LA Lakers tragic Sally Field on women’s struggles and the creation of a basketball legend

But the series is not all about the blokes. It also shows that women played key roles in a pivotal part of sporting history, even if they were often in the backrooms or on the sidelines.

When Jerry Buss, a charismatic businessman bought the basketball team and transformed it into a winning entertainment franchise, also involved in the venture were his daughter Jeanie Buss (Hadley Robinson) and his mother, Jessie Buss (Sally Field).

It was Jessie who drew up a contract ensuring the survival of the team; and it was Jeanie who discovered Paula Abdul and put the pizzazz into the new “Showtime” Lakers. (She’s now President of the team.)

Oscar winner Sally Field, who has made a name for herself playing determined women and strong mothers (Norma Rae, Forrest Gump) was thrilled to be offered the role of Jessie.

“I’m a huge Lakers fan. It’s really one of the reasons I was so excited to be offered this,” said Field. “I was with my two young sons sitting up there before the new stadium was built.”

In fact, Field made her Oscar-winning film about labour activist Norma Rae in 1979, the same year Jerry Buss bought the Lakers. Field, 75, finds a correlation between sport’s view of women during that era, and Hollywood.

“I was in a man’s world, the entertainment industry. It was hard then, it’s hard now,” said Field. One example is when Field was aged up to play Tom Hanks’ mother in Forrest Gump, despite the mere 9 year age gap between them.

In Winning Time, which launched on BINGE this week, Field plays a different type of mother. Jessie is her son’s adviser and bookkeeper – and she thinks buying the Lakers is a bad idea.

“We didn’t have a lot of real information about Jessie,” said Field. “But we knew some key things: that she was a single mother, that she had been really strong, that she had survived two bad marriages and raised her son, and she came to Hollywood in the ‘30s because she wanted to be a movie star and that wasn’t going to happen so she went to school and became an accountant. She was a survivor, and she was incredibly important to Jerry and to Jeanie … She’s not a perfect mother by any means.”

Her granddaughter, Jeanie Buss, is played by Hadley Robinson (Little Women). Like Jessie, Jeanie has doubts about her father, and struggles in his egomaniacal shadow — eventually the women unite to help realise Jerry’s grandiose vision.

While the series is full of drama, excess, and 1970s sexism and racism, it’s a lens through which to view some of the biggest shifts in American culture in the last 40 years — from Black culture to big business to women’s rights in the workplace.

As part of the younger generation of actors, Robinson, 27, sees the female characters as sharing a “deep internal struggle for independence. I think you can feel in all of them a separation from the attachment to a male entity … like, Yeah, but what is it to do this all on my own, and bear these burdens myself and pave my own path? And I think Jessie and Jeannie are doing it in their own unique ways.”

Field agrees and remembers her own struggle during that era. “It was so hard to get out of situation comedy television, which is where I started in 1964. So the era is embedded in me. I don’t even have to work on it. It’s just there. And I say to myself, You know what? I don’t have to win that anymore. But you do. Pretty much every workplace is still dominated by men. You learn to battle it in a way … and like Hadley said earlier, I felt I should make or break it myself. I had to be better than I ever thought. I had to work harder. I had to study longer. I had to know more. There was no room for error at all. And I think women who survive in a man’s world even today, that has to be the case.”

Gender equality aside, Field, who has lived in LA her whole life and joins the ranks of celebrities like Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, and Leonardo DiCaprio who are diehard Lakers fans, sees another legacy.

When the pandemic hit, the Lakers joined a strict NBA Covid bubble so that they could continue playing for their fans at the height of US lockdown.

“To be able to watch all of these athletes? It was such a release,” said Field. “To give us that. I will always be grateful. The legacy continues.”

Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is streaming now on BINGE.

Originally published as LA Lakers tragic Sally Field on women’s struggles and the creation of a basketball legend