Jerry West won’t be in attendance when his Los Angeles Lakers finally return to the NBA’s pinnacle night.
“Oh, I’m not going there,” he told me over the phone, referring to what was then known as Staples Center.
Wait, what?
The 1999-2000 Lakers, a team built for this purpose at the expense of West’s nerves and health, won Los Angeles’ first basketball championship in more than a decade, one step away from defeating Indiana in the Finals. The Pacers have one game left. They will be crowned on their home turf. This will be the team’s first championship since 1988. Bryant was included in the same team and swallowed his victory. That would be wonderful.
And it can all be done without West on the court.
This is nothing new for West. Now that he’s no longer able to bring his prodigious talents to the field and impact winning games as a player, moments like this serve as a serious distraction. He often drives around town during Lakers home games. Sometimes he would listen to Chick Hearn’s dulcet voice to see how things were going. That night, however, he left the car stereo silent. He followed the Ventura Highway to Santa Barbara, a hundred miles north of the city.
“I told my friend Bobby Friedman to call me only when he had good news,” West wrote in his searing autobiography, “West by West.”
Of course, it’s not because he doesn’t care. Because he cares very, very much.
West’s death on Wednesday at the age of 86 left more than one person around the league choked up.
“It’s a very sad day,” West’s contemporary, Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson, said by phone Wednesday afternoon.
West has been the embodiment of the sport for decades. Few people’s advice was more welcome, and he was synonymous with a tenacious, relentless pursuit of excellence. He was part of a dynasty as a player who couldn’t solve the Celtics’ problems, but then built a dynasty as an executive who ultimately solved the Celtics’ problems. He was selected to the All-Star Game 14 times and to the All-NBA Team 12 times. During his tenure as the team’s general manager, the Lakers produced two behemoths: Magic Johnson’s team won five championships in the 1980s, and then O’Neal Bryant’s team won the NBA championship from 2000 to 2003. Won three consecutive championships.
Just as Red Auerbach did for the Celtics, 3,000 miles east, West was always at the center of the Lakers’ collapse and rebirth. Decade after decade, the Lakers continued to be relevant in the NBA throughout the 1980s with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson and James Worthy, much like Boston was at the end of the Bill Russell era Later, through John Havlicek, he continued to hold the flag high. Colorado is currently in this year’s Finals series with the Dallas Mavericks for their 18th NBA title; the Lakers’ last title was in the 2020 Orlando bubble, where they were tied with the Celtics for 17th place.
In NBA.com’s 2017 all-time list of NBA executives, I ranked Auerbach No. 1 and West No. 2. During this time, nothing changed in my mind. They were the ultimate architects, Auerbach’s formidable playmaking and astonishing ability to motivate like a mechanical rabbit on a greyhound track, allowing West to chase the Celtics for a generation.
“I personally love and admire Red’s cheeky approach and he is one of the coaches I would compete with,” West wrote. ”. …Red is a character that people love to hate, and he doesn’t mind at all. He doesn’t mind being a villain. He’s going to be whatever you want him to be as long as he helps the Celtics win.
But West isn’t taking a back seat to anyone when it comes to talent evaluation. He’s the best ever. No former superstar as a player has found the next great talent in more towns, in more countries, and in more stadiums year after year than West has. He wasn’t stuck in nostalgia; He’s still excited about the current crop of players. He had nothing but praise for Terrence Mann when he was a little-known second-round pick of the Las Vegas Summer League Clippers in 2019.
He has his own suggestions for who and what he likes.
“It’s not trust,” he once told me. “I just think if you ask 10 people, you’re going to get more than one opinion. If you ask five people, you’re going to get more than one opinion. I don’t want to confuse myself by asking 10 people.
Like Auerbach, West possesses the kind of timeless charm that Dr. J and Pat Riley and a handful of aging celebrities still possess. After leaving the Lakers in 2000, he remained highly sought after and went on to hold executive roles with the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers into his 80s. It was West’s steadfast refusal to sign a Klay Thompson trade offer for Kevin Love in 2014 that prevented Golden State Warriors ownership from pulling the trigger and the Splash Brothers from starting to change the franchise. was disbanded before the championship tour.
Whether in person or on the phone, you can still feel his explosive intensity. In middle age, I still get goosebumps when my phone rings and the caller ID identifies the person on the other line. (He’s on my contact list as “TLogo,” for obvious reasons.) He always responded cheerfully: “David? Jerry West.
Like it could be someone else.
Given his pedigree, he is very humble and respectful about his success. West was revered for his 60-foot shot at the end of regulation in Game 3 of the 1970 Finals against New York that tied the score and sent the game into overtime. However, West only remembers the Knicks winning 111-108 in overtime. In the Lakers’ Western Division Series victory over Baltimore in 1965, he averaged an astonishing 46.3 points per game, which remains the highest scoring average in a single playoff series.
He can be vitriolic about today’s players, the state of the game, David Stern and anyone else who doesn’t live up to his standards at any given moment. He may be frustrated with his team. But if they don’t win on their own terms, he has no patience with them. The portrayal of him in the HBO miniseries “Hand of Victory” was an ugly caricature of his manic levels, which outraged his friends and colleagues. He’s not the kind of guy who foams at the mouth and spends his days trashing the Forum offices with blinding fury. He’s not a big shot.
If anyone can do this without controversy, it’s him.
But no one wants to win more than Jerry West, and he’s proven that throughout his life.
He won a state championship while attending East Bank High School in West Virginia. Named “West Bank” in memory of him. In 1959, he won at West Virginia, leading the Mountaineers to the NCAA national championship, but West Virginia lost by one point to Cal, 71-70. He was on the famous 1960 U.S. Olympic team that was as dominant as the Dream Team 32 years later. The 1960 team won eight games at the Summer Olympics in Rome, averaging 42.4 points per game. West, Robertson, Walter Bellamy, Jerry Lucas and coach Pete Newell were all individually inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010, as was the 1960 team as a whole.
“We just gelled right away,” Robertson said. “Pete Newell is the coach and he puts our starting five together. We know the stakes because we’re all here to make the Olympic team. Jerry’s a good guy. In fact, I knew him through Adrian Smith (who was on the 1960 Olympic team). I knew him through Adrian and I’m sure we were there. The background is kind of similar because where Jerry and I come from, we had nothing but basketball.
The word torture is often used to describe the West. indeed. The Devil spent a difficult and lonely childhood in his native West Virginia, setting down roots there where his imagination was his best friend and he fired thousands of shots so he wouldn’t have to go home. Devouring him throughout his life. There was little love in West’s home, and the children were physically abused by their father. Jerry West was driven, in both the best and worst senses, to strive for perfection, to be eviscerated in defeat and only gain in victory A brief moment of redemption.
“If I may say so, I am a mystery (even to myself, especially “I am an obsessive-compulsive person whose thoughts range widely and always return to the things that keep me bound, good or bad,” West writes in his book.
After moving to Los Angeles from Minneapolis in 1960, West played on Los Angeles’ first great team with future Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor. them production Professional basketball on the West Coast set a standard of excellence that only Auerbach, Bill Russell and the Celtics could stand in the way.
The Lakers and Celtics met in the championship series six times during West’s career. Boston defeated the Los Angeles Lakers six times, the last time in 1969, and West was named Finals MVP, becoming the only player to win the award on a losing team. From 1970 to 1973, the Lakers also played against the Knicks in the Finals three times. It wasn’t until 1972 that West’s team achieved victory, giving him his ninth NBA championship.
“It’s great to compete against Jerry,” Robertson said. “Jerry is a great athlete. I don’t know about other people, but I love playing against great basketball players. Because you have to level up your basketball. You don’t know where you are until you play against great basketball players. . Without a doubt, Jerry is one of the best. I think Jerry is a great basketball player, a great shooter.
But West is as stubborn as he is brilliant.
When the NBA convened the 50 greatest players of all time for All-Star Weekend in Cleveland in 1997 with much fanfare, 47 of the 49 living players were in attendance for the decades-long game. (Pete Maravich died at age 40 in 1988 during a pickup game; O’Neal was recovering from knee surgery.) West was the only one who didn’t come. The reason given at the time was that he had recently undergone surgery.
The surgery part is true. But that’s not why he didn’t show up. He didn’t show up because he was angry with the Orlando Magic, who accused him of interfering with O’Neal to ensure Shaq became a free agent while O’Neal was still under contract with the Magic.
Before the 1996 draft, West was shocked by Bryant’s workouts with the Lakers and plotted with his close friend Arn Tellem, Bryant’s agent, to bring Bryant to the West Coast. When West is on your side, you won’t find a fiercer supporter.
Lakers executive Mitch Kupchak famously retold the story years later about how the Lakers drafted Vlade Divac in the 1989 draft, which West selected over the objections of others. A Serbian center.
“We all chose the other guy,” Kupchak said. “I thought it was (Missouri center) Gary Leonard. We all agreed. Then (West) leaned into the microphone, which was connected to New York so we could announce our selection. Our guy was Hampton Mills. Jerry said, “Hampton” – he looked at us when he said this – he said, “Hampton, the Lakers took Divac. ” All three of us were thinking, “Why are we here?” He said, “He is just too talented to be passed on.” ” Then he walked out of the room.
As always, Logos was alone, and once again his mind, his tenacity and imagination, served him well.
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(Photo of Jerry West and Oscar Robertson: Vernon Biever/NBAE via Getty Images)
