The thing about sports and athletes is that their performances remain entirely unscripted. Unpredictable. No guarantees. This thought occurred with reports that Jerry West, a veritable poster boy for basketball excellence, has died at 86.
In his 14 pro seasons, West was an NBA All-Star 14 times. His Los Angeles Lakers made the playoffs each of those years and West literally came to embody the entire league—for a long time, we’ve known that is his silhouette on the NBA’s official logo—reliably stupendous, especially at the most crucial moments. He was known as Mr. Clutch.
Yet he played on only one NBA championship team despite his exceptional resume. And I was there during an exceedingly rare moment—especially atypical because Newsday rarely sent me on a pro basketball assignment—when West briefly went from hoops superman to a Clark Kent disguise. A fallible human.
That was during the 1972 playoff semifinals. The Lakers, who that season had won a then-record 33 consecutive games, were struggling mightily against the Milwaukee Bucks. In the series-opening 21-point Lakers loss, West—a career 47-percent shooter; a jump-shot master—made only 4 of 19 field goals. All layups.
“Kids of any age,” he lamented after the game, “should be able to shoot better than we did”—27 percent attempts converted by the team; a mere 21 percent by West. The Lakers won the next two games, but in the fourth, West missed 14 of 23 shots (31 percent) during another loss. And with a post-game shrug, the flummoxed West, who somehow couldn’t find the hoop with a search warrant, muttered, “God heal my jump shot.”
An anomaly, that. Though quickly overcome. The Lakers wound up winning the series and the championship final against the New York Knicks. And West, by the way, had lent a vast contribution to his team’s offense with a team-leading 8.3 assists per game during the Bucks series. So it was impossible to judge him guilty of dereliction based on the unforeseen reality of his sickly jump shot.
Still, that series hardly fit the West narrative of consistent brilliance that he carried beyond his playing days to coaching and front-office work. More to the point, it was an example of what can—and occasionally does—happen in the quirky universe of sports.
When the Lakers moved to L.A. from Minneapolis, having just used their No. 1 pick in the 1960 draft on West, I was in eighth grade, living in The Valley, so that was my team. West already was a widely recognizable star, the best player on the University of West Virginia team that was 1959 NCAA tournament runner-up. (A close-but-no-cigar result that would become a recurring, frustrating experience for West.)
On our playgrounds then—and despite the fact that televised NBA games were uncommon and we were left to visualize the Lakers through the voice pictures of radio’s frenetic Chick Hearn—our models to mimic were Elgin Baylor and West.
Baylor could defy gravity, the NBA’s first aerial showman (Julius Erving before there was a Julius Erving; Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan) with a hang-in-the-air jumper. Also on the Lakers then was West’s predecessor as West Virginia hero, a guy with a more picturesque name, Hot Rod Hundley. But it was West who was the model of perfection with his unerring line-drive jump shot, his knack for rebounding, passing and octopus-arm defense. We mostly wanted to be Jerry West.
For that 1972 playoff series years later, he was 33, in his 11th season, still at his best. During the ’71-‘72 regular season, he had averaged 25.8 points and a league-leading 9.7 assists per game. So it was a bit of a shock—bewildering, really—to witness West’s transitory descent into mediocrity.
Bottom line: His jump shot quickly was healed. He finally got his championship ring. But foregone conclusions are not the point in what was his world.