Jerry West, who has died aged 86, was a unique force in basketball for the better part of seven decades. A star for the Los Angeles Lakers for 14 years, not only is West still considered one of the top handful of players in National Basketball Association (NBA) history, but in his second career in management he built two separate dynastic Laker teams, turned around the struggling Memphis Grizzlies, and as a consultant played a part in the run of success of the Golden State Warriors. As if that were not enough, West was also the model for the NBA’s logo, a silhouette of him dribbling the ball in his left hand, which led to his enduring nickname, “The Logo”.
Great players often need more than one nickname to fully define them; the Los Angeles announcer Chick Hearn dubbed West “Mr Clutch”, after his penchant for making game-winning shots. Yet West’s individual talent was often diminished by his teams’ inability to clear the final hurdle. His most famous shot, a 60-footer that tied the New York Knicks at the buzzer in the 1970 NBA finals and sent the game into overtime, still wound up a Laker loss.
And no player took losing more intensely. “He never learned to lose,” wrote Jeff Coplon, in a profile titled The Man Who Loves Basketball Too Much, published in Men’s Journal in 1996. He was often regarded as a volatile, tightly wound man, who could be frustrated by imperfections in his own and others’ play.
West came by this obsession the hard way. He grew up poor in the hardscrabble West Virginia coal country, born in Cheylan, where his father, Howard, was a mine electrician and a machine operator for an oil company. His mother, Cecile Sue (nee Creasy), worked in a store. Jerry was a shy and sickly child, needing vitamin shots, and was kept from sports, so he began shooting basketballs alone at a hoop on the side of a neighbour’s barn. His father was abusive; Jerry spent much of his childhood with a loaded shotgun under his bed. In 1951 his brother David, nine years older, was killed in the Korean war, and for Jerry basketball became an obsession.
After failing in his first try to make his high school’s basketball team, a growth spurt to 6ft led to him starting the next year, and he became a star in his third season, taking East Bank high school to the state championship; every year thereafter,until the school closed in 1999, on the anniversary of that game, East Bank was renamed West Bank for a day.
In his first year at the University of West Virginia the team won 26 games, and lost two; in his second they lost the national championship to the University of California 71-70, although West was chosen the tournament’s “most valuable player” (MVP). The next year, ranked second in the nation, they were upset in the tournament by New York University. In the 1960 NBA draft, West was selected second overall by the Lakers, after Cincinnati’s Oscar Robertson. That summer the California coach Pete Newell chose both players as the core of the US Olympic team; in Rome, West and Robertson led them to eight wins, and the gold medal.
West joined the Lakers for the 1960-61 season. His teammate Elgin Baylor heard his southern accent and dubbed him Tweety Bird, but the name that stuck was the hillbilly-sounding “Zeke, from Cabin Creek”, Cabin Creek being just down the road apiece from Cheylan.
With Baylor’s ability to play above the basket, and West’s shooting, the pair were dubbed “Mr Inside and Mr Outside” in homage to the army football greats Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis. West, now listed at 6ft 3in, but in fact almost two inches taller, with long arms and fine jumping ability, could score, pass, rebound and defend. But he had an innate sense of the sport. “It’s a game of quickness,” he said, “and how your mind is wired.” And he was tough; his nose was broken 14 times.
He and Baylor made LA the best team in the NBA’s west. But they could not beat Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics, falling to them six times in the championship finals. In 1969, limping from an injured hamstring, West scored 42 points in the deciding game, and repeated his college feat of being named MVP from a losing team, the only one in NBA history. Russell once said his greatest wish was to “see Jerry happy”. In 1970 the Lakers added Wilt Chamberlain as center, and after losing to the Knicks, came back to finally win a championship in 1972, with a team that won a record 33 straight games.
West retired two years later. He transferred his obsessiveness to golf; at one point shooting a course-record of 28 on the front nine at Bel-Air Club in LA, but finishing the round with a 65. In 1976, the Lakers coaxed him back as coach. He improved the team to the league’s best record in his first season, but he bristled at the selfishness and sloppiness of the players and after three seasons moved to scouting.
He took over as Lakers’ general manager in 1982, winning four titles with the “Showtime” team led by Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy. Then he built a second dynasty around Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. Only Boston’s Red Auerbach had managed to build successive dynasties; no former star player ever had. But a rift with the coach Phil Jackson led to West’s departure for Memphis in 2000.
He retired in 2007, and in 2011 published an autobiography: West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life (with Jonathan Coleman). That year he joined the Warriors’ executive board, and titles followed in 2015 and 2017. He publicly offered to return to the Lakers, who were rebuilding their management; instead he went to the Los Angeles Clippers.
West’s first marriage, to his college sweetheart Martha Jane Kane, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Karen Bua, whom he married in 1978, and their two sons, Ryan and Johnnie, and by three sons, David, Mark and Michael, from his first marriage.
• Jerry Alan West, basketball player and executive, born 28 May 1938; died 12 June 2024
