Jeanie Buss is trying not to sniffle in front of me, but I can understand if there are a few tears. The president and controlling owner of the L.A. Lakers is in the middle of her rollout of Legacy, a Hulu-hosted doc about the team, her family’s tangle with fame, and the dynasty that brought Showtime to the world. But the day of our interview is also Kobe Bryant’s birthday. And the next day is Mamba & Mambacity Day, an homage to Kobe and his daughter Gianna who, along with six other passengers, died in a plane crash two years ago. For fans all over the world, the grieving process hasn’t ended. And for Jeanie, fresh for my eyes, it’s beginning all over again.
But Jeanie quickly regains her composure. The documentary was an important biography of her family’s history, something she took years to tell correctly. After buying the Lakers in 1979, her father Jerry quickly turned the team into a dynasty: Preserving its history as canon and keeping their future gold is a lifelong job for Jeanie, who assumed Jerry’s role as president after his 2013 death. And you don’t talk about family business without family consent.
So, naturally, when she sat down with GQ she was still a bit conflicted about Winning Time, the HBO series about the Lakers. She still misses her father and Kobe, and seeks guidance from Phil Jackson. She’s hopeful about the upcoming Lakers season, but doesn’t shy away from saying there needed to be some changes. And the Buss family rehabilitation tour, she says, is right on track.
This interview is edited and condensed.
How involved were you with the process of making Legacy? Was it long and detailed or fairly quick?
Jeanie Buss: This has been seven years in the making. It’ll be almost 10 years since my dad passed away. And a few years afterwards, talking about all of the innovation he brought to the NBA, I really wanted people to remember his contributions and what the Lakers meant to him—but especially his relationship with [Earvin] “Magic” Johnson.
It was unprecedented in sports to have an owner like Dr. Jerry Buss, a self-made man from a small town in Wyoming, bond with a 20-year-old superstar out of Michigan. They had two really different backgrounds. But they found their soulmate in each other in their love of basketball and “Showtime.” When my dad bought the team [in 1979], the first thing he did was draft Magic Johnson, and that rookie season, they won a championship. I think that it was a relationship that endured over the decades, and a new generation of Lakers fans are gonna learn about who Dr. Jerry Buss was, what he built with the Lakers, why it’s so special, and why it’s worth fighting for.
What do the Lakers mean to you as someone who sees it as Family Business?
I like to say my dad had his children, but the Lakers were his babies. This was important to him because growing up he felt that fans didn’t really look at the West Coast sports team as being important. The media revolved around New York, Philadelphia and Boston. He wasn’t born in LA, but LA became his home and he wanted to give his home a team they could be proud of that would rival the Boston Celtics in terms of championships. And here we are: 40 years later, we’re tied with the Celtics in titles. It was a really important mission he was on and he created this franchise that is known worldwide and is one of the top brands in sports in any league. We continued to follow his footsteps and wanted to tell his story our way.
Having Antoine Fuqua [Training Day, the doc What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali] sign on as a director, everything came together as a story arc—certainly after the Lakers won the championship in 2020. It was a labor of love and has footage that has never been seen, and an in-depth understanding of how the business operates and what it means to my family.
What does the footprint of the Lakers mean right now, culturally, to Los Angeles and its citizens?
It’s about bringing a very diverse, very spread-out city under a purple and gold flag. Even in the eighties, The Forum became the epicenter of all things sports and entertainment. I think the things that touch me most are when I get a letter from a grandmother who says that watching Lakers games with her 13-year old grandson is the only thing they have in common and it’s a bond that they share. What was important to my dad was that we were a very inclusive environment where he wanted everybody to be a Lakers fan. Everybody thinks of the floor seats and how expensive those are, but those seats are expensive so that the seats upstairs can stay less expensive and more accessible. He was the first owner to start a regional sports network to broadcast home games in the eighties, when most of the other owners didn’t want their home games broadcast in their market because it would affect ticket sales. He wanted to reach a broader audience, he wanted everybody who wanted to see a Laker game to be able to see a Laker game.
I don’t live in LA so that precludes me from knowing how fans currently really feel about the team after the last disappointing season. How do you think Angelenos feel?
With the Lakers comes the expectation of winning, and we obviously didn’t do that last season, so some changes have been made. Always, the Lakers want to contend for championships, which means you need a certain level of talent or resources for the coach to be able to put a team in a position to win. The expectation is for this team to win. But it’s hard to win a championship. You need a lot of things to go your way. But, if you’re not part of the conversation or you’re not a team that’s getting into the playoffs, well, you really can’t win a championship can you?
I look at my job as providing the resources needed to contend. And re-signing a player like LeBron James to an extension is giving us an opportunity to contend.
That makes sense: You re-signed the best player in basketball.
You really think so?!
Absolutely!
[skeptically] What about Joel Embiid?
Maybe two days out of the week, I think that Joel Embiid is better than LeBron James—which would mean, via the transitive property, that Embiid = the best player in the world. But I will spare you from that.
[laughs]
When you were a girl, your father went to Vegas after buying the team to meet Jerry Tarkanian’s agent because he wanted him to be his first head coach of the Lakers. After that meeting, the agent, Victor Weiss, was murdered, allegedly by the mob, and he drove a similar car to your father’s. What was it like for you that in the first few weeks of your father buying the Lakers, there was a chance he almost got killed?
Everything was happening so quickly. When you buy a team like the Lakers, the public attention is tremendous. As a family, we had never been through anything like that. And when the Victor Weiss situation happened, especially before the team ever played a game under my dad’s ownership…it was startling. It was jolting. And not really understanding where that was coming from, they didn’t know if my dad was the intended target. All of a sudden, you invite all of this new attention, and…it was just a learning curve.
But, eventually the learning curve lessens, right? You’ve had such a long time to get used to this as your reality. Do you ever get used to owning the biggest team in basketball?
It comes with the territory, so you have to be prepared. You’re living your life very publicly, you have to be ready for the criticism, the scrutiny and the feedback. The negative feedback, and [sighs] you know, all that comes with it. I guess I’m as prepared…well, I guess I’m really not prepared! My Twitter account was hacked a few weeks ago!
I saw that…
It’s like, you never know what’s gonna come at you. It’s very interesting to me because I felt really badly about it. People trusted me, and my account. I was a blue check account. I could see in the direct messages how the hacker was able to interface with the people he was scamming. It breaks my heart.
People say you should get used to these perils of fame and power. But, you never really get used to them, do you? Or have some things gotten easier than others? Where have you found peace in the difficult moments?
It comes from the joy of being together as a community, as Lakers fans. As you and I are talking today, it’s Kobe Bryant’s birthday. And tomorrow is Mamba and Mambacita Day, 8/24. Going through that traumatic passing of Kobe and Gianna Bryant, you, you…you think how am I gonna [sniffles], how am I gonna go forward from here? It’s too much to take. My heart is too broken.
LeBron, our first game back [after the crash], he stood up and addressed the crowd and he said “we grieve together as Laker Nation and we’re gonna come together and get through this.” That’s the part that fills my heart, fills my soul: what the Lakers can mean to people in times of sadness, as well as happiness.
Athletics can provide all of those beautiful things, but can also harbor the opposite. Think about the pre-Tarkanian years: the Lakers were, maybe, the third or fourth biggest game in town. And to build up, you guys sold an idea of community, that Laker games could be accessible to everyone. How did you turn a failing franchise into something magnificent?
My dad’s formula was putting together something that he would want to see. And the style of play that Magic Johnson had, he saw him in the NCAA tournament, and he loved his style with the ball in his hands. He played with a smile on his face. That was the right formula, then.
That morphed into the Shaq and Kobe Era with Phil Jackson and now, here we are with LeBron James. It’s about always being in the conversation, always being competitive, and putting a product on the floor that fans want to see.
In some ways, there’s a parallel from then to now. Bad season last year. Some bad seasons in the last decade. What opportunity are you trying to create for the Lakers right now? Is it Darvin Ham? Is it a roster reconstruction?
We changed coaches, so that’s a new voice. And we are continuing to, hopefully, stay injury-free. We want to see Anthony Davis stay on the floor and be healthy the whole season. And when you have Anthony and LeBron, there’s a lot of great things that can happen. But you have to have a supporting cast of players that can fill roles and also stay injury free. We have Kendrick Nunn coming back after missing last season, and a lot of young players that…I can name names, but until we see how they play there really isn’t…we have to give Darvin Ham all of the time and resources he needs to put the team together to see how they move forward.
One of the things you’ve consistently said as the Legacy documentary rolled out is that it’s really important that Lakers history be told by people who were actually a part of the Lakers, and that it’s crucial we hear from people who actually lived those lives. Was that language intentional?
I guess I’d be referencing the HBO project that aired called Winning Time, a scripted series based on the “Showtime” Lakers and, while I’m not telling people to watch it or not watch it—people can make their choice—there were a lot of things they were inaccurate on. There were some things they got right. But, when somebody else tells your story they take away an opportunity for you to tell your story.
So we wanted to have an opportunity to let everybody tell their story, give them time to share their truth, and it was also an opportunity for my family to come together and share their story of the conflict that existed between me and my brothers, and where we are now with that. It was important for my brothers to be able to talk about their process in all of that.
A lot of people loved Winning Time, but I understand how something like this could be personal for you since it is your family. Was it personal for you?
I’m conflicted because I think John C. Reilly captured a lot of my dad in his performance. And, you know, I miss my dad. So, revisiting some of those fond memories, I have to say, was nice for me. But, you know: the timeline was completely wrong with my grandmother and things like that. I felt like I was watching a TV show, I wasn’t watching my life.
You talked about your brothers: Is there still tension in the family after what happened? While watching Legacy, there’s feels like there’s still a bit of beef on the table. You mentioned that things are on the mend, so how are things going with family rehabilitation?
Really well. This doc allowed a lot of healing to take place, with everybody being able to say their piece. When my father passed away, the Lakers value would have probably been pegged between $1.5 billion and, you know, we hadn’t yet sold the Clippers to Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. And, now, the Forbes valuation has our team worth over $5 billion.
In the 10 years, I think they would say I’ve been a good steward of the brand. I’ve protected the shareholders. We won a championship and are now tied with the Celtics in terms of titles. So: I think they would say that I was the right person for the job and that’s what my dad had intended.
When you spend your entire life with one team you hold so many stories. What is your go-to, party-favor story?
[laughs] You mean about players or…?
Whatever was the first one was that just popped up into your mind right there.
You know, I talk about Phil Jackson a lot. When my dad hired him, I kind of rolled my eyes, like why are we gonna bring this guy in. He seems high-maintenance. Then, of course, we started a relationship that lasted 17 years. He would famously give players books. During the first long road trip of the season, he’d give them a book. And, you know, a lot of the players would throw them in their locker or make fun of it in the media.
And I finally said to him, “I don’t understand. Why do you keep doing it? They don’t read it.”
He goes, “Jeanie: it’s not about them reading it right then. That book may sit on their shelf for 10 years, but someday they will. And they’ll receive the message when they’re ready for what I was trying to share with them.” It’s little things like that…the purposefulness and intention of what this game can mean to the people that are involved in it.
I’m just thinking about Kobe, again. A few years ago, he called Phil. After he retired, he started coaching his daughter’s basketball team. He was teaching them the Triangle Offense. And he called Phil in Montana and said, “Can you give me some more ideas for books?” That, that, I really do believe someday Kobe would have been an amazing NBA coach. And Phil continued to feed him with information, plant those ideas in his head. That’s kind of a gift…
Lakers fans are obviously nuts…
[laughs]
When you’ve won so much, and hung so many banners, it entitles people to believe winning can last forever. For you, you’ve had the luxury of seeing it all, and now you’re coming off one tumultuous season and heading into another one: What keeps you grounded in the tough moments?
Phil [Jackson] would always say that, “every year there’s a pathway to a championship.” Sometimes it may be completely uphill [laughs] or, you know, through a rainforest! But you always have to see that there’s success at the end of the journey and you just continue on that path. Every step you take gets you closer to that. You can’t win every year, but every year you have to have that open mind and open heart, thinking that you can get there.