one really saw that potential," Bryant said. "You’d be hard-pressed to find another owner who has had that kind of success. He has been able to construct championship teams, regroup, reconstruct them again, regroup, reconstruct them again—I mean, rebuild them in a very, very quick order. That’s tough to find."
Working with front-office executives Jerry West and Mitch Kupchak, Buss spent lavishly to win his titles despite lacking a huge personal fortune, often running the NBA's highest payroll while also paying high-profile coaches Pat Riley and Phil Jackson.
Always an innovative businessman, Buss paid for the Lakers through both their wild success and his groundbreaking moves to raise revenue.
He co-founded a basic-cable sports TV network, Prime Ticket, in 1985 and sold the naming rights to the Forum in 1988 to Great Western Savings & Loan at times when both now-standard strategies were unusual, adding justification for his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010.
Johnson and fellow Hall of Famers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy formed lifelong bonds with Buss during the Lakers' run to five titles in nine years in the 1980s, when the Lakers earned a reputation as basketball's most exciting team with their glamorous “Showtime” style.
“He was a great man and an incredible friend,” Johnson tweeted Monday.
Jackson then led Shaquille O'Neal and Bryant to a threepeat from 2000-02, rekindling the Lakers mystique, before Bryant and Pau Gasol won two more titles under Jackson in 2009 and ’10.
Although Buss was proudest of his two hands full of NBA title rings, he also was a scholar, Renaissance man and bon vivant who epitomized California cool—and a certain Los Angeles lifestyle—for his entire public life.
The father of six, he rarely appeared in public without at least one attractive, much younger woman on his arm at USC football games, boxing matches, poker tournaments—and, of course, Lakers games from his private box at Staples Center, which was built under his watch.
Born Jan. 27, 1933, in Salt Lake City, Gerald Hatten Buss was raised in poverty in Wyoming but eventually earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from USC at age 24, becoming a chemistry professor and working as a chemist for the Bureau of Mines before his life took an abrupt turn into wealth and sports.
The former mathematician claimed that his fortune grew out of a $1,000 real-estate investment in a West Los Angeles apartment building with partner Frank Mariani, an aerospace engineer.
Buss purchased Jack Kent Cooke's entire Los Angeles sports empire—the struggling Lakers, the NHL’s Kings and their arena, the Forum—in a 1979 deal that also included a 13,000-acre Southern California ranch.
Buss' love of basketball was the motivation for his purchase, and he immediately worked to transform the Lakers—who had won just one NBA title since moving west from Minneapolis in 1960—into a star-powered endeavor befitting Hollywood.
At the time of the sale, the NBA had fallen into second-class status among major professional sports leagues as several teams stood on the brink of bankruptcy.
In the Lakers, Buss—who also was a world-class poker player—saw a gamble worth taking.
He was right.
In January 2013, Forbes estimated the Lakers were worth $1 billion, the second-most valuable NBA franchise behind only the New York Knicks.
"Jerry Buss helped set the league on the course it is on today," NBA commissioner David Stern told the Times. "Remember, he showed us it was about 'Showtime,' the notion that an arena can become the focal point for not just basketball, but entertainment. He made it the place to see and be seen."
Overall, the Lakers made the finals nine times in Buss' first 12 seasons while rekindling the NBA's best rivalry with the Boston Celtics, and Buss basked in the worldwide celebrity he received from his team's achievements. His womanizing and partying became Hollywood legend, with even his players struggling to keep up with Buss' lifestyle.
But Johnson's HIV diagnosis and retirement in 1991 staggered Buss and the Lakers, the owner recalled in 2011. The Lakers struggled through much of the 1990s, going through seven coaches and making just one conference finals appearance in an eight-year stretch despite the 1996 arrivals of O'Neal, who signed with Los Angeles as a free agent, and Bryant, the 17-year-old high schooler acquired in a draft-week trade.
Through the Lakers' frequent successes and occasional struggles, Buss never stopped living his Hollywood dream. He was an avid poker player, frequently participating in high-stakes tournaments, and a fixture on the Los Angeles club scene well into his 70s, when a late-night drunken-driving arrest in 2007—with a 23-year-old woman in the passenger seat of his Mercedes-Benz—prompted him to cut down on his partying.
Buss' children moved into leadership roles with the Lakers in their father's later years. Jim Buss, the team’s executive VP of player personnel and the second of Buss' six children, has taken over much of the club's primary decision-making responsibilities in the last few years, and daughter Jeanie is a longtime executive on the franchise's business side—and Jackson's longtime companion.
Yet Jerry Buss was deeply involved the Lakers' most recent major moves, including the acquisitions of Steve Nash and Dwight Howard last summer, along with the quick-trigger firing of coach Mike Brown and the surprise hiring of Mike D'Antoni early this season.
None of those moves has been particularly successful. The team is outside the top eight in the Western Conference standings at the All-Star break, and if it fails to make the playoffs could be considered one of the most disappointing teams in NBA history, if not professional sports history given expectations going into the season.
Buss served two terms as president of the NBA's Board of Governors, and was actively involved in the 2011 lockout negotiations, developing blood clots in his legs attributed to his extensive travel during that time.
He had been hospitalized several times in recent years, including a stint in July for dehydration.
Other survivors include children Johnny and Janie, who like Jim and Jeanie, are from Buss’ marriage to ex-wife Joan Mueller, whom he married when he was 19 and divorced in the early '70s, and Joey and Jesse, whom he had with former girlfriend Karen Demel.
Arrangements are pending for a funeral and memorial services….R.I.P
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