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When in 1969 the NBA sought an emblem for the league, one man was chosen above all as the icon of his sport: Jerry West. Silhouetted in white against a red-and-blue backdrop, West’s signature gait and left-handed dribble are still the NBA logo, seen on merchandise around the world.
In this marvelous book — the first biography of the basketball legend — award-winning reporter and author Roland Lazenby traces Jerry West’s brilliant career from the coalfields near Cabin Creek, West Virginia, to the bare-knuckled pre-expansion era of the NBA, from the Lakers’ Riley-Magic-Kareem Showtime era to Jackson–Kobe–Shaq teams of the early twenty-first century, and beyond.
But fame was not all glory.
Click on 'Read more...' to read the complete review, Tim Rutten's review and see the 5 videos !
Called “Mr. Clutch,” West was an incomparable talent—flawless on defense, possessing unmatched court vision, and the perfect jumper, unstoppable when the game was on the line. Beloved and respected by fans and fellow players alike, West was the centerpiece of Lakers teams that starred such players as Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain, and he went on to nine NBA Finals. Yet in losing eight of those series, including six in a row to the detested Boston Celtics, West became as famous for his failures as for his triumphs. And that notoriety cast long shadows over West’s life on and off the court.
Yet as the author discovered through scores of exclusive interviews with West’s teammates, colleagues, and family members, West channeled the frustration of his darkest moments into a driving force that propelled his years as an executive. And in this capacity, the success that often eluded West on the court has enabled him to reach out to successive generations of players to enrich and shape the sport in immeasurable ways.
Though sometimes overshadowed by flashier peers on the court, Jerry West nevertheless stands out as the heart and soul of a league that, in fifty years, has metamorphosed from a regional sideshow into a global phenomenon. And in Jerry West, Roland Lazenby provides the ultimate story of a man who has done more to shape basketball than anyone on the planet.
"... In-depth biography of one of the NBA's greatest players and executives. Decades after the conclusion of Jerry West's career, "Mr. Clutch," the bumpkin-turned-superstar whose graceful silhouette serves as the NBA logo, is still considered one of the best players ever.
Despite his star status, he often shunned the spotlight during his career. As Lazenby (Journalism/Virginia Tech Univ.; The Show: The Inside Story of the Spectacular Los Angeles Lakers in the Words of Those Who Lived It, 2005, etc.) peels back the layers of mystique surrounding his historically reticent subject, West is revealed as a peevish perfectionist whose hypercompetitive nature, which provided such an edge on the court, made him a high-strung, obstinate womanizer off it.
The author painstakingly recounts West's early years growing up in West Virginia, delving into his family history and focusing in particular on his contentious relationship with his father and similarities to his mother, from whom he derived his stoicism and legendary work ethic. After considerable success in high school, West earned All-American status at West Virginia University before being drafted by the Lakers.
His professional career was marked by historic personal success (14-time all-star and Hall of Famer) and agonizing team disappointment—though he won one NBA title, West's Lakers lost in the championship round eight times. A brief stint coaching the Lakers followed, but West ultimately found his post-career niche as a Lakers executive, proving to be an astute judge of talent in constructing multiple championship teams led by the likes of Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant. Lazenby gives short shrift to West's decades of work as a scout and executive, however, and though the author makes a game effort, it's impossible to make West as compelling on paper as he was on the court.Lakers diehards and hoops historians should give it a shot, but others may pass. ..."
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Jim West by Tim Rutten
"... When I was a boy, my father took me to see my first live professional basketball game in downtown Los Angeles at the Sports Arena.
Good parochial school boy that I was, I spent most of the pregame trying to figure out where John F. Kennedy might have stood during the recent Democratic National Convention. Then, I saw the Lakers with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor play the Cincinnati Royals with Oscar Robertson and Jerry Lucas, and I became a fan for life.
In retrospect, it’s easy to understand why I did since, like the Boston Celtics’ Tommy Heinsohn tells Roland Lazenby in his marvelous book Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon, I had seen three of the five finest NBA players ever to take the floor. Nothing I’ve seen in all the long intervening years as a fan and onetime sportswriter would compel me to contradict Heinsohn.
Sports biographies tend to careen between breathless hagiography and the slyly salacious. Lazenby, a prolific author who also has written on Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant, has produced something of a different order — a first-rate piece of narrative nonfiction whose subject happens to be a star athlete. His biography of West is, by turns, smart, beautifully reported, well-written and psychologically shrewd. It also manages to put both the NBA and individual players in a telling social and historical context without straying into didacticism.
All those qualities are required to do justice to one of the most complicated, compelling stars in American sports during the last half-century. Today, when the Lakers are the hottest sports ticket in L.A. and Magic Johnson’s “Showtime” teams seem like ancient history, it’s hard for many to recall just how closely West and the Lakers were identified with each other. It wasn’t just that he spent his entire playing career with the team, then went on to coach (with mixed results) and manage it (to brilliant effect) but also that the triumphs and the travails of the team and its star seemed inextricably linked.
Raised in poverty in West Virginia, in a small town outside Cabin Creek, West was the sickly son of a largely absent father, who delighted in Democratic politics and his work with the local union, and an emotionally withholding mother whose manic work ethic and unrelenting perfectionism left their stamp on West. Shy and withdrawn, West preferred solitary fishing and hunting to other activities and, ultimately, took up basketball because he could play it alone.
As Lazenby points out, he became one of those rare sports greats who rose to the top with adequate coaching during the most formative years of his career. To the last, his jump shot retained an odd flatness that was the product of long boyhood hours spent on wind-scoured outdoor courts.
There’s no point here in rehearsing the range of West’s achievements as a player, though few may now recall that the NBA’s logo is a silhouette of his dribble. Lazenby’s narrative does justice to all the triumphs and frustrations, particularly the long series of championship losses to Bill Russell’s Celtics — a sequence that left West wondering if he was laboring under a jinx.
Where this book breaks fascinating new ground is in its exploration of West’s tormented perfectionism, a drive for excellence so overweening that it appears to have deprived him of any consistent happiness or satisfaction in his accomplishments.
It took a terrible toll on his personal life, Lazenby writes, leading him to neglect his own children and alienate himself from a loving and, by all accounts, superhumanly supportive first wife. They divorced soon after West retired as a player and, when he met the much younger woman who became his second wife, she recalled him as “empty” and the “saddest” man she had ever encountered.
This was the Jerry West who, after the Lakers finally defeated the New York Knicks in 1972, is remembered by his teammates as the guy in the locker room who took one swig of Champagne and then didn’t seem to know how to celebrate. “I don’t know where I’m going to celebrate,” West said. “The feelings I have now are private ones. I’m going to go home and lock the door.”
As Lazenby reports, when West did that, it was to lose himself in caustically dissatisfied ruminations. West felt the 1972 season had been far from his best as a Laker and always would wonder if this team finally had won a league championship in spite of him. Perhaps, he mused, he’d always somehow impeded the team.
Though West’s mastery of every aspect of the game — as player, coach and executive — was complete, he may have been unequaled as a judge of talent. (The Lakers have Kobe Bryant today because of him.) Strangely, it’s in his judgment of other players that he seems most unguarded and relaxed.
Speaking of Baylor, for example, he is unstinting and sincere: “It was an honor to play with him. I never considered Elgin Baylor as someone I competed against. He is without a doubt one of the truly great players to play this game… He had that wonderful magic instinct for making plays, for doing things that you just had to watch. I learned from him, from watching him…”
Or there’s this, on his great rival, Robertson: “His greatness was his simplicity. He made every play in the simplest way because his skill level was enormous. It took me a long time to catch up with him.”
West, in his own way, always has had a similar simplicity. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said that “purity of the heart is to will one thing.” Assuming that’s true, then Jerry West may have been the purest spirit ever to play the game of basketball — for he willed one thing, greatness, and achieved it.
Lazenby’s superb account of his career suggests to those of us who, over the years, thrilled at witnessing that stupendous act of will that we can only join with Russell, his old nemesis, and wish Jerry West the happiness to which his achievements entitle him. ..." Tim Rutten - Los Angeles Times (MCT)
"... Going beyond the facade of the multifaceted NBA legend, Lazenby, a professor of journalism at Virginia Tech (The Show: The Inside Story of the Spectacular Los Angeles Lakers), examines West, who played for the Los Angeles Lakers from 1960 to 1974.
From the frail kid from West Virginia coal country through his rebellious youthful hoopster to the crowning of a pro sports icon, this entertaining biography explicates how West, a shy, introverted perfectionist, emerged as a fabled college star with the West Virginia Mountaineers, using his patented one-hand jumper, pushing himself with endless drills to change the fate of the pro ball leagues.
Lazenby accurately captures the inner man, his quirks, his rituals, his competitiveness when West, Mr. Clutch, faces off with Bill Russell's Celtics and Wilt Chamberlain's 76-ers. Even when the topic is life after active duty in pro ball, this book continues as a great example of old school sports bio without tabloid muck, satisfying all fans. ..."
"... Jerry West is one of the best five or six basketball players who ever lived. However, his career paralleled the greatest winner in the history of team sports, Bill Russell. West’s Los Angeles Lakers lost to Russell’s Boston Celtics six times in the NBA finals, lending a Sisyphean context to West's playing career.
It was only after Russell retired that West was able to win his single championship as a player. Later, as the Lakers’ general manager, he was able to build seven championship teams, but as related by Lazenby, longtime NBA writer and author of six previous basketball books, readers will conclude that West’s administrative championships did not compensate for the losses as a player.
Lazenby reaches back into West’s hardscrabble West Virginia youth to provide a background for the hypercompetitive athlete to come. He incorporates contemporary interviews with West—and teammates, coaches, and rivals—as well those done through the years into a portrait that will mesmerize basketball fans who remember the man who became the model for the NBA’s ubiquitous logo.
A thoughtful, serious biography of an athlete both blessed and cursed by talent and a competitive spirit. ..." Wes Lukowsky
About the Author
"... I teach journalism at Virginia Tech, about 100 writing students each semester. I also do some broadcast work, calling games on a local ESPN affiliate. I have appeared in more than three dozen TV shows and and sports documentaries, including more than a dozen Sports Centuries on ESPN. I have authored or contributed to 60 books, including The NBA Encyclopedia, Total Basketball and several others. ..." Roland Lazenby
• Author: Roland Lazenby • Binding: Hardcover • Number of Pages: 448 pages • Publisher: ESPN • Publishing Date: February 23rd 2010 • Language: English
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