Roland Lazenby - Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon

ITS MAY 1999. JERRY WEST SITS COURTSIDE IN THE EMPTY GREAT Western Forum in Los Angeles. It is the end of an era. His era. It is the last NBA season for this building, which has been the stage for much of his basketball life, a wrenching forty-year struggle for meaning. For those four decades, as a player, as a coach, as an executive, Jerry West has led the Los Angeles Lakers. He is the Los Angeles Lakers. And now his hour has come round at last. The only others present are young superstar Kobe Bryant, who is shooting free throws after practice; a freelance writer who is trying to engage West in a conversation; and a stunningly pretty television reporter who keeps exchanging furtive glances with the legend. Only the presence of the woman seems to pull him from his dark thoughts and push him toward a hint of a smile. He is troubled because the San Antonio Spurs are about to sweep his Lakers from the play-offs. Down three games to none in the series, his team has just finished a practice before the fourth and final game. The season, indeed his historic tenure with the team, is hanging by a thread. And so the people around him are an immense distraction. Jerry West, who seemingly sees everything, is peering into the immediate future and recognizing a developing scenario that absolutely nauseates him. (Those around him might scoff and say that everything seems to nauseate West.) He is pondering these things, half listening, when the writer suddenly mentions the very name that is the source of his trouble.

Phil Jackson.

The name brings West instantly and completely into the moment. His troubled face tightens.

Fuck Phil Jackson, he says.

Taken aback by Wests sudden fury, the writer attempts to clarify his comment.

No, West interrupts. Fuck Phil Jackson.

He says each of the words with emphasis to burnish his intent.

Sportswriters covering the Lakers have long been used to West exploding in anger during interviews. They laugh about the uptight persona that often leaves him launching F-bombs in response to one of their questions, but they hardly ever report his responses.

This time is a bit different, however. The sixty-one-year-old West is addressing the central issue of his career, perhaps even of his life. On the surface, it is about coaching versus talent. But in reality, its far deeper than that, perhaps even Oedipal.

West is certain that talent supersedes coaching in the business of basketball. It is a business about which West knows as much as a person can know. It is the obsession to which he has dedicated his life. There is the perception among the sports media, fans, players, coaches, agentseven the entrepreneurs and ownersthat no one has ever cared more, given more, sacrificed more, done more for basketball than Jerry West.

That is why he is the Logo, the player upon whose photograph the National Basketball Associations red, white, and blue logo is said to have been modeled. He is the very image of the sport, the brand of a multibillion-dollar enterprise that has captured the fascination of millions of humans around the globe.

And yet, on the core question of his life, the core question of the game he adores and knows so well, Jerry West is probably wrong. In fact, I know he is.

I was the reporter sitting in the Forum with West on that day in May 1999. Over my years of covering the NBA, I have had about twenty substantive, in-depth interviews with him. His focus on coaching versus talent is a running theme of those conversations. One time he told me, You can tell your friends Tex Winter and Pat Riley that coaching is important, but its mostly about talent.

The coaching-versus-talent thing was an issue that would hit West like a tsunami in the coming months, and he would cling to his beliefs like a person clinging to a tree, trying not to be swept away by a great tide.

Of course talent matters. West had spent his adult life assembling talent for the great Lakers championship teams. His 1999 roster brimmed with talent, including the mammoth center Shaquille ONeal and the resplendent young wing player Kobe Bryant. To play alongside them, West had acquired an array of polished, intelligent players. And yet here these marvelous Lakers were, once again facing dismissal in the play-offs, an underachieving collection of overpaiddare I say it?talent.

That tsunami headed Wests way was none other than Phil Jackson, the man who coached Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to six National Basketball Association championships in nine years. I had just watched Jackson engage in a titanic struggle with the vice president of those Bulls, Mr. Jerry Krause. Mr. Krause was a friend and confidant of Jerry Wests. They had long shared beliefs and phone conversations and gossip, the kind of talk that only NBA executives share. Mr. Krause was determined to prove that it is the organizationa teams scouting staff and administration that collects talentthat wins championships. Organizations were the most important thing in basketball, according to Mr. Krause.

Jerry West believed much the same thing, though he would express it in other words.

Phil Jackson, in essence, rolled right over Jerry Krause in this debate. Within weeks of cursing Jackson in our conversation, West would stand before the television cameras in Los Angeles and announce that he was hiring Jackson to coach the Lakers. And soon Jackson would turn the great force of his personality and his skill to the task of rolling right over West himself. It would not be pretty. I will explain this in detail, but right now I am getting ahead of the story.

My task here is to explain the mystery that is Jerry West, the most influential figure in the history of American basketball. My best clue was provided almost twenty years ago in an interview with that most perceptive of basketball men, Pete Newell. Newell had coached West on the 1960 U.S. Olympic team and was amazed and puzzled by the talented but tortured young player, so beset by inferiority complexes and insecurities.

After an early Olympic practice, West had come to Newell and confided that he didnt think he belonged on the team because he just wasnt as good as the other players selected, particularly Oscar Robertson. West expressed his thoughts about leaving the team and heading back home to West Virginia.

Newell recalled with a chuckle, I told him, Jerry, if youre not going to Rome, then Im not going either.

But the conversation would play on Newells mind long after the Olympic Games were over. How could such a high-level player harbor such doubts about his own abilities?