Jeanie Buss - Laker Girl

To my mom and dad: I can never return all you have done for me. I love you.

To my siblings: thanks for sharing your love and lives with me.

To my girlfriends: thanks for keeping me laughing.

To my Boobah: thanks for inspiring me every day with your love and affection.

Contents

Foreword by Phil Jackson

In 1999, the NBA had its league meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia. Attending was my first official duty as the Lakers new basketball coach.

In June, I had made the journey to Los Angeles to be introduced and had gone through the flurry of the press gauntlet, but these meetings officially kicked off the new season.

At the end of the first day, Jeanie Buss, the Lakers VP in charge of business affairs, hosted a dinner.

We had an exchange at that first meeting that was very cordial but relatively brief. I asked her if I could get her a drink and then brought my staff over to meet her when I delivered her vodka gimlet. She was engaging.

The next day, I left at noon after a coaches meeting to catch a plane back to L.A. I was still in the process of moving and getting settled and had a lot of loose ends I wanted to tie up before we started our training camp in Santa Barbara the following week.

When I got to the gate at the airport, however, there was a delay due to weather.

Seated there, waiting for the next flight, were Jeanie and her assistant. I joined them and we proceeded to have a very interesting conversation about the organization. I realized Jeanie was, first and foremost, very dedicated to the success of the Lakers. She had taken her position as a genetic gift, but she had earned the respect of those she worked with through dedication and hard work. We talked for almost an hour before boarding the plane.

As the first-class passengers were called, I asked if she was going to board the plane, but she said she flew coach, explaining that flying first class wasnt necessary and that the Lakers didnt need the added expense. Lets just say that was the beginning of something special.

Jeanie treasures the Lakers and the fans that love the team. She protects and promotes this very successful organization as if it were a Rembrandt painting, making sure it gets the best showing possible.

When Twitter became a media source of information, Jeanie was on it, giving her people, the Lakers fans, the inside scoop on the games and the players.

This book will take readers behind the scenes of the Lakers world and show how Jeanie goes about getting things done in this storied franchise.

I have often been at odds with her about her dedication to getting the job done when she gets up at 5:00 am to do a TV interview after a late-night game, or when she flies across the country for a one-day meeting in New York. She is a trooper, knows what her passion is, and knows what is best for this team shes taken to her heart.

After the last game of the 200910 season, when we were pressed to the limit to win a seventh game against the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals, a Sports Illustrated writer was garnering stories about me winning my 11 th championship as a coach. Jeanie was his target for a What was the best story. Was this championship or that one the most memorable? Which one did I or she particularly favor?

Jeanie quickly passed the questions on to my daughter Chelsea. Jeanie deflects attention or personal credit quite deftly, and graciously chooses to step out of the limelight. She has not written this book for her own aggrandizement, but to let her fans and the Lakers fans know what her work entails and to give them an inside look at her team, the Los Angeles Lakers.

Phil Jackson

Introduction

Much has happened to the Lakers over the last three years. We have experienced overwhelming sadness, painful departures, drama, controversy, triumph, and frustration.

The biggest loss was the face of our franchise for three and a half decades, my guiding light, my father, Jerry Buss, who died in February of 2012. From the humblest of beginnings in total poverty, he rose to build a real estate empire and then a basketball dynasty several times over, becoming the winningest owner in sports history.

We also said good-bye to the most successful coach in NBA history, Phil Jackson, who retired after the 201011 season.

Now, we have new faces on the court, a new coach on the sideline, a new collective bargaining agreement changing the way we do business, and a new broadcast partner. On a personal level, whats new in my life is the engagement ring Phil placed on my finger last Christmas.

With so many changes taking place since I first wrote Laker Girl after the 200910 season, I felt it was important to bring the story up to date.

The first edition of this book ended with two shining moments for the Lakers: we beat our archrivals, the Boston Celtics, in a memorable seven-game NBA Finals; and my dad was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

For those of you who read that first edition, you will find a great deal of new material in the final segment of this book.

For those of you who didnt read that first edition, youll learn about my dads roots in Depression-era Wyoming and his incredible life, one that reads like a great American novel. Youll read about what it was like for me growing up in the Buss family, living in Pickfair, learning to help run the family business, and finding the love of my life in Phil.

Writing this book presented me with an opportunity to demystify what goes on beyond the velvet rope that surrounds our organization. Laker Girl contains a journal of the 200910 season, culminating with the most recent of our 16 championships. Alternating with the monthly entries are the chapters detailing my life story to give you some perspective on how I came to view the world.

Through all of the changes in our franchise over the years, one group has remained consistent: you, the fans. You have always been there to support us, and I want you to know I will never take that for granted.

Hopefully, through this book, you will get a better idea of how hard everybody in this organization works to reward your loyalty, and of my unending devotion to my fathers wishes that the Lakers remain in my family.

Jeanie Buss

August 2013

1. Wyoming Roots: Harsh Times, High Hopes

I never fail to marvel at how blessed I have been in my life or how unlikely this all seemed at one time, considering where my dad started his life.

His parents, Jessie and Lydus, divorced when he was just a year old in 1934.

My dad lived with my grandmother in Evanston, Wyoming, where she worked as a waitress and scrubbed floors. With the Great Depression devastating much of the country, it was a rough existence. My dad remembers standing in food lines in sometimes brutally cold weather at the age of four, gunnysack in hand.

If there was no heat in the house, shredded paper might substitute for kindling wood.

When he was nine, my dad got his first glimpse of a bright, new world where snow was for skiing and heat was for sunbathing. My grandmother took him to Los Angeles where she got a job as an accountant at a greeting card company.

My dad would have been thrilled to stay there, but three years later, he found himself back in Wyoming after his mother married Cecil Orville Brown. Brown was also from Wyoming and back they went, settling in Kemmerer, where Brown purchased a plumbing store.

His stepfather soon put a shovel in my dads hands and informed him that he would be getting up at 4:30 in the morning to dig ditches sufficiently large enough to hold plumbing pipes before heading off to school.