Jerry West, RIP

How many great men have achieved more and enjoyed it less than basketball genius Jerry West, a giant figure in Southern California sports history who has died at age 86? Few giants of their fields have felt more intense pressure to succeed than West, the son of a West Virginia coal mine electrician, who excelled in the National Basketball Association as a player and an executive for many decades.

“Zeke from Cabin Creek” was an All-American at West Virginia U., the co-captain of the victorious 1960 U.S. Olympic basketball team, and drafted by the Lakers, then in transit between Minneapolis and Los Angeles, with the second pick of the 1960 NBA draft. (Who could have been picked ahead of West, you might well ask. Oscar Robertson, that’s who. Back when draftees played 4 seasons of college ball, drafting wasn’t that fraught of a process.)

West was so accomplished — for example, scoring more points in NBA Finals series than any other player in history, even Jordan, Kareem, or LeBron — that his silhouette was used for the NBA logo:

Yet, his frequent successes satisfied West less than his rare failures gnawed at his psyche. And failure haunted West’s Lakers, who seldom had a strong supporting cast behind West and fellow superstar Elgin Baylor. In his first six NBA Finals, he averaged a Jordan-like 33.0 points per game, averaging 37.9 in 1969 when he was voted the NBA Finals’ Most Valuable Player. ESPN reports:

In the seventh game of the 1969 Finals, West played with a leg injury and had 42 points, 13 rebounds and 12 assists -- and his Los Angeles Lakers lost.

The Lakers lost all six Finals to the Boston Celtics of Bill Russell and a host of superb role players.

Then Russell retired and the Lakers traded for the biggest name of them all, Wilt Chamberlain. The superstar triumvirate found themselves in the 1970 Finals against the New York Knicks, in which West hit a 63 foot buzzer beater to tie the third game.

Yet, despite West’s heroics, the Lakers managed to blow the game in overtime and the famous seventh game in a rout when a maimed Willis Reed sent the Madison Square Garden home crowd into raptures by limping out of the locker room to start.

Before the 1971-1972 season, the Lakers hired Bill Sharman, one of the Celtics who’d bedeviled them, to coach. Sharman convinced Chamberlain, who ten years before had scored 100 in a game and averaged 50 over a season, that his once potent but now crude scoring skills (the finger-roll and fall-away bank shot) were now obsolete, but that he could still be hugely valuable if he imitated Bill Russell’s style as a defense and rebound specialist. Since his trade to Los Angeles, Wilt had been hanging out Muscle Beach and added 40 pounds of solid muscle,

so he was physically perfect for Sharman’s envisioned role.

The Laker’s got off to a decent 6-3 start, but at that point, 37-year-old Elgin Baylor, immobilized by numerous knee surgeries, nobly fell on his sword and retired.

Baylor’s replacement by 23-year-old Jim McMillian liberated the Lakers to play a fast-break game in which Wilt’s humongous shot-blocking and rebounding and Happy Hairston NBA forward-leading rebounding fed the fast-breaking trio of McMillian and the two guards West and Gail Goodrich, who each averaged 26 PPG.

Beginning with Baylor’s retirement, the Lakers went off on an NBA record 33 game winning streak, which is when the 12-year-old me started following the Lakers closely.

The Lakers, of course, now have the most notorious frontrunner fans in all of American sports. Yet, they didn’t 50+ years ago when they were better known as a really good team that kept losing to a great team, the basketball equivalent of the late 1940s-early 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers vs. the Celtics’ New York Yankees. But as soon as I heard about Elgin’s retirement, I started listening to Chick Hearn’s broadcasts, and they won 33 in a row. So maybe I was the first ever True Laker Fan?

Looking back on my sports spectator career, I’m basically a front-runner. Is the local team going through tough times? Well, then, ehhhhhhhhh, I’m kind of busy. I mean, would George Costanza root for a hometown team that tends to lose more than it wins?

I don’t think so.

In contrast, are they on a historic hot streak, like the Lakers in 1971-72? Well, then, I’m there for you, baby!

Seriously, I figure that about 60% of the teams whose games I’ve listened to or watched with enough serious rooting interest that I would be disappointed for more than 10 seconds after they lost have won the games I paid attention to.

The 1972 Lakers went a record 69-13 in the regular season, swept the fine Chicago Bulls in the quarterfinals of the playoffs, survived the Milwaukee Bucks of Kareem and Oscar in the semis, and fairly easily dispatched 4-1 the Knicks in the Finals as, with Willis out injured, Wilt overwhelmed the offensively pesky Jerry Lucas. But Jerry got no pleasure from the Lakers’ historic victory, because he suddenly went cold after a great season and averaged only 20 PPG on dreadful .325 shooting.

The aging Lakers returned to the Finals in 1973, but got beat by superb team play of the Knicks.

At age 35 in his final 1973-74 season, West was finally washed up. I can recall watching a Laker game in which West was trying to come back from a long layoff from injury. He kept clanging brick after brick, so finally he was humiliatingly benched for most of the 4th quarter. Without the limping West, the Lakers rallied back and were down only 1 point with the ball at half court and about 3 seconds left. Coach Sharman put West back in, and at the buzzer he hit a running 22 footer for the win.

It was both pretty astonishing and pretty predictable. After all, Jerry was “Mr. Clutch.”

In West’s last season, the NBA started requiring their official scorers to finally record two defensive statistics, blocked shots and steals. Despite being old, decrepit, and injured, West immediately established the single game record with ten steals (the current NBA record is still only eleven), and averaged 2.6 steals per game while averaging only 31 minutes out of 48.

I can recall Laker announcer Chick Hearn explaining in 1972 or so that both Jerry West and he were the same height, 6’2″, but while Chick wore a 35″ sleeve on his sports coats, Jerry wore a 38″ sleeve, which is why he had so many steals. Personally, I’m 6’4” and wear a 34” sleeve. (Of course, West worked hugely hard to overcome the downsides of having long limbs. While his free throw percentage was .666 in his rookie year, it was .814 for his career.)

That and being a basketball genius — as well as all his steals, West also blocked a striking number of shots, many from behind on outside jumpers by guards being guarded by Gail Goodrich, which I’ve rarely seen since.

How many steals did West have in his prime? The announcers at the NBA All Star game in 1972 claimed that West was averaging almost 10 per game during the Lakers 41-5 first half run. The official NBA record is now Alvin Robertson’s 3.67 in 1987. In that All-Star game (a festive occasion when at least now it’s considered a faux pas to try hard on defense — the East scored 211 points in this year’s contest), West recorded 6 steals in 27 minutes, as well as scoring the winning basket over Walt Frazier at the buzzer:

Did West really average almost ten steals per game in 1972? Likewise, did Chamberlain really average some enormous number of blocks per game?

Keep in mind that the NBA no longer had a monopoly on basketball talent in the early 1970s. The upstart ABA was recruiting many of the best mid-sized stars like Julius Erving. Still, the NBA tended to sign the aircraft carriers like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It is said that video shows Wilt blocked 17 of Kareem’s shots in the six games of the 1972 NBA semi-finals. 2.8 blocks per game is not a huge number, but note that it’s of Kareem, whose skyhook is acknowledged to be almost impossible to block.

After retirement, West became the Laker’s coach for three seasons. His teams were quite successful, but their failure’s drove him crazy. He’s ask his players why in a particular situation they hadn’t done what was obvious to him to do, and they’d just stare at him blankly.

So Jerry quit as coach and became an executive resolved to choose players who wouldn’t frustrate him. In July 1996, he enjoyed his miracle month, signing giant free agent Shaquille O’Neale for a vast amount of money — because the Lakers have always been able to afford the giant talent from George Mikan to Wilt to Kareem to Shaq — and drafting 17 year old high school player Kobe Bryant, whom he pretty much stole from, IIRC, John Calipari.

Shaq and Kobe’s Lakers won three NBA titles and then, a decade later, Kobe’s Lakers won two more.

A more hidden side of West was that he was the one of the world’s best golfers in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Whenever the touring pros visited Los Angeles, big money bettors would arrange a match between West and the most famous golfers in the world at Jerry’s home club of Riviera. West was simply a better athlete than the best PGA Tour pros and could outdrive anybody other than maybe Jack Nicklaus. He could shoot as low as anybody.

West was tormented by the temptation to quit the NBA and join the PGA Tour. Eventually, though, he came to realize that while, perhaps, he could shoot 65 as often as anybody in the world, his volcanic temperament meant he might explode to a disastrous 82 while less sensational pros might, on an equally bad day, grind around to a 74, make the cut, collect a paycheck.

So, he decided to stick with basketball.