Legends of Basketball Official Website

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 Shy and withdrawn, West preferred solitary fishing and hunting to other activities and, ultimately, took up basketball because he could play it alone.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.