[In 1966, Jerry West wasn’t yet the NBA logo. But he was already one of the league’s big names. Now, imagine that four years earlier, you wrote an article for SPORT Magazine that declared West will never make it in the NBA. He’s too fragile, and the other players are too big and strong. That’s the scenario behind this 1966 mea culpa from writer Arnold Hano. He answers his critics with humor for his bone-headed prediction and, though his article is a little long for the average attention span in 2024, Hano provides a nice slice of 1960s NBA life. The article was published in the April 1966 issue of SPORT Magazine.]
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Anybody know a good effigy-maker, cheap?
My time has run out. Back in March of 1962, in SPORT, I wrote one of my most perishable pieces, an article on Jerry West. In it, I predicted West would not be playing much pro ball, if any, five years hence. I said he just didn’t have the physical requirements to hold up in the NBA meat grinder. I said he would either be out of the league, running a sporting goods store in Chelyan, West Virginia, or else sitting on the bench, swathed in bandages, good for five or six minutes a ballgame, at best.
And I said if I was wrong, you, dear readers, could burn me in effigy. I was wrong about Jerry West. I’ve got a year to go on my prophecy, but, well, I’ll be wrong then, so I might as well get it over with.
It isn’t a world record. I’ve been wrong before. I picked Goliath to stop David, and the Joker to take Batman within two episodes. Heck, I bet every shekel on the Czar.
Not that I have to tell you I’m wrong about West. For four years now, you’ve been telling me. Take that letter in the May 1965 SPORT, from one Bob Baker, who resides in Sepulveda, California (that’s not a town, that’s a food supplement):
“Three years ago, Arnold Hano stated that if, in five years, Jerry West was still playing at his remarkable pace, then he (Hano) would allow himself to be ‘burned in effigy.’ Well, as of Feb. 6, Jerry was third in scoring as well as fifth or better in all other departments.
“So, get ready, Mr. Hano. In two years, it will be my personal privilege to light the match.”
This was not the only generous offer. I heard from Baker, and from the butchers and candlestick makers as well. Few things I have written have ever brought so large, so magnanimous, and unanimous a response. Offers have swamped me. Matches, bunsen burners, acetylene torches, lighter fluid, flint. You’ve been too much, and I want to take this opportunity, in public, to thank each and every one of you for your generosity. All I have to do, apparently, is hold still while the jolly bonfire is kindled. Permit me then, besides a final meal (of my words), a brief meditation with the ghost of Reverend Naismith and other gods of basketball. You know, pray now, fry later.
As you can shrewdly tell, I’m bitter. Behind this jocular air is a man burned once too often. Beneath my cool facade is a hot collar, if that is physiologically possible.
I really didn’t mind Goliath blowing his fight. After all, we had guarantees from both boys there be no hidden weapons, and suddenly out comes this little punk with his rubber band.
But, dammit, Jerry West! A frail undernourished lad, with a much-broken nose, susceptibility to colds, flu, and sinusitis, a tendency—nay, an obsession—to insert his skinny frame beneath the muscle and lard of a Wilt Chamberlain or a Wayne Embry, a seeming touch of self-destructiveness. How was it possible he’d last?
Recently, I took my problem to the Los Angeles Sports Arena. I asked Jerry West how come he was still alive and kicking, and incidentally leading the NBA in scoring at that moment. How come in the 1965-66 season he suffered a painful siege of shin splints, a bad cold, stomach trouble, how come Bill Russell had stuck a long bony finger in his eye—how come with this luck, he’d managed to play in 55 of the Lakers’ 56 games thus far?
Even missing that one game was a freak. Russell’s exploring of West’s eyeball for a basketball occurred in the yearly All-Star game, just an exhibition, glamorous, of course, but meaningless in the standings. West could have sat out that one; he had his shin splints and a bad cold. But he didn’t, and Russell stabbed Jerry’s eye, and Jerry had to miss the next game while doctors fretted whether he’d suffered a detached retina.
Detached—or torn—retinas are minor injuries. If you like the dark. A teammate of West’s back at West Virginia University, suffered a detached retina and lost the sight of the eye. Others lose the eye.
This, however, was simply a bruised cornea, and Jerry was back in action a little more red-eyed than usual—his eyes suffer unduly from smoky arenas—squinting through a watery fog at the basket up in San Francisco and popping in his 35 points.
Why? Didn’t he know he’d been hit? Didn’t he know he wasn’t built to play this game? Or was he trying to make a fool of me? A silly occupation, and redundant. It’s been done before.
Jerry West is a polite, 27-year-old, and very likely the nicest, pleasantest athlete around. He thanks you for interviewing him. That kind of polite. The whole thing embarrassed him. He was sorry for making a fool of me; he apologized. He spread his hands; he just couldn’t help it.
“I guess I’ve matured,” he said. “That’s the reason I haven’t worn out, physically. I’m bigger and stronger today than when I broke in. I was 21 years old when I came up, and I was a skinny kid. Today I weigh 20 to 25 pounds more than I did then.”
He does not, of course. He broke in at 175 pounds in 1960, and here he was at 183. Yes, he is bigger, and he looks it. But nothing like 20 to 25 pounds. His wing-bones don’t stick out as far; you still can measure them beneath his shirt. He is square-shouldered and broad, but it is only bony breath, and you still find yourself covering your eyes when he starts his high dribbling drive for the basket, and the Chamberlains and Russells loom over him ready to squash him fast to the hardwood floor.
But this, too, he has learned. He will drive, yes, when he has to. He has also learned how not to have to. He calls it a part of this maturation. “I am learning to cope with the game,” he says.
Watch West when he does not have the ball. He is in motion, quick as a cat, suddenly breaking right or left behind a screen set by Rudy LaRusso, Elgin Baylor, or Bob Boozer. Walt Hazzard feeds him, and West does what he does so marvelously. He palms the basketball in his right hand, wrist bent back, and he gives a little leap and uncocks the wrist. Another two points for Los Angeles.
This is how he copes. He knows his way around the court; he moves to within 15 feet of the basket, where he is the most-deadly shot in the game today, and one of the most-deadly ever, and suddenly he makes his small quick break to find the screen. More and more, he has learned to get open for the flicker of a second; that’s all Jerry West needs. He is the Bill Mazeroski of basketball. Nobody gets rid of the ball so quickly. Around the league they tell you, and Jerry West is the first to agree that Oscar Robertson is the greatest player in the NBA.
Do not believe it for a moment.
Robertson does many things better than West, many things as well as or better than anybody has ever done them. But nobody is the outside offensive player West is; maybe nobody ever has been. (Well, maybe Bill Sharman was.) And they still pay off on the scoreboard. West is quicker than Robertson. Quick is a relatively new word in the sports lexicon. It has replaced speedy or fast. It doesn’t matter who runs the 100-yard dash in 9.5 seconds. It matters whose hands and feet can react most quickly, make the tiny moves that free a man briefly of his tenacious defender. It matters who can set himself, gain a cat-like balance, and pop the ball, quickest.
That is Jerry West. Here he outshines his fellow competitors. Robertson is smooth; Robertson passes the ball like a circus knife-thrower; Robertson has eyes that sweep a court and find a free man or a hole in the defense. Robertson is a marvelous all-around machine.
West is the greater punch.
This is part of the answer. Why he’s still around. He’s cat-quick. He’s also smart. He says, “I have a better feel of the game. I have learned how to make my shot and not get hurt. I can find a position to make my shot, without getting hurt.” It is a question of experience, of learning the screening moves of your bulky forwards. It is a question of hiding behind them when they’re available and finding a free inch or two of space when they’re not. West has never shied away from the hurly-burly of the middle lane—slaughter alley, bloody-nose drive—but he has also learned he does not always have to take that route.
Still, he will get hurt, and he knows it, and my ghoulish words of 1962 have occasionally sounded true. The year after I made my rash and morbid prediction, West saw a sliver of daylight in slaughter alley and down the lane he drove. A couple of New York Knicks filled the daylight, and when West stopped bouncing, he’d ripped a hamstring muscle clear through. He sat out the next 25 ballgames, came back too soon, as is his wont—or his will—reinjured it and sat out more games. The following year, he went scurrying for a loose basketball lying at the feet of a rival player. The two men crashed together, West driving his hand against the shin bone of the other man. The other man in this instance was Wilt Chamberlain. Hitting Chamberlain’s shinbone is like punching cement. West fractured his thumb and had to sit out six games until a cast could be placed on the hand that would enable him to play. Last year, for the fifth time in basketball, he broke his nose.
He knows he will get hurt. He told writer Bill Libby in 1965 that he worried some about the problem. “I try to put it out of my mind,” said West, “but it’s hard. You can’t try to protect yourself and still do a job.”
He expects to be hurt. But he is not a morbid man. He leaves that to the writers. “I always expect it won’t be serious,” he says, “and I’ll keep playing.”
There is more to it, and in many respects, West is not unique. They say professional football players must learn to play with small hurts. Slap on a freezing compound to kill the pain and shove the boy out there again.
Professional basketball is not much different. Husky redhots have come out of college basketball almost contemptuously eager to test themselves against aging monsters of the NBA. They have trained themselves in beer halls and fraternity wing-dings and in 25 college games a season.
They hit the big time, and the big time promptly hits right back. And that winds up the professional career of Husky Redhot. Jerry West says softly and without criticism: “I’ve seen many first-year boys ridden right out of the league because they can’t stand up to the rough aspects of our game.”
These aging monsters have enormous pride. They, too, play with small hurts. Or big ones. Jerry West went down the Laker lineup. “Gene Wiley has a bad knee. He cain’t run, and he cain’t jump.” But he can play. “Darrall Imhoff”—it comes out in West’s West Virginia speech “Darl”—”has two sprained ankles. He cain’t run at all.” But he can play. “Elgin—his knee is still not unsore.” It’s sore as shingles. But Baylor plays. So on down the line. Rudy LaRusso had a terrible leg for a spell; he played. LeRoy Ellis is a beanpole of a man, 6-feet-11, but barely over 200 pounds. He has to be the lightweight center in the league, he gets hurt easily. But he plays. They all get hurt on the Lakers and on every team in the league, but they play.
It is not college ball. You get busted up night after night, and there are more than 25 such nights a season. There are 80, plus preseason brawls and playoff wars. “When I was playing college ball,” West says. “it would be unusual to play two nights in a row. Now, we play four nights in a row in four different cities.” It wears on the toughest.
So, this is where I went haywire. I saw Jerry West, skinny and pale, and I watched him belted around a few times, and I did not know it was a way of life in the NBA. “It is part of the game,” Jerry West says.
You watch the Lakers in practice. Coach Fred Schaus is a big, growling man, plagued with a temper that is shortening its fuse each year the Lakers don’t win the league title. Each year, they come close, but close isn’t enough, and Schaus is starting to turn inward as his irascibility grows. He scrimmages his athletes on afternoons between the games, and he likes to set up screens, behind which his sharp-shooters can pop home the ball. Screening in the pro ranks is very different from the effete pick-off of college ball. It’s illegal to move your screen and make contact with the defensive man, to try to shut him out of the way. But the pros do it all the time. It is the only way they do it. Screening is the equivalent of offensive blocking in football. You take your man out of the play, ride him like a man prodding a bull, push him, drape your weight on him. Schaus makes his men do it over and over in practice sessions, and you see half the squad in red jerseys, trying to shove the other half, in white, clear out of the Sports Arena, so another redshirt can find room for his one-hander. Not that Schaus is different from the other coaches. He is not. This is the way the game is played.
You watch the game, and there is another difference. Defensive play in the pro game, these days, is hand-checking, like hockey stick-checking. You put your hand on the man with the ball, and you push a little, try to break up his drive, make him lose control, perhaps steal the ball. Naturally, the offensive man does not stand still for this nonsense. He, too, resorts to hands, or if he has the ball, one hand. So they go downcourt, banging each other as they go, jabbing the elbow, shoulder, the hip, while the referee looks the other way.
When West plays, you’ll see Don Ohl or Al Attles or K.C. Jones hand-hounding him all the way. K.C. is the genius of it all. “K.C. is by far the best against me. He is quick, he can jump, he recovers fast.
“Of course,” Jerry adds glumly, “if I do get past him, there’s Russell, which doesn’t help much.” But somehow, he manages to get past all of them some of the time, and Don Ohl refuses to fall in line when players automatically vote Bill Russell the most valuable player in basketball. “It’s West,” Ohl says. Ohl and West duel together, and the result is grim, clashing basketball.
It is not West, then, who should be judged. This is the sport. It is a rough game, and like most rough games—football, water polo, lacrosse, rugby— terribly exciting. Man is an animal, a human animal no doubt, but an animal, and he is often most natural and most exciting when he rolls on the floor and starts roughhousing his fellow man.
So, it wasn’t just happening to Jerry West. I was too green to the pro game, when I began to watch West being belted. College basketball was my sport, where contact is held down to mild concussions. West was my assignment, so I watched him closely, and I watched him too closely. They belted him but they belted everybody, and he belted back.
Not that it doesn’t wear down a man. It does, and the man it wears down is Jerry West, among others. But other things wear down West more than the belting by fist, elbow, or knee. It is the mental attrition of a long season that is most wearing.
“Every year is harder in many respects,” Jerry West says. West has a reputation of being the greatest clutch player in the game, one of the truly great pressure athletes any of us has ever seen. If West is a fine player for three quarters of a basketball game, he’s usually a finer player the last quarter, when it all counts. And if he is a finer player in the last quarter, he shines the last four minutes, the last three, the last 40 seconds. You can continue this line. Great as he is during the season, he is greater in the playoffs, when everything that has come before is anti-climactic. Now it counts. Now a second- or a third-place team over the 80-game pull can win everything in a brief dozen games.
In the 1964-65 playoffs, Jerry West scored 447 points in 11 games—an incredible 40.6-point average. Nobody in NBA playoff history has ever done as well. Of all the Laker points in those 11 games, West personally accounted for 35.6 percent—more than a third. There are 10 men on a squad; West, was the equal of three-plus men in the scoring column. At the end of the 1964-65 season, Jerry West in his five years in the league had already become the 27th all-time scorer in NBA history. In the playoffs, he was number nine.
Yet it saps you. It even saps Jerry West. “You reach a certain stage,” he says, “where the pressure piles up until you are not able to do your best.”
West calls it a problem in concentration. A man must pull himself together—mentally—and apply himself to the game at hand, no matter how tired or how pressed or how physically pushed he and his team are. It can’t be done every night. “You cain’t concentrate all the time. You cain’t get up for every minute of every game. You cain’t get up for every game. Maybe you can get up for two games out of three.”
You see it on the floor. In a game in Baltimore, on January 20, 1966, West had a slow start. It is his odd trademark these days. (Despite his high scoring of 1965-66, West had many moments of displeasure. He felt he was not playing consistently, and he is right.) Baltimore rushed off to a long lead. West and the Lakers finally began cutting it back. But in the second half, the Bullets went off on another spree, and the Laker faces became grim. You could see the muscles bunch at the brow between the eyes. The Lakers tried to break fast—they play best when they ad-lib off a fastbreak—and West grabbed a loose ball underneath and drove up for the cinch layup. He blew the shot.
Instantly, West called time, rushing toward the Laker bench, a fragmented, almost frightening, look on his face. He said to Coach Schaus: “I’m tired. Take me out,” and he sat on the bench for a couple of minutes. “I felt frustrated,” he says. “You have to make shots like that. I missed.”
The frustration can come in other forms than your own muffed shots, and it came that night in a game the Lakers obviously could not get up for. West went back in, and just as he had been cold, now we turned hot. Everything he threw up went in, and the Bullet lead melted, and the Lakers surged ahead. Then, with just 15 seconds to play, and leading by four points—you can’t hardly build a fatter cushion—the Lakers blew it all. Walt Hazzard threw one ball away, and then couldn’t pass the ball inbounds within the allotted five seconds. Johnny Green, one of the worst foul shots in the league, scored two free throws. Johnny Kerr tossed in two baskets, and Baltimore won in the last second.
Losses such as these lead to Jerry West’s most-urgent problem in pro basketball. “I just cain’t learn to wind down after a losing game. I cain’t sleep. It’s hard enough at home, but at least I have my family, and I am at home. On the road, it’s terrible. I replay the game, try to get rid of it that way, but it doesn’t always work. I’ve taken to reading when I get back to the hotel room.” He piles up the paperback novels and magazines and trots them out after a losing game. But even this doesn’t work, by itself, so Jerry West ends up taking half a sleeping pill, which embarrasses him. Finally, he falls asleep. “I have to,” he explains soberly, “because if you don’t sleep, there’s another game tomorrow. You’re going to be tired and maybe you’ll play badly and lose that one, and you’ll have more trouble sleeping.”
This is the vicious cycle of professional basketball. You can’t compound it. West does. “There’s the problem of time change. You go from one city to another, maybe it’s 8 o’clock on the watch, but to you it’s 11, and you ought to be getting ready for bed. Instead, you get ready to play a game.” West knows a lot of the problem is his own temperament, one that recoils violently from the reality of losing. “Some men wind down better. Some men can sleep on the plane. I cain’t. Some men can handle a loss better. Seems they have the temperament for it. I don’t.” And he eats his half sleeping pill. A whole pill—he says—is not good. He wakes up foggy. Things are bad enough without feeling foggy.
So this is a picture of professional basketball. It does not sound like the greatest fun invented by man. It isn’t. West knows it. He knows even more.
“You know what’s really awful?” he says, “those last 10 to 15 games, every season. If your team is out of the standings, it’s tough to play useless games. If you’re way ahead, you’ve got little incentive. Those games are useless, too.” Then he adds with a small, tight, perhaps smug smile: “Individual team pride in those last 10 or 15 games dictates which team will win.” And West seems to be saying he and the Lakers bring this pride to useless games. That is why, in years past, the Lakers have held their divisional leads and padded them the last two weeks of the season.
Which is another reason I was dead wrong back in 1962. I saw West’s pride, his willingness to absorb hurts and keep on playing, his ability to ride out the dull frustrations and the meaningless games, but I refused to believe what I saw.
(In the midst of this self-flagellation, I must add I wrote other things in that same article, back in West’s sophomore year. I said—then—he was very likely the best basketball player, pound for pound, and inch for inch, in the world today, which, oddly enough, all you incendiaries seem to have ignored. Oh, well.)
One change has occurred to the game in the years that have gone by since my otherwise half-witted words, and perhaps I can hide a bit of my error behind the change. “When I came up,” West recalls, “they said I would be one of the last guards my size in the NBA. You wouldn’t see guys who were only 6-3. Today, every team has men 6-1, 6-2, men who can run, defend well, and who are quick. Every team uses a more-pressing defense these days. You need little guys to press. Guy Rodgers, Al Attles, Hal Greer, John Egan, Lenny Wilkens, Komives, Bryant, me, Walt Hazzard, Jim King, Gail Goodrich, Barnhill.
“There’s more emphasis on small backcourtmen. And it’s changed the games. It’s taking something away from the forwards. They’re big, and they can be harassed by all this pressing. The forwards have lost a little of their ability to score. Which means more high-scoring guards.”
If you look at the 1964-65 final scoring figures, after Will Chamberlain come, West, Robertson, and Sam Jones, all guards. The old days of guards who guarded, period, are gone, of course. Now a guard will score 30 points, even 40, sometimes 50. West has a 63-point night in the record book. George Mikan’s best game as a pro netted him 61.
The little men hound the big men, make life miserable for them, and the result is the big men, the forwards, are now trained to look for the small, quick guard, to feed him the ball when he is open, instead of the other way around. It has changed the look and emphasis of the game—for the better—and it has brightened the lives of the little guy. You cannot tell me this has not made it easier, psychologically, for West.
That is the way the game has changed. How has West changed?
Not too much, he thinks. When he came up, he disparaged certain of his skills. “I cain’t pass well or dribble well. I cain’t handle the ball too well,” he said then. He still says it. “I’m not a good passer. I’m not the best ballhandler. What I want to be is a good all-around player.”
There has been other mild criticism of West. Some thought he was not the best defender in the league, back in his freshman season with the Lakers. West grins quickly. He is a realist, and if it demands he once in a while toot his own horn, he toots. “I think I always defended well,” he says. And he always did. Back in West Virginia, they called him Tarantula, the way his arms threw up a web around the man he guarded.
And there had been all that talk (by me, among others) about his need to adjust to the way the defense was cheating on him. West is a natural righthander, and the defense would play him a step or two to his right, because that is the way he tended to move and that is where the ball was. He built up his drives to the left, and eliminated the cheating, but he thinks it was all exaggerated.
“All righthanders,” he says today, “are defensed that way. Just as lefthanders are cheated to their left. I think I have taken care of that.” You still see West move to the left side of the court on offense, which means there is more open room to his right, the way he wants to move. The tendency remains. But tendency or no, defenses must be having a terrible time. This is one of the great scorers in the game.
He says his own problem is not so much improving—though he sincerely would like to pass better and dribble better—but maintaining himself at whatever high plateau he has reached. “I practice over and over what I do best. I shoot from certain spots, over and over. I practice my moves to get to that spot, over and over.”
It is the way most basketball players practice, and it causes coaches to go a bit crackers. What Fred Schaus would like, for instance, is for the Lakers to learn a handful of set plays, work them smoothly and successfully. It is what the Lakers do worst, and it is what the coach insists they do, over and over, in practice sessions. So, before the Reds play the Whites in a 16-point game, Schaus patiently runs his boys through set patterns. It is nothing that will unsettle the Boston Celtics. Bobby Kennedy’s touch football team runs plays better. Schaus will yelp: “43B,” and toss the ball in, and men begin running pell-mell for assigned posts. The collisions are terrifying.
Finally, the set patterns are exhausted, along with Schaus’ patience, and the scrimmage is conducted on a more freelance style. Everybody perks up, and basketballs are drilled through the nets, and Schaus now growls: “C’mon, Red, c’mon, play a little D down here, Red.”
A little D. A little defense. But there is no defense when West makes his cat-quick move behind Baylor’s brawny screen, and the wrist uncocks two points. The only defense Red has is a lid on the basket.
There is further change to West’s play these days, and it enables me to chicken out of some of my willingness to mount the funeral pyre. Back in the early seasons, West brought the ball down the court, setting up his team’s offense, and then—with the ball—either passing off or else driving into the center-lane melee. It led to those moments of anguish that dotted his first years, men crashing their 250 pounds against his slender, driving, off-balance body, and busting him up time after time.
Now the Lakers have a new playmaker, Walt Hazzard, and he has given Jerry West a new role. The man with the ball can control his own offensive effort. If he has the ball, he can shoot. He can’t without the ball. (Stick around, firebugs, you’ll learn a lot here.) Now that Hazzard brings the ball in, Jerry West must keep moving, jitterbugging right and left, darting in and out, looking for that open space or comforting screen. Then, and not until then, and not until Hazzard feeds him, he can score. It poses a new problem, West says today, “I had to learn to free myself and wait for the ball. It was hard to learn.”
Obviously, he has learned it superbly. But—significant to this piece of word-eating and effigy-burning—West also is now slightly removed from some of the dangers attending the guy with the ball. Everybody gets knocked down in basketball, but the guy with the ball gets knocked down the most.
So those are my alibis, and those are West’s reasons and other reasons, why I goofed. I eat my words, I eat crow.
We looked to the future, Jerry West and I, the past explained and out of the way. This was February 1966, and ahead was the remaining third of the season and the playoffs. West was a cautious optimist.
“Every year something comes up and makes it tougher for us in the playoffs. Every year, the Celtics would win. But I have to admit we were overmatched in talent every year. The Celtics were better than we were. This year may be the year. Cincinnati and Philadelphia seem to be proving they’re just about as good as Boston. So, Boston can be licked. Maybe we’ll do it.”
It did not ring with wild, buoyant hope. But again, West is a realist. When he and I spoke, the Lakers record was 31-25. But broken down, the record revealed the difference between the Eastern and Western Division rivals; it was 10-18 against the East.
The breakdown explains why Jerry West spoke so cautiously of what his club might do. Still, Los Angeles is a good team on most nights and a great team on a few nights. The playoffs could be those few nights.
After the playoffs, West will take his annual one-week fishing trip to Crowley Lake in the Sierras. “It’s cold as hell,” he says—with a big grin, as though additional discomfort was exactly what he most needed after a full season of bruises—“but it’s great!” Then, he and his pretty brown-haired wife Jane—whom he met at college—will go back East to see Jane’s parents down in Florida and Jerry’s in Chelyan, West Virginia.
After that, West will find himself more and more before the still cameras, posing for those advertisements that are nicely bulking his yearly income. He is part of that Jantzen team of sports figures—Bob Cousy, Paul Hornung, Frank Gifford, Terry Baker, Dave Marr, and Bobby Hull—who dress up in snazzy Jantzen wear and travel about to be photographed here and there, for fun and money. Last year, the Jantzenites and their wives went to Hawaii, and West says it was all a ball.
Jantzen is not the only product West has endorsed. There are Karl Shoes, a basketball for Wilson (West is thinking of quitting Wilson), Chapstick, and Wheaties. The 27-year-old West Virginian has begun to move into the upper brackets. He and Jane and their sons, David, Michael, and Mark, live in a $45,000.three-bedroom, two-bath home in West Los Angeles, and West dimly toys with the notion of buying or building something grander than that. Here, too, he moves with a realist’s caution.
“You never know from day to day how long you’re going to last in this game,” he says. “It’s unsure. You can be finished in one day.” He has taken modest steps to ward off such disaster. Together with Don Drysdale and Les Richter, he owns a summer camp at California’s Mammoth Lake. He owns stock. He’s invested in an orange grove. Next, he may move into real estate.
But where his money comes from these days is basketball, and though he pays lip service to what he calls “the unwritten law of basketball, the one that says I’m not supposed to tell you my salary,” he also says it’s an idiotic law, one he disapproves of heartily, and he does some telling. He gives you no exact figures, but when you tell him it was reported in SPORT that he was earning $30,000 last season, and it was reported in Sports Illustrated he was making $35,000 for the 1965-66 season, he murmurs: “I’m making much more than that.” And he says, “I’m the fourth highest-paid player in the league.”
Let’s see, now. There are Chamberlain and Russell at their reported $100,000, and Oscar Robertson reputedly at $75,000. Elgin Baylor was not too long ago listed at over $50,000. It’s doubtful Baylor’s been cut much, if any, despite his bum knees. After all, Baylor played exactly 10 minutes less than West in 1964-65. So West is probably earning a bit more than $50,000. Call it $55,000, and let it go at that.
West is considered a hard man at contract time. Lou Mohs, the Laker general manager, once said to Bill Libby: “West wants to be financially independent by the time he is 40, which is a laudable ambition. He also wants to be the greatest small man ever to play this game, which he may already be. He gets high standards and goes after them fiercely.”
Part of the way he goes after them is by demanding he be paid fairly for services rendered. And Mohs once said to writer John Underwood that Jerry is a cautious man “working out his salvation with fear and trembling.”
But then it is his salvation. If he remains in good health, and if he remains with the Lakers—owner Jack Kent Cooke would be driven out of town if he unloaded his superstar—West ought to achieve his desired financial independence.
The Los Angeles franchise is another reason West rolls merrily on. Why not? It’s a great fat cat among basketball operations. Cooke paid $5,175.000 to former owner Bob Short for the Lakers. The Celtics were unloaded at roughly the same time for under 3 million. The regular-season home attendance figures for the Lakers’ past five seasons—West’s career—escalate like this: 151,000, 190,000, 285,000, 322,000, and 392,000. This past season, the Lakers had averaged over 10,000 per game when West and I talked—which projected to a total attendance well over 400,000 for the 40 home games. This translates into money, which means higher salaries for them who deserve it. Jerry West is one of the most deserving.
And West adds, “I am very fond of our owner, Mr. Cooke. I was not so fond of the former owner, Bob Short. I don’t think I was treated very fairly by the old regime. Now I am.”
What of the long-range future. How much longer—God willing—does West expect to play? I asked him that in February. “I’d like to play,”—he paused lengthily—“I don’t know. Ten years. That’s four more years.”
Does he enjoy this game that he says gets harder in many respects every year, a game that has literally broken his bones, ground him down, physically and psychically? He grinned his crooked, slightly gap-toothed grin, and the grin revealed gold bridgework. He’s left teeth on the floors of basketball arenas. West has been in this meat grinder for six seasons, nearly 20,000 minutes of blood and thunder, thud and blunder. He looks like a kid, a tall, skinnyish kid with a nice kid’s grin, but he’s got a twisted beak of a nose; prize fighters have prettier schnozzes.
“The way I see it is if a man has a job that he hates, if he hates going to work every day, then it’s about time he started to look for a new job. Yes, I enjoy the game.”
Later, he thanked me and told me how much he enjoyed talking with me, and he went off into the Los Angeles rain, dressed in a violent blue jacket that would have made Jantzen’s designers shudder. A nice kid, the kind you’d hate to see playing pro basketball, the kind of kid you just know would be chopped to bits by the aging monsters. Then you realize. This nice kid, Jerry West, is now one of the aging monsters.
I’ll bet he will be around and playing full-time, big-league ball four seasons from now.
If he’s not, you may burn me in effigy.
From Way Downtown 