Jerry West (1938-2024) was one of the greatest basketball players of all time, the only person ever to be all-NBA every year of his career. He may have been even better as a basketball executive, assembling two great teams as general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers. Several people are quoted in recent tributes as saying that he was the greatest judge of talent they had ever seen. At The Athletic, David Aldridge writes, "Nobody wanted to win more than Jerry West."
He was also the sad, lonely product of an abusive childhood in a poverty-wracked corner of West Virginia who took up basketball partly to keep away from his father's fists.
The word tortured is often used to describe West. Indeed. Demons, which took root during a difficult and lonely childhood in his native West Virginia, where his imagination was his best friend and he shot thousands of shots so that he wouldn’t have to return home, ate at him throughout his life. There was little love in the West home, and physical abuse of the children at the hand of their father. Jerry West was driven, in the best and worst sense of that word, to strive, to chase perfection, to be hollowed out by defeat and only briefly salved by victory.
“I am, if I may say so, an enigma (even to myself, especially to myself), and an obsessive, someone whose mind ranges far and wide and returns to the things that, for better or worse, hold me in their thrall,” West wrote in his book.
As manager of the Lakers he rarely watched their games; it made him too anxious. Think about that, a man who became a sports legend but who couldn't actually enjoy watching the teams he had built win championships. Most sports people love sports, but with Jerry West it was weirdly more complicated than that. Basketball was the center of his life, but it also wracked his soul.
I have considered this from time to time since I first learned West's story about twenty years ago. I don't think it's true that all geniuses, or even all obsessive perfectionists, are soul-wracked. But it certainly isn't rare. Often, it seems, the path to extraordinary accomplishments starts from misery. Some people become great by throwing themselves into their careers to flee from pain, or to fill up an aching emptiness that ordinary life can't touch.
Talking about West recently, Doc Rivers (a basketball guy) mentioned a funeral sermon he once heard. The preacher said that in the middle of your obituary notice there is a dash, you know, 1938 (dash) 2024. The question is, what was in your dash? Jerry West, Rivers said, filled up his dash, filled it with accomplishments and achievements, plus a family, friends, and nearly universal respect in the basketball world.
Which I thought was a great metaphor. But it skips over the question of everything else that was in West's life, all of the less great stuff concealed by his dash. The pain, the anxiety, the sadness, the unreachable loneliness, the childhood trauma that kept him from ever reveling in his victories the way boys fantasizing about sports glory imagine they would. From the outside it seems like great athletes winning big games must be on top of the world. I'm not sure Jerry West ever felt that way, even for a minute. Every victory he won was shadowed by his defeats and failures; everything he achieved was haunted by what he had gone through.
The universe, it seems, is like that.
It seems to me that preacher who talked about the dash let a seeming pretty rhetorical figure run away with him. It's one of the cruelest things I've ever heard. By that standard, could any human life, Jerry West's or anyone else's, ever be good enough? Should human existence ever be measured in such a way? It's the pitiless voice of damnation, in which the original sin is the presumption of existing at all.
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