USA TODAY International Edition
JERRY WEST
Jerry West is Mr. Clutch. He’s The Logo. A master architect, building teams behind the scenes.
He’s also, at 79, a life-long sufferer of depression. Or, as he calls it, the dark place.
“This is something that doesn’t go away, this depression,” West says. “When I go through it, it’s almost always based on my (low) self-worth and self-esteem.”
West sees his suffering less as an illness and more as a product of a tormented childhood of abuse at the hands of his father. That’s part of why West turned to basketball as a kid — a “misfit with no confidence,” in his words — in West Virginia. It was a safe haven where he could build confidence.
“Everyone is driven by different things in life,” West says. “To some degree, based on some of the things I saw growing up, I was looking for an escape. I was just looking for something that I’d be appreciated for.”
Sometimes he played all by himself in a fantasy world in which he always splashed a game-winning buzzer-beater. “For anyone who saw me,” he says, “they probably said, ‘My God, this kid is crazy.’ ”
He emerged from childhood sanctuary to be one of the greatest players in history. The darkness never left him, though. “I feel that same sadness at times now,” he says.
He took his West Virginia Mountaineers to the championship game of the NCAA tournament, where they lost. His Los Angeles Lakers made the NBA Finals nine times — and lost eight.
“I’ve learned way more in my life through failure than I ever did from success,” he says. He didn’t feel the elation he thought he would when the Lakers won the NBA title at last in 1972. “All I could do right then,” he says, “was go back to the other losses.” Team camaraderie buoyed him during his playing days. As a team executive — with the Lakers, Memphis
Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and, newly, the Los Angeles Clippers — he
often is alone in his day-to-day operations. “You’re the judge, jury and executioner,” he says. The kid who wanted to be a hero, sinking all those game-winners in imaginary games, says he never wanted credit for his successes as an executive. “You’ll never see me on a (championship) podium or in a picture,” West notes. “It was never about me. Yet, on the other hand, there are times when I’d be down and out, and you feel like you’d want someone to come up and say, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at what you’re doing.’ That’s when the (depression) kicks in.”
West says he thinks he’s able to see talent and character through a different lens than other executives.
“Some of these kids, these players, they’re survivors,” he says. “In many cases I thought I was a survivor. That’s who I’m attracted to. Someone who’s been through something.”