Ending a relationship can be hard, especially one that sprang from the beautiful sport of basketball. Jeanie Buss knows this all too well and spoke about it during a recent interview on the Games With Names podcast. On the show, the controlling owner of the Los Angeles Lakers opened up about Phil Jackson and how his move to New York threw a wrench into their romance.
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Buss and Jackson—the famed coach who brought five championships to the Lakers with his leadership over dynamite players like Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant—made magic together in the City of Angels.
The couple started seeing each other in 1999 and became engaged to be married in 2013. Everything was on track to end well. But opportunity came knocking.
Jackson famously left LA to become the president of operations for the Knicks in 2014. Buss revealed that the NBA even forced her and Jackson to sign an agreement that they would not speak about basketball after that.
Buss said Jackson told her, “You can’t call me and bounce ideas off me.” That seemed to signal the beginning of the end.
“That kind of eroded my relationship because he was in New York, and I was in LA,” she admitted. Their engagement would be broken off in 2016 after 17 years together.
Buss then got a little choked up talking about Kobe’s tragic passing in 2020, but it reminded her of something Jackson once told her about the Black Mamba at a time she needed to hear it. “You’ll always have Kobe, and Kobe will always have your back,” said Buss, recalling the words of Jackson.
Jackson never found the same success leading New York, but Buss has continued to run the Lakers to the best of her ability. The 63-year-old executive was instrumental in acquiring LeBron James, who led them to another championship in 2020. She was also the driving force behind bringing Luka Doncic to the Lakers in the blockbuster trade earlier this year.
Yet there is something somber about how Buss remembers the past. No amount of success or money can erase the simpler things in life, her relationships with Jackson and Kobe being a couple of them. It’s unknown if she and Jackson still talk. One must wonder what could have been had he never taken that job in New York.
