She knows it was a Wednesday last October. She knows it was 10:55 a.m. But for all the Dodger Dogs in Chavez Ravine, Jamie McCourt can’t recall where she was when she opened the most important e-mail of her life, because her world went blank.
As she scrolled down her BlackBerry, Jamie thought she might be sick. It had taken almost 30 years for Jamie and her husband, Frank, to build a billion-dollar empire — a nest egg that included seven homes and the Los Angeles Dodgers — but it took only five paragraphs to destroy it.
On the surface, the e-mail — a letter scanned and forwarded by her attorney — was a formal but fairly routine termination notice from an owner of a sports team to a CEO for whom he no longer had use. But buried beneath the instructions for how said CEO might clean out her office was the subtext of a family in shambles, a husband firing a wife, a father canning the mother of his four sons.
Today, what began as boardroom and bedroom bickering has become tabloid fodder in LA. Details of their spat, once the domain of baseball blogs and Twitter feeds, now rival the latest nuttiness from Lindsay Lohan and Mel Gibson for splashy headlines in the Los Angeles Times.
• Read the full ESPN The Magazine story.
