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Cooke sells for a record price

Jack Kent Cooke signed checks worth $5 million to underwrite the first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971. He spent upwards of $10 million for 86% of the stock of the Washington Redskins. He bought the Los Angeles Lakers ($5.2 million in 1965) and in 1967 started a National Hockey League team called the Kings in, of all unlikely places, sunny Southern California. Then he built the $16 million Forum to house his athletic baubles. But the next check will read PAY TO THE ORDER OF JACK KENT COOKE. After 18 years as sport's premier entrepreneur, Cooke, 66, last week sold his basketball and hockey teams--tossing in their neoclassical arena in Inglewood and a 13,300-acre ranch--to Los Angeles Real Estate Tycoon Jerry Buss. As befits Cooke's style, the deal was the biggest in the history of professional athletics: $67.5 million.

Cooke's divestiture came at the end of three bitter years of exile from the teams he once ran with the glee of a small boy on Christmas morning. He fled to Nevada in a vain attempt to escape California's community property laws during an acrimonious divorce and, suffering from a heart ailment, lost touch with his clubs. In his heyday, Cooke made the trades (Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), picked the draft choices, coached the coaches and chastised waiters in the Forum Club restaurant for allowing a guest's water glass to remain empty. The eye for detail paid off: the Lakers won the N.B.A. championship in 1972, and have remained one of the good, if not great, teams in pro basketball. The Kings have been less successful, but the Forum, dubbed "Cooke's Folly" by local detractors, has been a smash, making money from games, rock concerts and ice shows.

Why did Cooke sell? Buss had made him an offer he couldn't refuse. "I've always said if someone offers me more than what I think one of my assets is worth, I'd be tempted to sell--and I did."

As for the swashbuckling Buss, 46, he dealt so high because he has been "a sports nut since I could remember," and, he adds, "if I handle it right and produce some winners, I can do rather well economically." Adds the new sports czar of the West Coast: "There's a lot of crap-shooter in me."

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