“Now Monopoly, like those other games, takes strategy, skill…but it also throws in an element of chance, so no matter how good you are, the bad breaks come, and they knock you on your ass,” said actor John C. Reilly playing an embellished version of Los Angeles Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. “Anyway. The thing about luck is, it cuts both ways. If you hold on long enough and stay in the game…eventually it goes your way… My point is, I’m fucking due!”
At the start of HBO’s dramatized series Winning Time, set in the 1970s, we all thought it was the story of scrappy entrepreneurial patriarch, Dr. Buss. But just as we eventually learned that the Godfather movies are ultimately about Michael Corleone (not Don Vito), and the Star Wars movies are ultimately about Annakin Skywalker (not Luke), over the course of two seasons we learn that Winning Time is ultimately about Dr. Buss’s daughter, Jeanie Buss. She began working with her father as a teenager, and went on to become the controlling owner and president of the Lakers.
“From the time I was in elementary school, I wanted to work in the family business,” said Buss. She studied business at USC and graduated with honors. She joined the family business as GM of the Los Angeles Strings professional tennis team–which included top players such as Martina Navratilova–at 19 and led them to a championship. She also served as president of the Great Western Forum when it was the Lakers’ home arena.
After her father died in 2013, Buss took over as Lakers president. In 2020 she became the first female controlling owner to guide her team to an NBA championship, giving her six NBA titles overall as an owner/executive. “I just like working with my family; I like building something together,” she said.
In addition to these championships, Buss also won an Emmy Award in 2023 for Outstanding Documentary Series (as executive producer of Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers). She produced the series in response to disapproving of how her father was portrayed in Winning Time. Buss said of working with her family for four decades: “For me, the burning desire has always been about building what my family had.”
