EppsNet Archive: Jerry Buss

Jerry Buss, 1933-2013

 

I’m sad. As a lifelong Laker fan, I kind of feel like I knew the guy. He bought the Lakers in 1979, which means he was younger than I am today, and now he’s dead at the age of 80. I feel old. Dr. Buss was a USC alum. Fight on. R.I.P. Jerry Buss Read more →

You Can Make It If You Try

 

“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much [economic] mobility as most other advanced countries,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.” — Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs – NYTimes.com I’ll argue with it . . . the fact that people are not doing something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a hard thing to do. Maybe people aren’t trying to do it. Maybe people don’t want to do it. From Daniel Kahneman‘s Thinking, Fast and Slow: A large-scale study of the impact of higher education . . . revealed striking evidence of the lifelong effects of the goals that young people set for themselves. The relevant data were drawn from questionnaires collected in 1995-1997 from approximately 12,000 people who had started their higher education in elite schools in… Read more →

At the Lakers Game

 

My son and I went to the Lakers game last night, a pre-season game against Utah . . . Pre-game As we were walking in, he pointed out an Asian girl with a spiky-haired Asian guy wearing an Olympics jersey and said, “That guy with the Olympic jersey pulled a hotter Asian woman than you.” The girl was hotter than my wife is now, but not hotter than she was at that age. “You don’t know anything,” I said. “Mom was pretty hot.” “Yeah. Right.” Game Pretty good game! The starters played more than I thought they would. Andrew Bynum is back. He looked good! Jerry Buss was there. He looked terrible. Thirty minutes before the game, a guy rolled him out in a wheelchair to the end of the court. It took him several minutes to hobble from there to his courtside seat. My son said he had a… Read more →

Wasted Time

 

There was a profile of Jerry Buss, the owner of the Lakers, on TV the other night . . . Buss spent very little time with his family when his kids were growing up. When he and his wife separated, they didn’t tell the kids, and it was five years before any of them noticed the difference. True story! Clearly, I have not been nearly as ruthless as I could have been at disregarding my family in my pursuit of success. Read more →

Another Difference Between USC and UCLA

 

NBC analyst Bill Walton attended UCLA. FOX Sports analysts Marques Johnson and Jack Haley also went to UCLA. Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss attended USC. Read more →