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Jerry West was one of the first superstars whom I ever personally heard describe his own torment. His word, not mine. It was even part of the title of his autobiography, “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life,” a book that has been reliably described as one that West’s wife, five sons and four siblings didn’t want him to write.
But West, who died this morning, was unerringly honest. The literal logo of the NBA had accomplished enough, been enough, done enough that he shouldn’t have had to worry too much about how his description of a lifelong battle with depression would be received.
The rest of West’s professional life is, to understate the case, pretty well known. He was an NBA champion as a player, an eight-time champ as an executive, an easy Hall of Famer, a consensus inclusion among the best ever to play the sport. He makes all the lists, and he is in fact the model for the NBA’s shadow logo, although the league never conceded that obvious reality.
West will be remembered for all that, as he should. He probably won’t be remembered for a contribution that was vastly underrated: his openness to discussing the kinds of things that men of his generation virtually never discussed.
Everything in sports doesn’t have to be about how athletes process their feelings, but with that caveat, West’s story stands out. We hear more frequently these days from pro athletes concerning their mental health, people like relief pitcher Kenley Jansen, NBAers Kevin Love and Ricky Rubio, etc. It’s all to the good. But in West’s day (he was born in 1938), it just wasn’t done.
I’d like to credit organizations for stepping up their game since those old days, and it certainly is true that most franchises now employ mental strength coaches or even whole staffs. But for most teams, that’s about being mentally fit enough to win more games, period. It’s a competitive edge — not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if players hadn’t started speaking out, no such mental health counseling would be available.
West’s backstory was rough; he was physically abused by his coal-miner father and was a short, skinny, frail kid whose physical maladies prevented him from playing many sports growing up. All of this led to his diminishment of himself as both a person and an athlete.
As it turned out, though, a neighbor had a basketball hoop nailed on a storage shed in their little West Virginia town, and West would go over by himself and shoot there at all hours, through all seasons of the year. It was something he could do. By the time he hit high school and finally grew, he had developed a midrange jump shot that was absurdly consistent from almost every angle on the court.
West was plagued by chilling self-doubt and long depressive phases, but, as he recounted in his memoir, he actually kept a lot of that at bay during his playing years because he was so intensely focused on — well, on not losing. It was the months after the seasons ended that got him, as he pored over every failure. (His wife said he sometimes barely spoke for days at a time.) And as his Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals six times, there was plenty for him to chew on.
But Jerry West got out — or perhaps it’s closer to the truth to say that he found a way through. In his case, dealing with his depression involved medication, and for West it was Prozac that seemed to do the job. He eschewed therapy, no doubt partly because of the generation in which he grew up. Ultimately, writing his memoir was a form of that missing therapy.
West made the rounds in 2011 publicizing his book, which by no means is only about all this. The man had an amazing, stunningly winning professional career. Still, the inclusion of his personal travails caught many in the sports world flat-footed; they didn’t know what to do with an older gentleman star/legend/logo who was so willing to discuss the very most difficult parts of his own story.
I was in radio at the time. I remember West speaking so clearly and vividly about dealing with depression — it was almost revelatory. It also made me feel fortunate. Despite his reputation as a hard-edged executive, West could be remarkably kind-hearted; after listening to him, I understood a little better why that was.
I hope you didn’t see the portrayal of West in HBO’s glitzed-up Lakers docudrama Winning Time; it was a cartoonish thing, and it undersold West by a million miles. Then again, the tough-minded, occasionally explosive Jerry was the person most people saw. That’s probably why the rest of him was so surprising, and honest.
Fortunate to see him play with loaded Lakers team versus the Warriors in Oakland decades ago. Rise in power, sir. 🏀
The Logo was truly a treasure…