Jerry Buss Cause of Death: An American Businessman Died of Liver Failure at Age 80

By Mathhew Paul On Aug 16, 2022

Businessman, real estate mogul, and billionaire MLB franchise owner Jerry Buss passed away recently. Most of Jerry Buss’ wealth came from his role as majority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. Besides the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, and the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, he was a former owner of all three.

History and Formative Years

Gerald Hatten Buss was born on January 27, 1933, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Buss’s biological mother, Jessie, was a single parent, so she was responsible for raising him. His dad, Lydus, was a divorced chartered accountant who ended up teaching statistics at UC Berkeley. When he was nine years old, his family relocated to Los Angeles. Her family relocated to Kemmerer, Wyoming after her mother remarried.

Buss received a full ride to the University of Wyoming, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1953. When he was 24, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in physical chemistry.

Career

If you’re an entrepreneur in the real estate industry To earn extra money and keep teaching, Buss decided to dabble in the real estate market. His first real estate investment was a West Los Angeles complex he purchased for $1,000 in the 1960s.

Together with his longtime business partner Frank Mariani, he established the real estate investment firm Mariani-Buss Associates after finding success in the industry. The Beverly Hills mansion known as Pickfair, once owned by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, was purchased by Buss in 1979 and sold to another buyer in 1987.

Sports Team Ownership

Jerry had saved up $67.5 million by 1979, at which point he purchased the Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings, as well as the Forum arena. That amounts to about $213,000,000 in current value. With Jerry at the helm, the Lakers won their first of 10 consecutive NBA titles in a little over a year after making the greatest sports franchise acquisition in history.

The Los Angeles Lakers have a market value of over $1 billion, making them one of the most valuable sports franchises of all time.

The WNBA changed its rules in 2002 to allow individual franchise ownership, and that’s when Buss bought the Sparks. He donated to the squad in 2006. In addition to the LA Galaxy, Buss bought the Los Angeles Lazers of the MISL. Also playing at The Forum was the band The Lazers. The franchise folded in 1989, and the league folded three years later.

Fatal Reasons

Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who oversaw the team during its 10-championship run from the Showtime era of the 1980s through the Kobe Bryant era, passed away on Monday. He was 80. According to his assistant Bob Steiner, Buss passed away at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

In spite of Buss’s 18-month hospitalization for cancer treatment, Steiner said kidney failure was the immediate cause of death. Several notable ex-Lakers players went to see Buss before he passed away, as his health had clearly declined in recent weeks.

NBA commissioner David Stern lamented the loss of a “visionary owner whose influence on our league is incalculable and will be felt for decades.” More importantly, we have lost a close and treasured friend.

Since 1979, with Buss at the helm, the Los Angeles Lakers have been both Southern California’s most popular sports team and a global symbol of Hollywood’s glitz and glamour.

From Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, and Dwight Howard, Buss amassed and fostered an incredible collection of talented players and basketball minds during his Hall of Fame career.

“He was a visionary, he was a trailblazer,” Johnson said of Jordan during an interview on “SportsCenter” on Monday. “He acted in ways that were frowned upon and improper during that era. He was the kind of guy who actually did what he preached. When he was the owner, he was the most competitive person you’d ever see, and that’s why his teams won championships.

In a statement released by the Lakers, the Buss family said, “We not only have lost our cherished father but a beloved man of our community and a person respected by the world basketball community.”

John Black, a spokesman for the Lakers, said at a press conference on Monday, “The future of the organization will remain unchanged.” Foreseeing the team’s desire to stay with the family, Dr. Buss made arrangements for this to happen years in advance.

“Jim Buss has been in charge of basketball operations for the past few years, and he and general manager Mitch Kupchak will continue to work closely together. The company will continue to be run by Jeanie Buss, who has done so for the past 15 years. Everything about how the team is managed and run will remain the same.