Following the bombshell news that Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter had purchased the majority share of the Lakers, with a $10 billion valuation, I was reminded of a text I’d received from a longtime friend a few months ago regarding the Dodgers’ team-building methods (and I’m reprinting it with his permission):
“I think that the Dodgers aren’t doing anything more than what Dr. Jerry Buss did in building the Showtime Lakers and that was a savior for the NBA.”
Chances are, then, that the incoming Lakers ownership will be operating with a familiar blueprint, albeit one modernized to fit the moment.
The timeline isn’t quite the same, but there is a definite parallel between the ascendency of the Lakers beginning in the summer of 1979, when Buss completed his $67.5 million purchase of the Lakers, the Kings, the Forum and a ranch in the Sierras from Jack Kent Cooke, and the emergence of the Dodgers from May, 2012, when Walter and his Guggenheim Baseball partners closed a $2.15 billion deal to rescue the team from Frank McCourt.
Consider this, by the way: As noted by Jeanie Buss in her book Laker Girl, originally published in 2010 and updated in 2013, her dad’s purchase of Cooke’s assets broke down this way: $33.5 million for the Forum, $16 million for the Lakers, $8 million for the Kings and $10 million for Cooke’s Raljon Ranch. Cooke felt like he had to sell his California properties because of an impending divorce.
To facilitate the deal, Buss had to purchase the Chrysler Building in New York and property in three other East Coast states to swap, in what may have been the ultimate real-life Monopoly transaction.
“When it was all done, there were enough escrow papers to fill a library and enough lawyers to fill the Forum,” Jeanie Buss wrote. “The New York Times called it ‘the largest single financial transaction in the history of professional sports,’ but also ‘the most confusing, complex transaction in the history of sports.’”
This impending purchase will be the fifth sale in the history of the Lakers franchise. The first time, in 1947 when Detroit jewelry store owner Maury Winston sold the team then known as the Detroit Gems to a Twin Cities group including then 24-year-old Minneapolis Star-Tribune sportswriter Sid Hartman, the sale price was $15,000. (Today, calculated for inflation, that would come to $216,232.06.)
“For $15,000, you could buy about anything in those days,” said Hartman, then a Minneapolis newspaper columnist and radio talk-show host, four decades or so later.
In 1957, that group sold the team to Bob Short for $150,000. Eight years after that, and five years after Short moved the team to L.A., Cooke bought the Lakers for $5.175 million.
And the current valuation – which by one report could turn out to be as much as $12 billion – not only says a lot about the rise in franchise values but speaks eloquently to what Buss did when he took over the Lakers.
Transformative? If you weren’t around at the time, you have no idea.
The Lakers of 1978-79 were just a basketball team, really. A good, solid NBA franchise, to be sure, one that had had its heart broken repeatedly by the Boston Celtics and Bill Russell through the 1960s before finally winning a title in 1972. But in some ways the Lakers were still second fiddle to John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty in L.A. for much of that time.
And the NBA was far from the cultural behemoth it is now. It was dogged by suspicions of drug abuse among its players and was thought of so lightly in terms of TV programming that CBS showed its championship series games on tape delay, starting at 11:30 p.m. on the East Coast.
The Lakers’ first stroke of luck was drafting Magic Johnson in 1979, though that occurred before the sale. Magic and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, acquired from Milwaukee in 1976, were the nucleus of what would become the Lakers’ first dynasty, with five titles – two of them over the Celtics – in the 1980s.
But what happened on the court was only part of the story. Under Buss, the Lakers went from stolid to sexy. There was the live band that at that time replaced the organ. There were the Laker Girls, the dance team that spawned imitators throughout the NBA (including, decades later, a dance team for the tradition-bound Celtics). There were the courtside seats that suddenly skyrocketed in price but became the place to be on game nights for the brightest stars in a community that ran, and still runs, on star power.
(And yes, Jack Nicholson paid for his own seats.)
There was the naming rights deal in 1988, when what Chick Hearn had always described – at Cooke’s insistence – as the Fabulous Forum became, officially and for a price, the Great Western Forum. It may not have been the first naming rights deal but it established ground that has been trod (trampled?) many times since.
Cooke “got it (the name) for free,” Hearn said years later. “When Great Western came in, it cost them millions.”
And there was the Forum Club. Under Buss, it became the hottest nightclub in town, and it further cemented the idea of Laker games as the place to be seen. (Let’s just say it wasn’t for the timid or the puritanical.)
“My dad understood from the beginning that the key to making the Lakers appealing was equal parts sports and entertainment,” Jeanie Buss wrote. “Every arena now tries to copy that formula.
“One word best describes my dad’s philosophy: Showtime.”
That word described not only the atmosphere around the game but the style of play itself – fast-paced, flashy, razzle-dazzle. It was perfect for Johnson and the players that surrounded him, a group that included fellow Hall of Famers Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Jamaal Wilkes, Bob McAdoo and Michael Cooper, along with Byron Scott, A.C. Green and Kurt Rambis. With first Bill Sharman and then Jerry West procuring the talent, and Pat Riley creating his own Hall of Fame case in coaching four of those five ’80s title teams, Showtime wasn’t so much a description as a state of mind.
When it was time for the roster to turn over, Buss’ Lakers recalibrated. They signed Shaquille O’Neal, maintaining the Lakers heritage of acquiring the best big man available, in the summer of ’96, and traded Vlade Divac for the rights to Kobe Bryant on draft night. And Buss hired Phil Jackson as coach three years later, right before the team moved downtown into what was then known as Staples Center. That eventually brought five more championships: a three-peat at the beginning of the 2000s with Kobe and Shaq, and two more at the end of the decade with Kobe and Pau Gasol.
Throughout, the Lakers have had a discernible personality, on the floor and as an organization. During that rollicking period, you could make the case that they had supplanted the Dodgers as L.A.’s most popular team.
That status took a bit of a dip during the last decade plus, especially after Jerry Buss’ death in 2013. There were six straight non-playoff seasons from 2013-14 through 2018-19. And there was the squabble for control among the heirs in 2017, with brothers Johnny and Jim Buss attempting but failing to oust Jeanie as the controlling owner.
But the Lakers remain the Lakers. They captured their 17th title (and 11th under Buss ownership) in 2020. Star quality (LeBron James, Luka Doncic, etc.) remains important. Jeanie will remain the team’s governor after the sale, and the new ownership already applies many of the same principles with the Dodgers as Jerry Buss did with the Lakers four decades ago.
Which suggests to me that Magic, who is now part of the Dodgers’ ownership group, learned quite well from Dr. Buss.
jalexander@scng.com