Mr. Clutch was often Mr. Clench
Jerry West didn't find happiness too easily despite an NBA career that was seemingly filled with it.
Jerry West is dead?
Ha ha, that’s a good one. A real knee slapper.
Next thing you’ll tell me is that Red Auerbach is gone. Or that Wilt Chamberlain has left us.
You can’t fool me.
I know the news that broke yesterday. The item that said West, who literally still IS the NBA, passed away at age 86.
Don’t believe a word of it.
And I’m not in denial. In fact, just the opposite.
Some men may physically leave this Earth, but some live on, because they’ve left an indelible mark in their field.
Jerry West is no more dead today than he was yesterday, because to say so is to say that the NBA is dead.
I’m not at all demeaning his physical loss to his friends and family and to those he touched (and there are many!). That’s not my intent. The grief is quite real.
But for the rest of us, who never met the man, there’s no killing Jerry West.
First, as a player, West epitomized why a player’s record in the championship round should never be used as a way to measure his legacy.
West’s Lakers made the NBA Finals nine times and came away winners just once, near the end of his career. Those damn Celtics.
Thank goodness that 1-8 mark isn’t held against him. Yet somehow, the lack of rings was always used against Wilt when comparing him to Bill Russell.
Jerry West was called Mr. Clutch for a reason, the Finals be damned.
The 6’3” guard from West (!) Virginia annually upped his game when it was time for spring basketball. His 29.1 PPG average in 153 playoff games was two points higher than his career regular season average, and while two points might seem insignificant, this includes his brutalization of the Baltimore Bullets in 1965, when West averaged 46.3 PPG in that six-game series. No less than 13 times did West average 30+ PPG in a playoff series.
And look, mom! No three-pointers!
West scored from everywhere and anywhere—from his patented jump shots to slashing to the hoop. If he wasn’t scoring himself, he was dishing off to someone else who did. And there was quite a menu of choices. Elgin Baylor. Wilt. Gail Goodrich.
Which led, of course, to West’s silhouette image being used as the official logo of the NBA. Another way that he’ll live on.
Losing the “big one” couldn’t diminish West’s on-court wizardry. He remains the only player to win the NBA Finals MVP while playing for the runners-up and he was named MVP of the 1959 NCAA tournament despite the Mountaineers dropping the championship contest.
You want defense from your great players? West was a first team All-Defensive player in the NBA four times in a row.
I don’t know if there was any correlation, but maybe Jerry West’s veins had ice in them in the playoffs because of his childhood.
Abused by his father, the young West took to sleeping with a shotgun under his bed for fear that he’d have to use it in self-defense against his old man.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, at 15 West lost his older brother David in the Korean War.
West Virginia is hunting and fishing country, and Jerry did that, but a basketball hoop that a neighbor nailed to his storage shed fascinated West as a teen. He would spend hours shooting a basketball at that hoop, from every conceivable angle.
Mr. Clutch was truly born.
Yet what separates Jerry West from his contemporaries and the great players who followed him was his second career as a basketball executive.
West could have not played a single minute in the NBA, but he would have been a Hall of Famer anyway for what he did in the front office of mainly the Lakers, followed by shorter stints with the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and, most recently, the Los Angeles Clippers.
But before moving upstairs, West gave coaching a try, like so many former players do. His three years on the Lakers sidelines were OK, but he was more enamored with the behind-the-scenes aspects of an NBA team, i.e. scouting, drafting, etc.
After scouting for the Lakers for three years, working under GM Bill Sharman, West replaced his mentor in 1982. That launched an 18-year run in the Lakers’ C-suite, during which time the team won six championships, when they weren’t losing the Finals to those damn Celtics.
The trio of moves that defined West’s GM career with the Lakers—trading for the rights to Kobe Bryant in 1996, trading for Shaquille O’Neal that same year and hiring Phil Jackson as coach in 1999—don’t do justice to all the smaller, more under-the-radar tweaks that West made to keep the Lakers’ roster at elite status for so many years.
Then it was off to Memphis in 2002 to become GM of the “grislies,” a franchise that had just finished their first year in Tennessee after six failed years in Vancouver.
Why?
Why would someone of Jerry West’s pedigree do such a thing?
"After being a part of the Laker's success for so many years, I have always wondered how it would be to build a winning franchise that has not experienced much success. I want to help make a difference,” he explained.
The Grizzlies weren’t the Lakers in so many ways, but West did alright—essentially rescuing the franchise from being sold again and turning the Grizzlies into yearly playoff contenders. He won Executive of the Year in 2004, the same year that Hubie Brown, brought out of mothballs by West to coach, captured Coach of the Year guiding the Grizzlies.
After Memphis, the 69-year-old West slipped into what was thought to be retirement in 2007, only to re-emerge four years later, turning into the NBA’s Yoda, functioning as a board member with the Warriors (along with minority ownership) from 2011-17, followed by a consultant role with the Clippers (2017-to his death).
Winning followed him wherever he went.
Was Jerry West a playmaking guard or a shooting guard?
Yes.
He was also gifted with long arms, which helped make him one of the best rebounding guards in league history. His assist numbers increased the longer he was in the league, all the way to 9.7 APG in 1972 when the Lakers finally won the whole thing, which demonstrated that as teams fixated on stopping him, West figured out how to feed his teammates even better than before.
Can you make the case that Jerry West was the best player in NBA history?
That might be a tall task, but when you combine what he did on the court with what he did off it, he was without question one of the top 3 figures in league history.
Oh and did you know that West’s other nickname on the Lakers was Tweety Bird?
That was given to him by Baylor, who often made fun of West’s high-pitched Appalachian accent.
"Rumors are safe with you, Tweety Bird. You pass them on, but nobody can understand you."
Yet Jerry West wasn’t necessarily satisfied or even happy for very much of his life. The child abuse he suffered at the hands of his father did a number on him, and his competitive fire, which manifested itself after every loss, sucked a lot out of him as well. West admitted that his hatred of losing led to the dissolution of his first marriage to his HS sweetheart, because after losses he was a bear to live with, sometimes jumping into the car and driving for hours away from home.
Legendary Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn once said, "(West) took a loss harder than any player I've ever known. He would sit by himself and stare into space. A loss just ripped his guts out."
West described his game with similar darkness, despite all that he accomplished.
“Very rarely was I satisfied with how I played."
I hope he found happiness eventually. It’s clear that those he touched found it as a result.