Ball is life. This is what they say on playgrounds across America. Perhaps more than any other team sport, basketball has a way of bringing its legends back to the game long after their playing days are over – if they ever left. Their ubiquity has always linked the future to the present.
No one embodied this better than Jerry West, the Hall of Fame player turned executive. The life saver. His death Wednesday widens a void that no amount of sports can fill. Where Tommy Heinsohn once still called Boston Celtics games, Bill Russell still presented the NBA Finals MVP award named after him and West was still looking for another contender, now there are the immeasurable shadows they cast.
For so long, generations of fans could bounce their youngest on one knee, point to the front row and say, “There goes a legend.” It would serve as a conversation starter about how West was a high school phenom from West Virginia, a great mountaineer and an Olympic gold medalist before he ever played in the NBA.
And man, what an NBA career that was. He was an All-Star every year of his 14-year career, including 10 first-team All-NBA selections. He was the origin of ring culture in the league. He lost seven NBA Finals (six to Russell’s Celtics) before breaking through at age 33 alongside Wilt Chamberlain with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1972. He is the only player to ever capture Finals MVP honors on a losing team. He even finished second behind Chamberlain, Willis Reed and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in four separate regular-season MVP races.
But West doesn’t take a backseat to any basketball lifer. He was a jump-shooting guard like the NBA had never seen. Almost no one before him even knew that someone 6-foot-1 could post 27 points, seven assists and six rebounds in a game, let alone average as many for a career. He was Mr. Outside And Mr. Clutch. If you want to know why, just watch his 60-footer that sent Game 3 of the 1970 NBA Finals to overtime.
He’s the logo of the NBA for God’s sake, and that’s not even the half of it.
“Jerry would kick in a manner that was so skilled and relentless,” Pat Riley, who credited West with his illustrious career as both coach of the Lakers and president of basketball operations for the Miami Heat, said in a statement Wednesday. “I was so proud to be there in his presence. I watched, I learned. He made me believe. It was fascinating to be in that aura of greatness. I was told, ‘Pat, just look at him and model yourself after Jerry.” He was smart, dedicated, stubborn, fearless, generous, ultra-competitive, stubborn, but with great grace. These were just some of the characteristics he cemented in my psyche.
West served as a scout, coach and eventually the general manager of the Lakers from 1976-2000, building a pair of dynasties in LA. He drafted Magic Johnson, signed Shaquille O’Neal and traded for Kobe Bryant, who together delivered 10 titles to the franchise to which West owed his entire playing career.
West won his second Executive of the Year award with the Memphis Grizzlies in 2004. Even after stepping down, West didn’t stay out of the game for long. He joined the Golden State Warriors as a consultant in 2011, famously convincing them not to trade Klay Thompson and recruit Kevin Durant. Another dynasty under his belt. West held a similar role with the Los Angeles Clippers until his death, advising on their acquisitions of Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. No leader has achieved more. West collected eight championship rings in eight decades in the NBA. So much for second place.
Never mind his groundbreaking contributions to the league’s mental health discussion.
“He never stopped,” Clippers owner Steve Ballmer said in a statement Wednesday. Not even after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019. The work is never done. The game never left him.
These stories are long to tell, but they are necessary to unfold the history of basketball, as long as the grandson on your knee is willing to listen to them. It was easier when you could still see the legend on the sidelines.
However, those days are fading. We lost Heinsohn in 2020, Elgin Baylor in 2021, Russell in 2022, Reed in 2023 and Bill Walton late last month, just to name a handful. We were lucky that so many of these legends stayed with us – stayed in the game – for so long. We can still turn to Bob Cousy, as The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaugnessy did this week, when we need to feel connected to the beginning of the game.
But not forever.
“I’m 95 [expletive] years old with one foot in the grave and I can barely move,” Cousy told Shaugnessy at this year’s finals. ‘I know I have overtime. So that everything in your life becomes more meaningful. And one of the last things I want to see is the Celtics putting up banner No. 18.”
Their legacy may last forever, but they are just as mortal as the rest of us, so we must remind these monumental figures how much they mean to us and to the game we love so much. I saw Oscar Robertson at the All-Star Game in Indianapolis this year. I should have stopped him. I should have said “Thank you.”
So thanks, Jerry. Ball is life, and you were its logo.
