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It was the summer of 1969, and Jerry West couldn’t sleep.
He was one of the greatest basketball players on Earth, an athlete whose grace and drive had transported him from the dirt roads of rural West Virginia to the glitz of Los Angeles arenas.
And if that wasn’t cruel enough, he lost each championship to the same opponent: the smug, invincible, hated Boston Celtics. The 1969 series was tied 3-3 when they played the seventh game in Los Angeles. Despite West’s heroics, the Lakers lost, again, and there’s a photograph of him leaving the court in stunned defeat. He’s walking slowly, one foot in front of the other, shoulders squared. His hamstring bound in tape, his eyes sunken sockets — a prisoner on his way back to his cell. In his memoir, “West by West,” he captioned the photo: “Where do I go?”
West played so spectacularly well in that losing series, averaging nearly 38 points per game, that he was awarded the Finals M.V.P. — the first and only time the losing star has ever been so recognized. As a prize, the league gave him a brand-new Dodge Charger. He fantasized about blowing it up with dynamite. Read More
For any competitive athlete, losing would have been misery. But for Jerry West, a man who measured his childhood in beatings and his career in defeats, it was intolerable. “Every night I went to bed I thought about it,” he wrote of that summer. “Every night. Every goddamn night.”
Growing up poor in West Virginia, West was envious of his classmates’ Christmas presents and resentful of his watery soup dinners. His father, a bully and a tyrant, beat him mercilessly. His mother was a haunted, spectral figure. “I never learned what love was and am still not entirely sure I know today,” he wrote. When West was 13, a revered older brother, David, was killed in the Korean War. Shooting hoops late into the night, West imagined that if he made one more basket, it might bring David back.
West led his high school team to the state championship and could have gone to college anywhere he wanted. He chose West Virginia University, securing his status as a hometown hero in a state that often felt left behind.
In the N.B.A., West became a star who could shoot, pass, play defense and take a punch. He turned the Lakers into a force — but a stoppable force. In 1970, his team reached the Finals for a seventh time, only to lose — again — this time to the New York Knicks. They had another shot in the Finals two years later. West played badly, missing easy shots that he had made all his life. He turned to passing, and finally — — the Lakers prevailed. Jerry West was an N.B.A. champion.
He had a hard time enjoying it. “I played terrible basketball in the Finals,” he said years later. “I was playing so poorly that the team overcame me.”
Here’s how the world saw West: a Hall of Fame athlete with ferocious tenacity and grit who so reliably hit the big shots that he was nicknamed Mr. Clutch.
Here’s how West described himself: “A tormented, defiant figure who carries an angry, emotional chip on his shoulder and has a hole in his heart that nothing can ultimately fill.”
Karen, his wife of 46 years, said that when she and West were introduced, she thought he seemed like “the saddest man she had ever met.”
The morning after winning the title, a Lakers colleague found him brooding in his silent, dark office, alone but for a dimly lit lamp. “He was not in a good spot,” the colleague remembers.
Losing had made West miserable; now winning did, too. He quit and left the team that summer as he struggled with another bout of depression. “It was not only providing me with zero joy but also affecting — ruining, really — every aspect of my life,” he wrote. The Lakers team he built would win two more championships without him.
If West, with his anguish and his brilliance, had lived in ancient Greece, he might have become a constellation. In midcentury America, he became a logo. In 1969, the N.B.A. replaced its schlocky emblem with a new one featuring a silhouette of West midstride, basketball on his hip, shoulder angled for speed. As a bid for eternal life, it’s a good bet that more people would recognize the N.B.A. logo than they would Cassiopeia.
There he is, forever frozen in motion, sprinting away from his opponents as well as his demons, resplendent with the rarest of talents and kissed with the gift of immortality, but tortured, forever tortured, never able to savor the fruits of his singular life.
Sam Dolnick is a deputy managing editor for The Times. He wrote about Marianne Mantell, a pioneer of spoken-word audio, in last year’s The Lives They Lived issue.
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It was the summer of 1969, and Jerry West couldn’t sleep.
He was one of the greatest basketball players on Earth, an athlete whose grace and drive had transported him from the dirt roads of rural West Virginia to the glitz of Los Angeles arenas.
And if that wasn’t cruel enough, he lost each championship to the same opponent: the smug, invincible, hated Boston Celtics. The 1969 series was tied 3-3 when they played the seventh game in Los Angeles. Despite West’s heroics, the Lakers lost, again, and there’s a photograph of him leaving the court in stunned defeat. He’s walking slowly, one foot in front of the other, shoulders squared. His hamstring bound in tape, his eyes sunken sockets — a prisoner on his way back to his cell. In his memoir, “West by West,” he captioned the photo: “Where do I go?”
West played so spectacularly well in that losing series, averaging nearly 38 points per game, that he was awarded the Finals M.V.P. — the first and only time the losing star has ever been so recognized. As a prize, the league gave him a brand-new Dodge Charger. He fantasized about blowing it up with dynamite. Read More
For any competitive athlete, losing would have been misery. But for Jerry West, a man who measured his childhood in beatings and his career in defeats, it was intolerable. “Every night I went to bed I thought about it,” he wrote of that summer. “Every night. Every goddamn night.”
Growing up poor in West Virginia, West was envious of his classmates’ Christmas presents and resentful of his watery soup dinners. His father, a bully and a tyrant, beat him mercilessly. His mother was a haunted, spectral figure. “I never learned what love was and am still not entirely sure I know today,” he wrote. When West was 13, a revered older brother, David, was killed in the Korean War. Shooting hoops late into the night, West imagined that if he made one more basket, it might bring David back.
West led his high school team to the state championship and could have gone to college anywhere he wanted. He chose West Virginia University, securing his status as a hometown hero in a state that often felt left behind.
In the N.B.A., West became a star who could shoot, pass, play defense and take a punch. He turned the Lakers into a force — but a stoppable force. In 1970, his team reached the Finals for a seventh time, only to lose — again — this time to the New York Knicks. They had another shot in the Finals two years later. West played badly, missing easy shots that he had made all his life. He turned to passing, and finally — — the Lakers prevailed. Jerry West was an N.B.A. champion.
He had a hard time enjoying it. “I played terrible basketball in the Finals,” he said years later. “I was playing so poorly that the team overcame me.”
Here’s how the world saw West: a Hall of Fame athlete with ferocious tenacity and grit who so reliably hit the big shots that he was nicknamed Mr. Clutch.
Here’s how West described himself: “A tormented, defiant figure who carries an angry, emotional chip on his shoulder and has a hole in his heart that nothing can ultimately fill.”
Karen, his wife of 46 years, said that when she and West were introduced, she thought he seemed like “the saddest man she had ever met.”
The morning after winning the title, a Lakers colleague found him brooding in his silent, dark office, alone but for a dimly lit lamp. “He was not in a good spot,” the colleague remembers.
Losing had made West miserable; now winning did, too. He quit and left the team that summer as he struggled with another bout of depression. “It was not only providing me with zero joy but also affecting — ruining, really — every aspect of my life,” he wrote. The Lakers team he built would win two more championships without him.
If West, with his anguish and his brilliance, had lived in ancient Greece, he might have become a constellation. In midcentury America, he became a logo. In 1969, the N.B.A. replaced its schlocky emblem with a new one featuring a silhouette of West midstride, basketball on his hip, shoulder angled for speed. As a bid for eternal life, it’s a good bet that more people would recognize the N.B.A. logo than they would Cassiopeia.
There he is, forever frozen in motion, sprinting away from his opponents as well as his demons, resplendent with the rarest of talents and kissed with the gift of immortality, but tortured, forever tortured, never able to savor the fruits of his singular life.
Sam Dolnick is a deputy managing editor for The Times. He wrote about Marianne Mantell, a pioneer of spoken-word audio, in last year’s The Lives They Lived issue.
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