Jerry West: Not A Plumber

Born in 1938, Jerry West grew up in Chelyan, West Virginia, in a dysfunctional family within a hard-bitten coal mining community. Young Jerry developed a knack and a liking for basketball. He received encouragement and good instruction and began climbing a ladder. West's high school team were state champions. Many colleges recruited him, and he elected to stay in-state and attend West Virginia University. He became the biggest star before or since in a then-rising WVU program. In West's junior year the Mountaineers were NCAA runners-up, probably the biggest sports achievement in the school's or state's history. West won a gold medal with USA Basketball at the 1960 Olympic Games, then went on to a long and celebrated career in the NBA. He didn't completely leave West Virginia behind--he kept a summer home there and did a lot behind the scenes to support WVU--but that bouncing ball led him around the world and to levels of success that boy in Chelyan couldn't have imagined. 

Being born and raised in West Virginia has never been the easiest thing, but there were rays of hope in the post-WW2 years. The U.S. economy was riding high, the coal industry was fueling it, and the labor movement gave coal miners more power and agency, a better claim to middle-class status and the American dream, than at any other time. Jerry West represents that post-war moment. (Even though he left the state to pursue success; many others did too.) My father, born in 1939 and raised in somewhat similar circumstances, who attended WVU one year behind Jerry, utterly revered him. My whole family, and the whole state as far as I can tell, felt much the same; I never remember hearing anyone speak a word against Jerry West. 

Drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1960, West entered the NBA at the same time as his great rival Oscar Robertson. The two of them changed the sport dramatically. No one playing the guard position had ever scored like them, either in sheer number of points or in efficiency. West and Robertson made great advances in the mid-range game, in the ways for a player to create his own shot within the flow of play.

In his playing career West was frustrated for many years, coming close to a league championship but repeatedly falling just short. He's more associated with losing in the Finals six times than with finally winning in 1972. That's unfortunate, but it fits West's personality--he dreaded failure even more than he hungered for success. The 1972 Lakers team was one of the very greatest ever. Assembled through trades, it was a brilliant job of blending star players and their egos. 

Along the way West became not only a brilliant practitioner of the NBA game but a brilliant student and observer of it, including the psychology, the care and feeding of egos. After retiring as a player, West took a short unhappy turn as the Lakers' head coach before finding a niche as a front-office executive, where he would engineer great trades and win many more titles. All told, he would spend 40 years associated with the Lakers.

In the end, a rift grew between West and the Laker organization. One thing about Jerry West: he never forgot a defeat or a slight. The last couple of years of his life were marked by his protests against media portrayals of himself or public comments about his generation of ballplayers. (On his podcast a while back, J.J. Redick dismissed early NBA players, of West's era and before, as "cabdrivers and plumbers." Some of those old-timers did have day jobs, of course, in the offseason, by financial necessity, in the long collective effort of building the NBA into the juggernaut that now pays J.J. Redick so handsomely. Here is West venting his fury on Redick as well as a piece of gum .) 

A digression: In my family's lore there is an episode in which my father introduced my mother to Jerry West, and I've spent a little time trying to nail it down. I assumed this happened on WVU campus while Mom and Dad were dating, but instead it was 10 years into their marriage. It was at an NBA game in 1973, the Lakers visiting the Baltimore Bullets. Apparently my eight-year-old self was there, but I have no memory of it, certainly not of meeting Jerry West. All Mom remembers is being star-struck; it sounds like an occasion for Dad to flex a little bit, to impress his girl by rubbing shoulders with a star. 

Jerry West died on June 12. Twelve days later, amid some controversy, J.J. Redick was named the head coach of the Lakers.