(Editor’s note: Welcome back to The Athletic NBA 75. We’re re-running our top 40 players to count down every day from Sept. 8-Oct. 17, the day before the opening of the 2022-23 NBA season. This piece was first published on Feb. 1, 2022.)
On the east side of Chick Hearn Court, between the statues of a rim-shaking Shaquille O’Neal and a sky-hooking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, outside the building formerly known as the Staples Center, there is a granite memorial that summarizes Jerry West’s incredible basketball legacy in 87 words.
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It can be found beneath the statue of West, a bronze rendition of his iconic pose that sits among so many other Lakers legends in the “Star Plaza” where 10 local sporting legends have been honored. West’s friend, the late Elgin Baylor, is gracefully soaring toward the rim nearby. Magic Johnson is directing traffic on the break. And then there’s West — eyes and body darting to the right as he drives, the off-arm up to ward off all comers, and the ball firmly in his left — making you feel like he’s in his prime again.
“After nearly five decades as a player, coach and team executive, Jerry West is one of the true icons and legends that the game of basketball has ever known. His fearless style of play and emotional, ‘wear his heart on his sleeve’ demeanor, made him a beloved figure to Lakers fans. One of the game’s all-time great players, Jerry was known during his playing days in the 1960s and early ’70s as Mr. Clutch for his propensity for hitting huge game-winning shots and his grace under pressure.”
The brief breakdown is a veritable synopsis of why West lands at No. 14 on The Athletic’s list of the top 75 players. Yet nearly a half-century after he retired, there’s an unfortunate and unwelcome addendum to his story that he’d like to share: He wishes he could do it all over again — in a different jersey.
“One disappointing thing (about my career) is that my relationship with the Lakers is horrible,” West, a Clippers consultant since June 2017, told The Athletic. “I still don’t know why. And at the end of the day, when I look back, I say, ‘Well, maybe I should have played somewhere else instead of with the Lakers, where someone would have at least appreciated how much you give, how much you cared.’”
It’s late November 2021 — more than 83 years after West was born into poverty in Chelyan, W. Va., 47 years after his playing days came to an end and 10-plus years after this very statue was built — and the man who has always been an open book is living up to his reputation yet again.
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Anyone who knows West well knows his tendency for starting with the tougher topics first. To wit: The man’s autobiography, one in which he was brutally honest about everything from his childhood abuse from his father to his lifelong battles with depression, was titled “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life.” And this conversation, one arranged with the sole purpose of celebrating his remarkable playing career for our “NBA 75” project by reflecting on it all, was no different.
Just 36 seconds in, right about the time I mention how I spent the afternoon watching his old highlights on YouTube to get a reminder of all he had done, he wastes no time in discussing his toxic relationship with the Lakers.
“I played for the guys I played with and the fans,” he said. “I didn’t play for a franchise.”
You can’t talk about Jerry West without the Lakers being in the same sentence, of course. Between his 14-year playing career and his front-office tenure in which he was the architect of five Lakers titles, one could argue that there has never been a more impactful Laker.
But those memories of his Lakers past just aren’t the same anymore because of his Lakers present, one where the dynamic between the two old friends, so to speak, has devolved so publicly and painfully in recent years. His frustration, unmistakable even in this loud and crowded room, surfaces in full force approximately 10 minutes into this conversation that lasted nearly 40 minutes.
“They’re in complete denial,” he said of the Lakers. “It’s insulting to me that I’m not …”
He stops briefly.
“I’m not seeking any apologies from no one — no one — ever,” he said. “I just said to myself, ‘How petty can this be?’”
Petty enough, it seems, that it makes it hard to even bother going down memory lane.
Jerry West at his statue dedication ceremony in 2011. (Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty Images).You’d think the lifetime of hoops accomplishments would be enough to negate all the negativity that has surfaced between West and the Lakers in recent years. He came their way as a shy, impoverished 22-year-old, one still reeling from his rough and unrelenting upbringing.
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Fourteen seasons, 25,192 points, 6,238 assists and 5,366 rebounds later, he had become one of the greatest players the game has ever seen. According to StatMuse, only West, Oscar Robertson, John Havlicek, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James have reached those 25,000/6,000/5,000 thresholds.
“How many people have a statue made to honor them? One in a billion?” late Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss said at the statue unveiling on Feb. 17, 2011. “Well, Jerry is certainly one of those.”
He is one of 11 players in NBA history to have 10 first-team All-NBA selections. One of only six players — along with Wilt Chamberlain, Tiny Archibald, James, Russell Westbrook and James Harden — to have led the league in scoring (1969-70) and assists (1971-72). He made four consecutive All-Defensive First Team appearances (1970-73). Had nine NBA Finals appearances, won one title.
The only player to win an NBA Finals MVP award while playing for the losing team, when West averaged 37.9 points, 7.4 assists and 4.7 rebounds against Boston in the seven-game series in 1969. The NBA record for highest scoring average in a single playoff series (46.3 points in the 1965 Western Division finals against Baltimore; six games). A playoff scoring average of 29.13 points, which was the best of all time when he retired (it has since been eclipsed by Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson and Kevin Durant). When he retired after the 1973-74 season, his 4,457 points were the most in postseason history, a record he held until Kareem surpassed it in 1985.
The list goes on.
His career as a Lakers executive was perhaps even more remarkable, with West considered by many to be the best talent evaluator the game has ever seen. His fingerprints were all over five of the Lakers’ titles, with West heading the front office during the “Showtime” era and the Kobe-Shaq years of dominance that followed (1982 to 2000; titles in ’82, ’85, ’87, ’88 and 2000). He even coached the Lakers for three seasons (1976-79, with a 145-101 record; a Western Conference semifinals berth in ’77 was the peak of his playoff coaching success).
There’s a strong argument to be made, in other words, that West is the greatest Laker of them all. And along the way, he said, he had “an incredible working relationship with Jerry Buss.” But in these past few years, as West continued to make his mark by way of adviser roles with Golden State and the Clippers, the divide between him and the franchise he played such a monumental role in elevating has grown so wide that he says it will never be bridged.
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The reasons vary, and the tricky truth is that neither side is willing to divulge all of the private details as to why. But there’s more than enough in the public sector to get a good sense of what happened here.
In the summer of 2017, just as West was leaving the Warriors and deciding what would come next, he said on “The Dan Patrick Show” that he would have liked to have ended his NBA career where it began — with the Lakers. Instead, they showed no interest in bringing him aboard, and the Clippers, in turn, reaped the benefits when he came their way.
Two summers later, West’s oldest son, Ryan, parted ways with the Lakers after spending a decade in a variety of scouting roles (he now works for the Detroit Pistons). West declined to discuss the part Ryan played in the Lakers’ dynamic in the interview with The Athletic but told NBA.com in October that he believes he’s the reason his son was let go.
It only grew uglier from there. In December 2020, a voicemail surfaced from months before in which West can be heard telling an associate of then-free agent Kawhi Leonard (before he signed with the Clippers) that the Lakers were a “shit show.” The friction between the Lakers and Clippers has extended well beyond West in recent years, with no moment more memorable than the emails in which Lakers owner Jeanie Buss referred to Clippers owner Steve Ballmer as “Ballz” while discussing his pursuit of a new arena in Inglewood.
Then in April, after Jeanie Buss left West off her list of top five important Lakers of all time on the “All The Smoke” podcast, West fired back on the “Hoop Du Jour” podcast by calling it “one of the most offensive things I’ve ever heard in my life.” Buss had named Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe, Magic, James and her ex-fiancé and Lakers legend Phil Jackson. Back and forth, in the headlines and the hallways, the acrimony just kept building.
For West, though, the final straw came when the Lakers repealed the lifetime season tickets he said the late Dr. Buss had promised him so many years ago. Without any warning or explanation, his wife, Karen, received a text message from the Lakers last season informing her that the family’s seats for their games would no longer be granted.
“It was a cold phone text to my wife,” West recalled. “No one had the nerve to call me, but that’s how petty they are, OK? And I love the Lakers, OK? I love to see them do well. It’s great for basketball. I’m proud of everything that happened when I was there. I’m proud of everything that happened when I wasn’t there — the positives.
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“But sometimes you feel like you’re discarded, like a piece of trash. And there’s a couple of people over there — not Jeanie — but there’s a couple of people over there that, uh … I don’t get it. I don’t. … I always had a great relationship with Jeanie — at least I thought I did. I don’t know where it is now.”
Just as the retelling of it all starts to rile West up, he stops just short of naming names. Still, as he’s well aware, the Lakers’ circle that surrounds Buss is a small one. A message has been sent.
When asked if there was any hope for reconciliation, West shook his head.
“No, it’s too late; it’s too late,” he said. “I don’t need to do that, OK? I really don’t need (it). It’s just (bothersome) how people change so much. And I don’t understand it, but it’s fine. It’s fine.”
Jeanie Buss was presented with West’s extensive comments by The Athletic and chose not to respond. And so, it seems, West’s resentment will remain.
West’s Lakers fell to Bill Russell’s Celtics six times in the ’60s. (Bettmann / Getty Images)There has been some well-deserved joy in West’s basketball experience. It takes him a little while to get to the more positive parts of his story as he retells it, what with all those Lakers grievances to share and all. But eventually, as he settles in and starts to sift through the greater meaning of it all, he starts to smile.
As West has grown older, he has come to this realization: It’s the respect of his playing peers — not the Lakers — that means more than anything.
For example, on that day when his statue was unveiled in 2011, the caliber of players who chose to attend the celebration in his honor spoke volumes about his reputation among the playing greats. Magic, Kareem, Baylor, Bill Russell, Shaq and Bill Walton — to name a few — were all there. That’s the kind of stuff that matters most to West now.
So imagine his delight late last year, when Russell, the Celtics legend whose teams took six titles away from West’s Lakers in the 1960s, sent him a heartfelt note about this very truth:
“The greatest honor a man can have is the respect and friendship of his peers. You have that more than any man I know. If I could have one wish granted, it would be that you would always be happy. Bill Russell.”
Said West, who shared the story of Russell’s message and later shared it via text, “There’s something uplifting (in) it, for me to hear this and read it. It was pretty special. Today, in my life, it was probably one of the most meaningful things I’ve read from someone who I have great respect for. ”
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Those two men, perhaps more than any other, represented that magical era. Russell’s Celtics downed West’s Lakers in the NBA Finals in 1962, ’63, ’65, ’66, ’68 and ’69. West’s lone title came against the Knicks in 1972, when he averaged 19.8 points, 8.8 assists and four rebounds in the five-game series. Still, it’s his 1-8 series record in the NBA Finals that — Lakers relationship aside — will always make it hard for him to look back fondly on his career.
“To win (the Finals) only once is probably something that haunts me to this day; it does,” West said. “I feel like I let the city down. I let myself down. And most of all, I felt like I let the people I played with down, regardless of how I played.
“I always blamed it on me. I’m still very much the same way, self-critical to a fault. I’m not a fan of myself, which is a story of its own. Self-esteem — I don’t have a lot of self-esteem. And it’s just something where everyone says, ‘Well, you should grow out of this.’ Well, I haven’t. I used to say to myself all the time, ‘What more can you do?’
“There has to be something more you can do. And it wasn’t. And it’s one of those things where I wish that I would have appreciated some of the incredible times I had as a player, some of the accolades I had as a player.”
West is the first to admit that he should have found a way to cherish the good times more. Yet as we discussed the many disappointments in his basketball life, and as I admitted that it was hard to hear him take such a grim view of it all considering his incredible accomplishments, he admitted that there was a blissful moment that stood above the rest: the 1960 Olympic gold-medal run with Team USA in Rome.
He was less than a month away from the start of his NBA career back then, with California coach Pete Newell leading the way and the great Oscar Robertson finishing as the leading scorer (17.1 points per game). West, who had been so stunned when all those recruiters showed up on his doorstep to make their college pitch, was a star for West Virginia at the time who would average 14.1 points (third on the USA team). They went 8-0 overall, with an average margin of victory of 42.4 points that would eventually land the entire team in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame.
Yet even this achievement came with a deeper, darker subtext. West’s 20-year-old brother, David, had been killed a decade before while serving in the Korean War. And that, more than anything, served as motivation to succeed on the world’s biggest basketball stage as a way of honoring his memory.
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“Probably my happiest as a player was winning a gold medal as an amateur,” West said. “I was so happy. Nothing like this had ever occurred before, where an amateur team had ever won a tournament to get into the (Olympics). You’re young, naive, and I was unbelievably nationalistic because my brother had gotten killed in Korea.
“With all the turmoil going on in the world, the threat of nuclear war, racism at its worst — everything was going on. And even though you were young, and you don’t pay as much attention when you’re young, it was a really significant moment in my life.”
To watch West walk the NBA sidelines these days is to be reminded that his impact remains. Before a recent game in Los Angeles between the Clippers and West’s old Warriors squad, Draymond Green stopped his pregame routine to say hello and catch up for a few minutes.
Fans who know him as “The Logo” — that unwelcomed title that came his way in 1969 when a picture of West became the league’s brand — stop him for selfies and even autographs. He’s a gracious relic.
West said he’s humbled that people still know him. After all, this is a far cry from the basketball world that he once dominated.
Long before the league became an $8 billion-a-year venture in which stars make upwards of $40 million per season, West made a measly $15,000 during his rookie campaign (1960-61) and never made more than $275,000 in a single season. They took commercial flights on the road, played occasional back-to-back-to-back sets and — get this — had to work in the offseason to make ends meet.
No, really. Ask your grandparents about it. Or maybe your great-grandparents.
Picture this reality from those summers in the early 1960s: West, Baylor and various other Lakers players working for — wait for it — Great Western Savings & Loan. Beyond the extra check that came with the job, West said, there was a team-building element that came along with the side hustle.
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“There were three or four players who worked with them,” West remembered. “The president there, he’d send us out to visit escrow companies and stuff like that. … It wasn’t very much money, but at least it would help get you through the summer.
“We were so thankful because I wouldn’t even know how to (make the money work). Here I am starting an ascending career in a city that cared nothing about basketball at that time. It was one of the most awkward periods in my life. I was still really shy and everything, but being around those guys was like a blessing in disguise because they constantly would be encouraging me and laughing and making fun of me all the time.”
The job, he said, was to recruit new customers by way of their basketball brand.
“They’ll give you five or six escrow companies in Southern California, particularly the west side of town, and you’d go out and visit with those people and go and talk, get to know them and just tell them that you’re involved with Great Western,” he said. “I was always hoping they’d ask me a question, so they could at least start a conversation. It was a huge learning experience for me.”
But nothing could ever get his juices flowing like the day job — the game itself. He still watches ever so closely, forming strong opinions not only about the Clippers team that he’s paid handsomely to evaluate but the rest of the league, as well.
He still fumes after losses and moves on quickly from the wins. And even with his frustrations about the Lakers, this much is clear: He appreciates the part they played in his one-of-a-kind basketball tale.
“I love the competition,” said West, who had his No. 44 retired by the Lakers in 1983. “Coming to games as an executive, I had the same habits I did as a player. I’d go home and take a nap. And I was privileged enough that we were able to acquire some of the most incredible names in basketball.
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“You look at the franchise, and you say to yourself, ‘My gosh, the Laker franchise (is unparalleled).’ You look at all those numbers retired. Does any team have the volume of truly great players? Great, great players.”
And West, no matter the state of his relationship with the Lakers, will always be among them.
Career NBA stats: G: 932, Pts.: 27.0, Reb.: 5.8, Ast.: 6.7, FG%: 47.4, FT%: 81.4, Win Shares: 162.6, PER: 22.9
The Athletic NBA 75 Panel points: 885 | Hollinger GOAT Points: 329.5
Achievements: 12-time All-NBA, 14-time All-Star, NBA champ (’72), Finals MVP (’69), Scoring champ (’70), Assists champ (’72), Hall of Fame (’80, ’10 — ’60 Olympic team), NBA 35th Anniversary team (’81), NBA at 50 (’96), NBA 75th Anniversary team (’21)
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
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