Jerry West is one of the greatest players in NBA history, an elite scorer who willingly passed the ball, was a great defender and was beloved by virtually everyone. Even Boston Celtics radio guy Johnny Most, the chain-smoking, snarky-nickname-creating, gravel-voiced mother of all homer announcers called him “Gentleman Jerry.”
He led his team to the finals year after year, where he averaged more than 30 points a game and was a lock-down defender on the other team’s star.
And he was a supreme athletic stylist whose signature move — gliding to his right with one last high, hard dribble before launching a pull-up jump shot — was such a timeless classic that it became the inspiration for the NBA logo seen round the world.
Yet somehow, despite all that scoring and all that winning and all that branding, and even acquiring the nickname Mr. Clutch, Jerry West also became synonymous with losing at the highest level.
And he knows it.
He knows it because it’s mentioned in every profile.
He knows it because he’s asked about it in every interview.
Lately West, who just turned 72 but looks 52 with the same full head of silvery hair he always had, is being asked about it a lot. That’s because West also holds one very dubious distinction: he has lost the NBA Finals to the Boston Celtics more times than anyone else in history, dead or alive.
“Six times in eight years,” he said ruefully. “Even today, I haven’t put that to bed. It made me a lot different person than I would like to be… I have not come to grips with it yet.”
Put under the microscope, those six Finals losses to the Celtics look even more painful for such an obsessive competitor and compulsive perfectionist. Three of them — 1962, ‘66 and ‘69 — went to a decisive game seven. West put up huge numbers across the stat sheet in all three games, yet the Lakers lost them by three points in overtime, by two points and again by two points thanks to an incredibly lucky Don Nelson foul-line jumper that hit the back rim, bounced up two feet and fell straight down through the net. That ‘69 buzz-kill shot at the LA Sports Arena by Nelson — a former Lakers teammate, now the coach of the Golden State Warriors — was the last of a grand total of seven points over seven years that forever framed West’s legacy, no matter how great his individual accomplishments.
And it sealed the most bitter of all his Celtic losses. “Most years they were better than us and they deserved to win,” West said. “But not that year. That year we were better. Period.”
As the undisputed expert on the psychic pain of losing to the Celtics, West is confident that Phil Jackson, Kobe Bryant and the rest of the current Lakers team will not have to suffer that same sense of anguish and despair when the retro-cool reality show known as the NBA Finals comes to its epic conclusion this week.
“I think the Lakers will win it in a long, tough struggle. Six or seven games,” West told Easy Reader on the Tuesday morning before the Finals started last Thursday. “Boston doesn’t really have a post game and the Lakers have the two best post players in the league in Kobe and Pau Gasol.”
West’s prediction got off to a flying start Thursday night when the Lakers won easily, 102-89. They established themselves as the physical aggressors in the first 30 seconds when Ron Artest took down Paul Pierce in what looked like a typical MMA move. Gasol and Bynum easily handled the Celtics supposedly scary front line — Kevin Garnett looked old and injured, Kendrick Perkins looked timid and Rasheed Wallace merely looked whacko — and mid-way through the third quarter the rout was on.
Further support for West’s prediction came from the statistic du jour in blogland: Phil Jackson-coached teams are 47-0 in playoff series when they win Game 1.
The Greatest Hoops Generation
Redondo Beach’s own Bill Sharman, one of only three men to make the Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach and a player, agreed with West’s assessment of the match-up everyone in LA is talking about, from the mayor and police chief on down.
“It’s going to be really hard for the Lakers, but I think they will win it in six or seven games,” said the 84-year-old Sharman, who took time out from his busy schedule to talk hoops at his beautiful Redondo home. Under the loving care of his sweet and devoted wife Joyce, Sharman is still exercising every day, still engaged with the outside world — a Navy veteran of the Pacific campaign in WWII, he attended a Memorial Day Parade — and is still built like a sleek greyhound with not an ounce of fat on him. And he still has a sharply analytical mind that won’t stop working on the problem of how to beat the Celtics. “A lot depends on Andrew Bynum playing well. We really need him to establish our toughness inside….I’m hoping this week-long rest will get his knee healthy. Then he can help Pau Gasol battle Perkins and Garnett and Big Baby Davis.”
Although he grew up here and has lived and worked in LA for the last 40 years, Sharman admits he has divided loyalties: he was an All-Pro guard for the Celtics from 1952-62, when he was the best outside shooter in the league, an All-NBA defender and the best foul shooter in NBA history. Then he brought the team-first Celtic Way to LA and coached the West-Wilt-and-Gail Goodrich Lakers — oh, and there was a bench scrub named Pat Riley — to their first modern-era Finals win over New York in 1972. That was the same at-long-last championship season when he led the Lakers on an incredible 33-game winning streak, an NBA record that will probably never be broken.
“I always root for the Celtics, except when they play the Lakers,” admitted Sharman, who works as a special consultant for the Lakers. Last week he was busy preparing his Celtics scouting report, a double-secret document that he personally presents to Lakers owner Jerry Buss and General Manager Mitch Kupchak.
Cousy on Kobe
Sharman recommended that Easy Reader also get a prediction from Hall-of-Famer Bob Cousy, his running buddy in the Celtics’ best-ever backcourt of the ’50s and early ‘60s. Not only were both Sharman and Cousy selected to the NBA’s Top 50 of the First 50 Years list back in 1996, but they were backed up by defensive beast KC Jones and bank-shooter supreme Sam Jones, himself a Hall-of-Famer who had to apprentice for four years before he finally took Sharman’s starting spot as the shooting guard.
Reached at his home in Massachusetts, Cousy declined to make a prediction on who will win the much-hyped, much-anticipated re-match of the 2008 Finals in which the Celtics handed LA a serious humiliation in the game six clincher by the unfathomable score of 131-92.
But he said he had good reasons not to make a prediction.
First, although that epic embarrassment took place 24 months ago, Kobe Bryant — who shot 7-for-22 and tuned out halfway through the third quarter — is still seething about it. And back in Boston the feel-good effect from Kevin Garnett’s “Nothing is Impossible” post-championship howling finally faded away this season. After a great start that echoed their championship season, the Celtics finished 27-27 in their last 54 games and found themselves mired in fourth place in the East behind Cleveland, Orlando and Atlanta. They were frequently injured, had ugly late-season losses to New Jersey and Memphis, and appeared to be aging ahead of schedule. Going into the playoffs hoop experts like Cousy figured they had no shot at traversing their only possible road to the title: beating the Miami Heat, Cleveland Cavaliers, Orlando Magic and (most likely) the LA Lakers in succession.
Now, despite two consecutive monumental upsets that may drive LeBron James out of Cleveland and inspire yet another expensive reshuffling in Orlando, Cousy is still not quite ready to predict a Celtics championship. First, he wants to see if they can continue their supreme effort on D.
“Emotionally, of course I want the Celtics to win. But I told everybody the Celtics wouldn’t beat the Cavaliers in the playoffs, and they did,” Cousy said with a chuckle. “Then I told everybody they wouldn’t beat the Magic, and they did. I’m done making predictions.”
But he did agree with Sharman and West on one crucial point: this series will be a test of the Lakers’ much-questioned manhood, especially for Pau Gasol, who was overrun two years ago by the hand-to-hand combat while still trying to learn the nuances of the Triangle Offense three months into his Lakers career.
This time it’s sure to be a tough, physical battle with large, beefy bodies flying all around the court, with players and coaches screaming about calls made and not made, and defenses dominating for long stretches to the point where nobody can get a good look at the basket.
“If the Celtics can play the kind of stifling defense they did against the Cavaliers and the Magic, then a good offensive team like the Lakers can be stunned when none of their stuff is working and they don’t know where to go for points,” Cousy said. “The series will turn on the Celtics’ ability to play that same kind of suffocating defense.”
It’s a high-octane match up with only one given: Kobe Bean Bryant will play at an elite level as he continues to morph from the Older, Limited Kobe he was for much of the season to the Kobe of Old, a magical process that began last month when he had his knee drained of two ounces of accumulated fluid.
“Kobe is now playing as well as I have ever seen him play,” says West, and he should know: He scouted Kobe as a high school senior, called his private work-out the best he had ever seen, and took a huge risk in 1996 when he traded starting center Vlade Divac to Charlotte in a draft-day deal/steal that brought the 17-year-old prep phenom to the City of Lights with the 13th overall pick.
Without Kobe controlling the game tempo, dominating the ball and scoring at will, there is no way the Lakers can win four games. So expect to see even more of the gimme-the-ball-and-get-out-of-my-way Kobe who was throwing dare-to-be-great daggers at the Phoenix Suns late in the Game 6 clincher and showed up again in Game 1 of the Finals with 30 points, seven rebounds and six assists.
Rondo Rising
This re-mix of a re-match has more fascinating sub-plots than Avatar.
One of the more bizarre: Will Celtic center Kendrick Perkins get a technical foul — it would be his seventh of the playoffs – and automatically be suspended for the next game? That unusual cliff-hanger has some people calling for a rule change — players should start over in each new series rather than accumulate techs along the way — while others hope it will be a catalyst for Perkins to cease and desist his continual growling, scowling and whining about every call that goes against him. Although he plays with a tough, physical style and is much admired for his defensive intensity, there is a downside: According to him, he has never committed a foul or set a moving screen, and he isn‘t shy about letting the refs know it. His complaints grew old and stale, the refs resented it and finally they started picking on him last season. Now his sense of persecution has gotten out of control.
“I love Perk, but maybe if he stopped looking at the refs like he was a serial killer he might not get so many techs,” Cousy says. “This is his seventh year in the league. He needs to grow up emotionally.”
Another bubbling subplot: Will Kobe get his fifth title and, more important, his second Shaq-free title?
Meanwhile, the Celtics lead the NBA with 17 titles while the Lakers, with four since Kobe showed up, are closing fast with 15. Dr. Buss’s son even mentioned the narrowing gap when he accepted the championship trophy last year. Will they close the title gap to one this year?
Conversely, there’s the issue of the Celtics’ Big Four — Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allan and Rajon Rondo — trying to win that second title to forever lift them above all the other one-and-done NBA Champions that came and went over the years. And there are big bonus points involved: it would stop Kobe dead in his tracks once again, just short of the promised land, and frustrate his messianic drive to prove he can win titles without Shaq and surpass Michael Jordan’s six trophies. That would leave only Bill Russell with nine titles. Of course, Russell only played 11 years while Kobe entered the league at 18 and could easily play till he’s 40.
But the juiciest subplot of all has only emerged in the last couple of weeks. Can Celtic point guard Rajon Rondo, a 6-foot-1 ball hawk with freakish athleticism, blow-by quickness, a 7-foot wingspan and hands like catcher’s mitts, continue his emergence as a sudden superstar? Can he continue to be an unstoppable force with the ball that can go anywhere he wants and create any kind of shot he wants for his teammates or himself? Could this 21st overall pick in the 2006 draft actually be a game changer on the level of a Dwayne Wade or even Kobe? Could a vastly improved jump shot make that big a difference for a guy who had always been a defensive specialist and pass-first point guard?
The new Rondo subplot produced the question of the day on talk radio, whether it was Manny from Simi Valley, Vic the Brick live from LA Live or Sean from Dorchester with a wicked important question: should Kobe come out from the opening tip and guard Rondo on a full time basis, using his superior size and great quickness to neutralize him? You know, like he did in the first round against Oklahoma City when Russell Westbrook’s mis-match with Derek Fisher was threatening to tilt the series the Thunder’s way?
North Redondo’s Paul Westphal, the greatest player ever to come out of the Beach Cities — Class of ‘68 at the dearly departed Aviation High School — thinks that would be a smart tactic.
“I think Kobe will have to take Rondo,” says Westphal, who is now coaching the Sacramento Kings. “Kobe’s size and smarts give him a good chance to keep Rondo away from the basket and it might even save Kobe some energy. I think it would take a lot less energy to play Rondo loose, hang back and let him have the jump shot, than to chase Ray Allen around endless screens all night.”
Telling His Own Story His Own Way
Not too long after the NBA Finals are over, Jerry West’s long-awaited autobiography will finally come out. After laboring on it for many years and then bringing in co-writer Jonathan Coleman to help, West said it’s just about ready to go.
The problem is that someone named Roland Lazenby, who has been writing second-rate books about various Lakers for decades, beat him to the punch with a West bio that came out earlier this year.
Much of the book is an amateurish psychological dissection of West’s West Virginia roots and the never-be-satisfied perfectionism he learned from his mother. Throw in all the heart-breaking losses over three decades and you are left with one very tortured soul, restless and unhappy to this day.
Asked about some of the assertions in the bio, West snorted.
“That guy doesn’t know anything about me,” he said. “Most of the book is just stuff he got from old newspapers….the real story will be told in my book.”
That book will naturally deal with his rural, hardscrabble childhood.
“I’ll be talking about some of the difficulties I had in growing up, how I overcame some of the obstacles that manifested themselves in front of me,” he said. “And of course I’ll have to talk about all the times we lost to the Celtics.”
But there was one good thing about all that losing, he said.
“The trauma of losing motivated me more than anything,” he said. “Losing the NBA Finals is not a fun thing to do.”
Contact the writer at: paulteetor@verizon.net. ER
Did anyone see the riots anfter the last game this week? What kind of fans celebrate by destroying their own city? The LA Lakers are a group of scofflaws. According to AP, 38 people were arrested for “public intoxication, vandalism or inciting a riot.” Probably doesn’t help to have criminals on the team. Kobe seems to have escaped that rape charge in Colorado just fine. In any case, the basketball is starting to seem pre arranged. LA always seem to get more than their share. Remember Derrick Fisher and the Spurs? Wonder if it’s because of Jack Nicholson.