A recent episode of "Winning Time" revisits the murder of Vic Weiss, Tarkanian's friend and business manager.
Pearlman also notes that around the time of his death, he had been traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Las Vegas to “deliver bundles of laundered cash,” from which he was believed to have been skimming money. “A mere three days earlier, on the evening of June 14, Weiss had seemed to be the happiest man on the planet,” Jeff Pearlman writes in Showtime, the book on which Winning Time is based. “The Best Is Yet to Come” — the third episode of HBO’s Winning Time, which aired on Sunday night — ends on a shocking note.
Episode three of "Winning Time" included Jerry Buss' very real pursuit of UNLV's Jerry Tarkanian as the next Lakers head coach, and led to raised eyebrows ...
That allows media to be looser with how they portray characters that have passed without having to worry about libel accusations, and it’s something that has to be taken into account with any dead character, even if acknowledging that doesn’t make any of the things Hearn actually did say back then any more acceptable today. In the wake of Magic Johnson’s announcement that he had HIV, the rumors of his own sexuality swirled. While there is no reference in the book to such an exchange or any other public evidence of Hearn using that exact language, the longtime Lakers play-by-play announcer did have a bit of a checkered past with some remarks he made. “In a couple days you’ll get a call.” And he did. Chick would ask him where he worked; if he was black, Hearn would invariably say, “So, do you have a job?” He also had a habit of asking Oriental contestants how to tell the difference between Chinese people and Japanese people. 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. Weiss had run up more than $60,000 in gambling debts and—at the time of his death—was flying back and forth from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to deliver bundles of laundered cash. “I don’t think Jerry ever got past Vic’s death,” said Lois. “He just didn’t get past it.” When Tarkanian called Buss to tell him he had decided to remain in Las Vegas, the new Lakers owner held no grudge. Hearn refers to the security guard as “some new gorilla.” He would have to incorporate Jamaal Wilkes, the smooth small forward, into the offensive mix, and find an answer to the long-standing void at power forward. Weiss always carried around a thick wad of cash (he had $38,000 in his pocket for the meeting with Buss and Cooke), and rarely left home minus his ostentatious solid gold wristwatch and matching diamond ring (purchased from Anthony Starr, a Canadian jewel thief who routinely sold Weiss hot goods). “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. 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.
Was Jerry Tarkanian in line to replace Jerry West as the head coach of the Lakers? Was Tarkanian's representative Vic Weiss murdered? Also, on a completely ...
Speaking of the Riley men, fans of Winning Time should pay close attention to Pat Riley's (Adrien Brody) journey on the show. For starters, the possibility of Tarkanian coaching the Lakers was not Buss’ idea according to Bleacher Report. Former Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke approached Tarkanian with an offer to coach the NBA team in 1977. Tarkanian still wasn’t sold on leaving college ball, but then Cooke (not Buss as portrayed), verbally agreed to pay Tarkanian $700,000 if he agreed to coach the NBA team. As shown in the series, Tarkanian wasn’t leaping at the chance to move up to the pros when initially propositioned. At the beginning of episode 3, after Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) berates Jerry West (Jason Clarke) for quitting in the manner in which he did, Buss comes up with an idea for West’s replacement after looking in a newspaper. Who knew the introduction of a yet another Jerry was going to bring forth such jaw-dropping moments to the series, and with them, questions?
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty co-creator Jim Hecht is confident viewers will Google the end of the most recent episode.
And the other was when Magic is on his way to the apartment. And he doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t do drugs. I don’t even know if people know that Jerry West was the coach and that he quit. The first was when Magic arrives at LAX. Buss didn’t pick him up. Pat Riley. It is the introduction of Pat Riley [played by Adrien Brody], along with how the episode ends, those two really crazy parts of our story. Winning Time implies the hit was carried out to keep Tarkanian at UNLV.
It's a known fact that UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian was one of the candidates that Dr Jerry Buss looked at to coach the Los Angeles Lakers after Jerry West ...
Finally, his body was found in the trunk of his car in the parking lot of a hotel in North Hollywood, California. He had taken a bullet to the head and was found limp and dead. Although it was believed that Weiss was actually owning a couple of car dealerships, truth was that he was only a paid consultant and also had burgeoning debts due to gambling. According to Pearlman, Weiss has a certain "slipperiness'. He also added that "it was far from unusual to see Weiss standing ringside, talking shop with known mobsters." And just when Buss thought 750 million and two Rolls Royces would have reeled in Tarkanian, the murder of Weiss changed it all, and the Lakers were back to a square one without a coach with the training camp looming large. It's a known fact that UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian was one of the candidates that Dr Jerry Buss looked at to coach the Los Angeles Lakers after Jerry West handed his resignation. 'Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty' Episode 3 sheds light on the aftermath of West's resignation and ends with Tarkanian tipping to take the role.
Midway through “The Good Life,” Magic Johnson joins the rest of the Lakers for the world premiere of The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a 1979 basketball comedy ...
On the phone, he raves to Cookie about the love the premiere crowd showed for (a pre-infamy) Bill Cosby. Cookie suggests that was not love, but at the moment, Magic seems incapable of separating blind adulation from the kind of sincere and personal love Cookie clearly wants from him. This is not really a case of Winning Time sensationalizing the details: as recounted in Jeff Pearlman’s Showtime book, the real Weiss was murdered and left in a trunk, and he had on him $38,000 in cash from a meeting with Buss and Jack Kent Cooke, who in reality was still involved in team operations at this stage of things. The expanded focus on three potential new Laker hires turns out very satisfactorily on a narrative level, even if none of the characters quite seem to be getting what they want by the end of the hour. He wanders into one of Chris’ sessions with a client, obsessively records audition tapes for Chick — who is skeptical that Pat’s “faggy” voice is suitable for television — and eventually tears apart his garage out of frustration at his inability to pull out the weeds that are growing around it. The episode’s conclusion offers a hint as to why he was so nervous, as Vic’s corpse is found in the trunk of a car, Jerry Buss’ business card resting on his face. Jerry Tarkanian, meanwhile, had been coaching for nearly a quarter century by the time Jerry Buss came calling, and the previous half-dozen as head man for the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels. He was among the most successful coaches the college ranks have ever seen, and among the most controversial. On the whole, he vastly exceeded the athletic career of his baseball player father, who spent decades in the minor leagues and only four days on a Big League roster (during one of the World War II seasons when MLB was desperate for anyone who could play and wasn’t fighting overseas). When we catch up to Riley here, he should be enjoying the good life of the episode’s title: living near the beach, playing volleyball, and basking in the company of his therapist wife, Chris. (She’s played by Gillian Jacobs, who adds to the “Is everyone in Hollywood in this show at some point?” feeling.) But the good life is an unfulfilling one for a pathological competitor, leaving him an exposed nerve constantly getting into trouble. It’s a great gag, even if, as we discussed last week, the real Buss expected to be replacing his head coach when he bought the team. It could have been something alliterative (Los Angeles Leopards?), a play on the real name (Los Angeles Rivers?), or literally anything at all. The Logo has left the team high and dry, Buss exclaims, while West insists he is doing the team a favor by stepping down from a job to which he feels he is unsuited. But because the movie did not have the rights to use an NBA property, they are not members of the Lakers. And because the movie is largely bereft of ideas, they are introduced(*) for the championship game against the Pittsburgh Pisces as “the Los Angeles… team!” No one even bothered to think up a fake name! Before we can talk more about this episode, we must first discuss a few things about one of the most infamous sports movies ever made:
So, what happened to Vic Weiss? Episode 3, “The Best Is Yet To Come,” follows Lakers owner Jerry Buss' (John C. Reilly) search for a new head coach ...
At the time of his death, he was traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Las Vegas to “deliver bundles of laundered cash,” from which he was known to skim money. Johnson was drafted on June 25, 1979, about a week after Weiss was found dead, smack dab in the middle of the hunt for a new head coach. An interesting tweak “Winning Time” made to the true story is Jack Kent Cooke’s place in it. In Pearlman’s words, “Many of those who knew Weiss acknowledged a slipperiness to the man. In “Showtime,” the book on which the series is based, Jeff Pearlman writes that a Sheraton parking lot attendant found the maroon and white Rolls-Royce on June 17, 1979. According to Pearlman and the Los Angeles Times’ descriptions, Weiss’ body was in much worse shape than he appears to be onscreen – minus one Jerry Buss business card.