Christina Lurie helped shape the Eagles vision

Fourth of an eight-part series

The wives stream by, bejeweled and Botoxed, in a high-priced parade of designer labels and expensive perfume. They are laughing, mostly, and why not? They are immaculately dressed down to their open-toed wedge sandals, not an eyelash out of place, not a fingernail chipped, and almost all are carrying boutique bags filled with Gucci and Chanel and Hermes.

It is a charmed life, that of an NFL owner's wife. The pedestrian worries of common folks - such as how to pay the soaring electric bill or what to do once the severance payments run out - aren't of their concern. They're married to multimillionaires, and in some cases, billionaires. Those problems don't pertain to them.

But there is a wife who spurned this morning shopping trip, a diversion for the wives while the men - the highest-ranking members of the front offices of the 32 franchises - sit in a chilly boardroom discussing the business of the NFL. This woman probably would spurn the title "wife" as well, if it were not accurate. Partner might be better. For she is in the sprawling boardroom at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, alongside her husband, listening and learning - and, on occasion, speaking her mind.

You won't find Christina Lurie hanging with the ladies. She won't go shopping, won't go get a group pedicure, and won't go to a seminar for the wives even though the presenter is former Eagles great Troy Vincent, now a vice president at the NFL. It's just not her style.

"She's not into that. That's an understatement," Jeffrey Lurie said of his bride of 18 years. "Oh yeah, she would want to be [in the meeting] understanding what's going on with the business of football, not taking a tour of some shopping mall. If she's going to bother going [to the meeting], at least take it seriously."

That has been Christina Lurie's approach to ownership ever since she and her husband rolled into Philadelphia in 1994. Christina had a career in Hollywood. She was her own person. But her husband wanted to own a professional sports franchise, and who was she to not indulge his dream?

It might, she figured, even be fun.