Game 81: Bob Steiner - Rich Chocolate Cake

As Director of Public Relations for California Sports, the holding company for the Lakers and The Forum, Bob Steiner literally wrote the history of the Los Angeles Lakers. Sure, it was written in terse, matter-of-fact press releases but it was the history of Jerry Buss’ Lakers nonetheless. Steiner, an L.A. native, started his career as a journalist for U.C. Berkeley and continued in its academic department following graduation. But he left his alma mater in 1974 to take a job with World TeamTennis, a mixed-gender indoor tennis league co-founded by Billie Jean King.

Debuting just one year after King’s victory against Bobby Riggs in the iconic Battle of the Sexes tennis match, WTT made gender parity a key tenet of its foundation. It also showcased a faster-paced style of tennis (no advantages) and a multicolor court that took advantage of color TV’s widespread adoption in American living rooms. While WTT remains one of the only active sports leagues where men and women play together, its impact in the sports world goes far beyond tennis. That’s because Jerry Buss, the man who changed the NBA, not only got his start in sports ownership by buying World TeamTennis’ Los Angeles Strings. It’s also where the absentee father started teaching his children, to mixed results, how to run the family business.

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By the mid 1970s, former rocket scientist Jerry Buss’ gambit into the real estate market had made him one of the wealthiest men in Southern California. With the energy of a man half his age and a zeal for women, fast cars, and more women, Buss lived the kind of life you’d expect from L.A.’s most eligible bachelor. He also loved sports and unsuccessfully tried to buy several ABA and MLB teams. In 1972, the Los Angeles Lakers won their first championship and Buss turned his attention towards owning the team one day. But he’d have to wait for their owner, Jack Kent Cooke, to have a reason to sell.

Buss bided his time by looking to a different court. In 1974, he became the first owner of World TeamTennis’ Los Angeles Strings. He had high hopes for the league and signed stars like Chris Evert, who had just won the first of her 18 Grand Slam singles titles that year. For the inaugural season, the Strings played at the already-decrepit Sports Arena next to Buss’ alma mater, USC. But one day Claire Rothman, the head of bookings at The Forum, called Buss out of the blue. According to Jeff Pearlman’s Showtime, Rothman was looking to fill empty dates not played by the Lakers, Kings, or musical acts. Buss stopped by to chat with Cooke and found that, despite Cooke’s reputation for being an asshole, they got along swimmingly. Or maybe it was just that Buss’ reputation for being well-liked by everyone he came in contact with was the yin to Cooke’s yangish renown for being a fucking prick. In any case, Buss decided to move the Strings to The Forum for the 1975 season and bought a $12,500 box in the arena. Buss was playing the long game. His true intention was establishing a relationship with Cooke in case the Lakers ever went up for sale. Maybe Buss, a semi-pro poker player, bet that the irritable millionaire with a passion for pissing people off would one day get into a messy divorce.

In the meantime, it was Buss who was losing money. The Strings averaged decent crowds of 7,000 but Buss spent wildly on big names like Evert. He also spent freely on additional teams and soon became part-owner of WTT franchises in San Diego, Anaheim, and Indiana. Then in 1978, Buss decided to fold the Strings due to events that he said left the WTT not “economically sound.” With Buss ready to shut down the other half of WTT he owned, the league collapsed. But as the Lodi News-Sentinel mentioned in its Nov. 1978 article about Buss closing up shop for the Strings, his targeted acquisition of the Lakers was already public knowledge. Buss knew his buddy Cooke was in for an expensive divorce proceeding and would be open to selling his sports franchises. Having already lost $5 million to the Strings, Buss suddenly couldn’t afford to throw away money in the manner that only millionaires like himself were privileged to do so.

In 1979, Buss finally pulled off the deal. Cooke sold the Lakers, the Kings, The Forum, and a ranch to Buss for $67.5 million. Part of that $67.5 million included tax-free real estate holdings like the Chrysler Building, which Cooke wanted even though Buss did not own it. But the former chemist and his lawyers somehow pulled it off. Buss finally owned the Lakers at the expense of World TeamTennis and the Los Angeles Strings. While it seemed like the end of this upstart tennis league, it turned out to be dormant, not dead. And Buss, a man who always looked towards the future, saw the league as a way for his children to continue his legacy.

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Jerry Buss’ children were spoiled rich Westside kids, the kind whose idea of a cheap, non-pretentious dinner was Dan Tana’s. That’s not a critique, it’s just the life they were born into. Jerry’s four oldest kids -- Johnny, Jim, Jeanie, and Janie -- were a product of his first and only marriage to JoAnn Mueller, a union that quickly became estranged and whose end became official with a 1972 divorce. Jerry’s kids were raised in the tony L.A. community of Pacific Palisades, a far cry from Jerry’s impoverished upbringing during The Great Depression. He spent most of his childhood in the town of Kemmerer, WY, raised by a divorced waitress mother whose husband abandoned the family to teach at UC Berkeley. Jerry and his mother eventually made their way to California, but after three years in Los Angeles, he was yanked back to Kemmerer when Jerry’s mother remarried. Jerry never forgot the beauty of L.A. and once he was accepted as an undergrad at USC, he never left.

While Jerry’s kids were spoiled by their father’s riches, they were by no means pampered with his love. Jerry embraced the Playboy lifestyle as soon as he made his real estate fortune, leaving his kids “starved for the love of a father” as he galavanted with his many girlfriends. He was someone they only saw on weekends… or in the L.A. Times. Jeanie started attending WTT board meetings with her dad when she was just 14, perhaps sensing that this was the only way to spend time with her father. In 1981, World TeamTennis was restarted as TeamTennis and Jerry, now the owner of the championship Lakers, bought back into the league. He named 19 year old daughter as general manager of the new Los Angeles Strings. “Basically, my dad bought me the team,” Jeanie told Sports Illustrated. Her only qualification was winning Miss Pacific Palisades in 1979.

Jerry’s kids didn’t know the value of a dollar or what a real day of hard work was, but the patriarch was going to do his best to simulate it. While the Strings folded in 1991, Jeanie got hands-on experience in what it took to run a franchise: Hiring and firing staff, dealing with agents and contracts, setting ticket prices and coming up with promotional ideas, liasoning with the fans, and everything else that comes with putting on a sports event for 2,000 people in a 17,505 seat arena. When the Strings folded, hockey was more popular than ever before in Los Angeles thanks to the arrival of Wayne Gretzky. So in 1993, Jerry bought the Los Angeles Blades of the newly-formed Roller Hockey International league and put Jeanie in charge of The Forum’s newest team.

Jeanie’s one-time boyfriend, tennis legend John McEnroe, said that her father tossed her “lame sports” but she took these jobs seriously like a normal employee instead of the pampered daughter that she was. The same could not be said for her older brothers, Johnny and Jim, two dictionary definitions of spoiled failsons. Like with Jeanie, Jerry handed them high-powered jobs that they in no way deserved. But unlike their younger sister, they viewed their positions not as a training ground but as meek offerings from a famous father who was absent in their formative years. As Laker fans found out in the 2010s, Johnny and Jim’s resentment towards Jerry went back decades.

Johnny, a brooding high school dropout who was deeply affected by his parent’s divorce and his father’s lifestyle, was put in charge of Jerry’s newest acquisition: the Los Angeles Lazers, an indoor soccer team. That team ran from 1982-1987 but Johnny only lasted for three before quitting. He fell into a deep depression and became obsessed with horse racing and, later on, Formula Three racing. But when his father stopped bankrolling that career out of a fear for his safety, he did what any unfulfilled rich kid from L.A. would do: Start writing bad unproduced screenplays. Following a three-day marriage in 1997, Jerry swooped in to save his oldest son by installing him as head of the Los Angeles Sparks of the newly formed WNBA. Jeanie would’ve been the more obvious choice given that she started attending NBA Board of Governors meetings in her father’s place, but perhaps Jerry thought this would finally shape up his oldest child. It didn’t take. Johnny went into what he called a “minor league” obsessed about his past failures. When Jerry sold the Sparks in 2006, Johnny gladly stepped down.

Most Laker fans of the last two decades barely knew anything about Johnny and his little brother Jim until Jerry Buss died in 2013 from prostate cancer. Following that death, the Lakers ownership group set up Jim as head of basketball operations and Jeanie as head of the business side. It was the fulfillment of a dream that Jim had for decades. “I wouldn't mind Jeanie having control over Lakers finances as long as I had ultimate say over player personnel,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1998. This was one year after he returned to the Lakers on the request of his father. Jim was given Johnny’s old job with the Lazers after his brother quit, but spent most of the ‘80s and ‘90s training thoroughbred horses. Now entering his ‘70s, Jerry wanted his 2nd oldest boy back in the fray, even though his oldest daughter was clearly more capable and deserving of taking over the team. Jim started shadowing general manager Jerry West and quickly pissed him off with statements like “If you grabbed 10 fans out of a bar and asked them to rate prospects, their opinions would be pretty much identical to those of the pro scouts.”

In 2017, Jerry Buss’ dream of his children taking over the franchise almost came to a disastrous end. In just four years, Jim ran the Lakers into the ground. Partly due to an insane $50 million contract gifted to Kobe Bryant shortly after he tore his Achilles, the Lakers were a laughing stock by the time of his 60 point farewell game a few years later. Jim told the media that if the Lakers weren’t contenders by his 4th year, he would step down. So Jeanie, realizing that her brother would never fulfill his promise, took matters into her own hands. She fired her brother and replaced him with Magic Johnson.

But the fight wasn’t over; Jeanie had to thwart a coup to retain her throne. Jim teamed up Johnny, then the Lakers’ EVP of corporate development, and sent a notice to the team’s shareholders. The brothers demanded a vote for a new board of directors, a board that reserves three of its five seats for members of the Buss family. Of the four family names they submitted, none were Jeanie. The Lakers governess reacted swiftly by seeking a restraining order against her brothers. Within a couple of weeks, they backed down. Permanently. Both resigned from the board and were replaced by their sister, Janie, head of the team’s charitable services, and Joey, one of Buss’ two sons from his relationship with ex-girlfriend Karen Demel. A few months later, Johnny told the L.A. Times “not only have I resigned from [the Lakers], I’ve resigned from being a member of the Buss family.”

The story of the Buss family’s ownership of the Lakers, one of the last family-run teams in all of professional sports, should’ve had its inevitable denouement in 2017. In most other alternate timelines, Johnny and Jim convince a third family member to kick out Jeanie. Then they sell their shares to Philip Anschutz, the minority Lakers owner who owns Staples Center, and cash out with each individual receiving a nine figure windfall. Instead, the lessons that Jeanie learned through decades of being the loyal right hand woman to her father, even as he passed her over for jobs like President of the Sparks, paid off. Jerry knew deep down that Jeanie was the only logical choice to succeed him. But maybe the guilt of his absentee parenting of Johnny and Jim led him to include them in the family business. Still, even as their blunders and personal flaws piled up, the part-time gambler knew he had a trump card: His daughter, someone who took after the old man. And unlike what happened four decades earlier with Jack Kent Cooke, a family squabble over a fortune would not squander ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers.

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Rich Chocolate Cake

1 package German chocolate cake mix

4 eggs

1 small carton sour cream

½ cup water

1 3 ounce package instant chocolate pudding

½ cup oil

6 ounces chocolate chips

Combine all ingredients except chocolate chips and beat for 5 minutes. Add chocolate chips and beat for additional minute. Bake in greased and floured bundt pan for one hour in 350 degree oven. Remove from pan and cool. Delicious served plain, sprinkled with powdered sugar, or frosted.

It’s wild to think that just six months ago, I was a virgin baker. If you saw me walking down the street, eating a bag of 2 for 99 cents gas station chili peanuts, you might’ve thought “I bet that guy has stuck a toothpick into the center of a cake and inspected it for gooey gunks.” You would’ve thought very wrong.

Now? I set the oven to 350 degrees and have the batter ready before the oven is hot. This is what it must've felt like for Magic Johnson to whip a no-look pass in the late ‘80s. Repeated success can sometimes give birth to monotony. Monotony is one of my biggest fears. In relationships, in food, in entertainment, in work, in life, in basketball passes. In anything, really. Even making a cake. This is not an exciting cake. It’s like the Corn Flakes of cake. It's a cake created to be so dull, it makes you want to stop jacking off.