Weiss’s business holdings were hardly of the up-and-up genre. Many of those who knew Weiss acknowledged a slipperiness to the man. But on the way, his agent Vic Weiss is found dead in the back of a car, presumably because of ties to the mafia which are alluded to during the dinner scene with Buss, Tarkanian and Weiss.Īnd while the timeline wasn’t exactly the same as portrayed in the show, the murder did indeed happen, and organized crime was presumed to be responsible for it (emphasis mine). “This is a really exciting time for you.”Īs it plays out next in the show, Tarkanian and his wife are set to drive to a location to meet Dr.
“I’ll meet you and Lois tomorrow morning at the resort,” Weiss told Tarkanian. In the coming days, Tarkanian presumed he would sit down with Cooke and Buss, sign the five-year contract and be introduced to the Los Angeles media as the Lakers’ tenth head coach.
“I was the new coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.” Around the same time Weiss was wrapping things up, Jerry and Lois drove north from San Diego, where they had been vacationing, to the Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach. Not only were the Lakers willing to make Tarkanian the NBA’s all-time highest-paid coach, they also ceded to his demands: a pair of season tickets for every home game, three luxury automobiles-one for Jerry, one for his wife, Lois, one for Pamela, their oldest daughter. “We can do that.” So here was Vic Weiss, moments after concluding with Cooke and Buss, briefcase in hand, approaching the valet parking station at the Comstock, happy as could be. “It’d have to be double the $350,000 I make right now.” “That’s fine,” Cooke said. a helluva lot more than the $70,000 offered last time. “When the Lakers reached out, I immediately said to my wife, ‘I can’t take the job, right? I just can’t.’” Still, to be polite, Tarkanian returned Cooke’s call, explaining that, even if he were interested in moving to California, it’d have to be for, ohhhhh. “I loved Las Vegas, my family loved Las Vegas,” Tarkanian said. In reality, Buss was joined by Jack Kent Cooke, who was still in the picture, but many of the details of that meeting from Pearlman’s book carried over into the show. A Final Four run in 1977 in just his fourth year as coach helped forever tie him to a city that had already fallen in love with him.Īs it played out in the show Buss met with a hesitant Tarkanian and laid it all on the table to bring the towel-biting head coach back to Southern California. Tarkanian had led Long Beach State to four consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances and back-to-back Elite Eights in the early ‘70s before leaving for Las Vegas. In another example of Buss’ innovative eye, he sought out Tarkanian a decade before he won a national title with the Runnin’ Rebels, though he was hardly a no-name coach. The main storyline of episode three of “Winning Time” is new Lakers owner Jerry Buss’ pursuit of a new head coach, a search that quickly zooms in on UNLV head coach Jerry Tarkanian. But, improbably, an episode that includes an actual murder has, so far, been perhaps the most accurate of the show to date. Each week, we’ll be looking back on the newest episode of HBO’s “Winning Time” and fact-checking or adding more details on some of the key and bigger plot points by using the book “Showtime: MAGIC, KAREEM, RILEY, AND THE LOS ANGELES LAKERS DYNASTY OF THE 1980S” By Jeff Pearlman.Ī good amount of debate surrounding the “Winning Time” has been about where the truth stops and where the dramatization begins (aka literally the point of these articles).
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