Jeanie Buss laughs because of her pain

By the time she got to the mic, the applause had subsided and Jeanie Buss was faced with the scariest sound for a standing comedian.

Silence.

She had been preparing for this moment for months. Months and a week, in fact: she missed her first stand-up presentation at North Hollywood’s Haha Cafe in September 2018 because his day job bothered him. When you’re the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and LeBron James makes his preseason debut, a night of comedy can wait.

Buss had researched comedy as a means of healing, not realizing how scary it would be. His act was raw, vulnerable. Sometimes it was funny.

“Someone called me Barbie,” said Buss, who has blond hair, to open her set. “In LA, actually, I’m Barbie’s mom.”

It was catharsis in the form of comedy, coming just when she needed it most.

At least that’s what she thought.

“She must have that tough exterior.”

Buss loves to laugh.

A waiter at Jinky’s Cafe in Studio City, Calif., Told her the restaurant serves Tater Tots, she claps and beams as if watching Lakers forward Anthony Davis dunk.

It will be some time before she sees him again, as the Lakers have long left the playoffs after a surprising first-round loss to the Phoenix Suns. But his mood is on the rise these days. It’s been weeks since the Lakers’ quest for back-to-back championships ended abruptly, and part of her saw it coming after the quick turnaround from the end of last season to the start of this one.

“It was just like we could never catch our breath,” she said.

Besides, she added, she sees in the embers of the Suns the spark of the Lakers’ championship.

“A lot of people are surprised in Phoenix, but not me,” she said. “The way they played in the bubble, you could tell it was like money in the bank. They got it right away and you could tell, they were so well prepared. They know each other well. “

The disappointment has subsided to the point that Buss can joke about it. But in the middle of 2018, after a series of personal and professional hard knocks, she couldn’t find anything to laugh about.

Her father, Jerry Buss, had died in February 2013 at the age of 80, after being hospitalized with cancer for more than a year. The Lakers franchise, which he bought in 1979 and headed to 10 championships, had become a laughing stock, mired in the worst streak in its history. Kobe Bryant, the last icon of the team, had retired in April 2016. Eight months later, Jeanie Buss and Phil Jackson, the former Lakers coach, ended their long-standing engagement. And in early 2017, a Shakespearean struggle for control of the Lakers became public knowledge, with Buss hiring Hall of Famer Magic Johnson as president of basketball operations and replacing longtime chief executive Mitch Kupchak with the Bryant’s agent, Rob Pelinka. She also accepted her brother Jim’s resignation as vice president of basketball operations. A subsequent lawsuit divided the family.

It was enough for Buss to search for answers.

She found them on stage.

She always had a love affair with stand-up comedy but never thought she could pursue it, until she was coaxed by comedians Theo Von and Heather McDonald at a barbecue. July 4th four years ago. McDonald suggested that Buss resume a class taught by longtime actress Lisa Sundstedt. Entitled “Pretty, Funny Women”, the course is designed for women who are first time actresses, regardless of their age, race or economic status. Buss first started the course in 2013 after her father died, but she dropped out three weeks later. This time, she stayed, struck by “the sample of people I would never meet in my ordinary life”.

Sundstedt saw a real improvement from Buss on his second try.

“She’s so shy that she probably didn’t even realize she was a funny person,” Sundstedt said. “It might not be encouraged in her world, where she has to have that harsh exterior.”

When Buss first started attending NBA Board of Governors meetings for the Lakers in 1995, she was intimidated by some of the glares directed at her.

These days, she trades beards with the best of them.

“Jeanie has always had that special spark,” said Wyc Grousbeck, who led a group that bought the Celtics in 2002. “People want her to succeed. They are happy when she succeeds. They know she is successful. “deserved – and I mean the” earned it “part. She’s unequivocally respected among the league, by the owners, by the players. She’s got steel in her veins.

It was clear something had eaten at Buss as she ate breakfast in early May for one of the many interviews with The New York Times.

It wasn’t the injuries to James and Davis that sparked the Lakers’ downfall to seventh place in the Western Conference after second in mid-March.

It was Bryant.

The previous 18 months had been heavy for Buss. In December 2019, her mother, JoAnn, passed away at the age of 86. Less than two weeks later, on New Years Day, David Stern – the former NBA commissioner and one of his mentors – died after several weeks in a coma. Then, in late January, Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, were killed in a helicopter crash.

Now the Basketball Hall of Fame ceremony was in a few days and Bryant was going to be inducted. Buss feared it.

She met Bryant in 1996 after her introductory press conference with the team. She was 34 years old; he was 17 years old. The Lakers’ offices were inexplicably empty that day, with no one in charge of taking the rookie to lunch. Buss was pushed into the gig and they talked about Italy – Bryant was raised there and Buss had spent time in the countryside with her ex-husband, a former professional volleyball player. She recalled being stunned when Bryant asked a waiter if he spoke Spanish, then said he was going to learn it.

In his final season, 2015-16, Bryant trusted only Buss to help him complete his farewell tour. Once he invited her to lunch and brought Gianna. He said he wanted his daughter to learn from a powerful female sports leader; Buss now thinks it was all a ruse, that Bryant just wanted Buss to know how important she was, to him and to the team.

When she tells this story, Buss chokes. Her shoulders slump when asked about the Hall of Fame ceremony.

“It’s almost like I have to put it away again,” she said, her voice broken. “He goes into the Hall, and it’s like we leave him there.” It’s hard. It’s hard to relive that. “

“I guess,” she added, “you just won’t get over it.”

“I deserve to be here. “

Comedy was never meant to become a second career. It was supposed to help Buss heal.

But now she has a workplace comedy TV series in the works, designed and presented by her, comedian Mindy Kaling, TV writer Elaine Ko and Linda Rambis, longtime colleague of the Lakers and Buss’s best friend. .

The show takes place in the back offices of an NBA team. In June, Netflix announced that it had given the green light to a 10-episode series. While Buss said the show wasn’t based on her life, she and Rambis gave Kaling and Ko nearly four decades of behind-the-scenes drama and humor in the NBA.

“It makes it entertaining and cathartic for me,” Buss said. “Now, 20 years later, I can look back and laugh about it and put it in context. What was in itself a heavy burden can now be shared and broadcast. And it didn’t destroy me! These things happen and you feel lonely, but people can relate. “

Humor helped Buss deal with many forms of loss.

Eight months after Bryant’s retirement, Buss and Jackson broke off their four-year engagement. The two had met briefly before, but they started dating after he became the Lakers coach in 1999.

“He’s this person I never thought I’d be drawn to, but the second I met him, there was something in his voice,” Buss said. “I was just like, ‘Who is this guy? All I knew was that he was that kind of eccentric Bulls coach and then he becomes the most important relationship of my life.

Jackson had retired from training in 2011, but was set to return to the Lakers in November 2012 after Jim Buss and general manager Kupchak contacted him as the team struggled under Mike Brown. Jackson was wearing a Lakers shirt when he made dinner for Jeanie one night, his devious signal to him that he was there. But Kupchak called around midnight, saying they’d decided to hire Mike D’Antoni instead. Jeanie Buss was devastated.

Part of the fallout was a rekindling of Jackson’s interest in basketball, leading him to serve as president of the Knicks team, which took him across the country from Buss. This is the start of their relationship breakdown.

“The actors come from pain, and immediately you say, what kind of pain can she have? Said Craig Shoemaker, a comedian who is his close friend. “The money, the looks, the fame, she has one of the legendary franchises in history – in seconds you can break that barrier by telling your truth. It always comes out if you are a fake. And she is not.

Years later from his foray into stand-up comedy, Buss is back to the joy of basketball, even though this season has ended on a bitter note.

The Lakers are no longer a joke. Helping the franchise win its 17th NBA Championship last season was her biggest achievement, she said, although the celebration was dampened by the multiple losses she had suffered over the years: her father, his mother, Stern, Bryant.

“It’s a lot of losses,” she said. “And everything ebbed back then. “

There was laughter mixed with tears then, but now thinking about the championship, Buss knows what it will mean for his legacy.

“I think now people are saying, ‘She belongs,’ said Buss. ‘Would I have been in this position if my dad wasn’t the owner of the team? Probably not. But I deserve to. ‘be here.

Her role is certainly different now for almost 60, and she embraces him. Her father bought the team when she was 17. With Johnson and those early ’80s Lakers, she was a little sister. Then, with Bryant, she became “a big sister, for sure”.

Once again, his role has changed.

“Now I’m a mom,” she said of her current relationship with the players. “I am proud to say it.

She pauses for high, like a trained stand-up. Doc Rivers meets Joan Rivers.

“When I’m a grandmother I’m not so sure. I could just stay with mom.