All fans of the Los Angeles Lakers and West Virginia Mountaineers know just how much the spectre of Jerry West looms over their teams. The source of his great competitiveness West drew from his mother Cecile. In honor of Mother’s Day, I offer this excerpt from my book, “Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon,” recently released by ESPN Books. It reflects on the role of women in West’s life and in the lives of basketball players everywhere.
Jerry West’s grandmother, Salena Kile West, died in 1910 at age 41, having been worn down by a succession of troubled maternities amidst a world of toil. She had birthed nine children in fourteen years, a succession of labors that defined the wretchedness of subsistence farm life in rural West Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It was a life wrought with unrelenting difficulty for women in that age before rural electrification. Pregnant year after year, all the while faced with the staggering work load of a farm woman, the cooking, washing, cleaning, cutting wood and tending stove fires seven days a week. Salena had somehow raised the brood of children needed to scratch out a life from the thin soil of the West Virginia hills in rural Roane County northeast of Charleston. Like so many women of the period, her life had been an act played out in drudgery and isolation. Her first six pregnancies had brought the supposed blessing of six boys to help with her husband’s work, but that also meant that for much of her life she had been the only female to support a family of seven farming males.
The troubled life of Salena Kile West sprung from circumstances all too familiar for generations of rural women. “Living was just drudgery then,” a farm wife from that era recalled. “Living — just living— was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was the farm life for us.”
The history of the American frontier — and make no mistake, West Virginia remained a fixture of that frontier in 1910—has been written as a man’s story yet the history itself was borne and endured by women like Salena Kile West. Likewise, the story of her grandson, basketball legend Jerry West, would seem to be a man’s story, yet in so many ways, his success was a product of the strong and enduring women amongst his forbearers.
Stories passed down through the West family say that the birthing process over the years had been particularly hard on Salena, a typical problem of that era. One federal study said many farm women of the early 20th century had almost no access to medical care, particularly during child birth. As a result, a large percentage of them suffered from tears of the perineum, the area between the anus and vagina. These tears, many of which were third degree and left unrepaired, according to the report, were so bad, so painful long after birth, that it was difficult to see how farm women “managed to stay on their feet.” And of course many didn’t.
It was this cumulative effect of the nine births and the harsh life that brought Salena to an early grave, according to family legend. She apparently continued to bleed long after the last birth.
Her early death and the harshness of farm life were routine to the world that shaped Jerry West’s highly strung competitive nature.
I found my first clue to the feminine influence on West in a 50-year-old photograph, both comical and telling in its intensity. The photo is from signing day, 1956. Local high school star Jerry West was signing to play college basketball with West Virginia University. There have been literally thousands of photographs taken of West over the decades, yet this is the one, found in the long-ago pages of a small Mountain State newspaper, that says so much about who he is and the family chemistry that wrapped him so tightly and made him, to use his own words, “so crazy.”
He’s standing there with his parents, Howard and Cecile West, and WVU’s handsome young coach, Fred Schaus. Of the four, there are two sets of eyes that emit the same quiet fury. Their energy and indignation are absolutely radioactive. Mother and son, eyes burning like Blake’s tiger, obviously share something unspeakable, something far away and deeply troubling. The occasion should have been joyous. Just weeks earlier West had experienced what he has often described as one of the true moments of delight in his entire life — leading his East Bank High School team to the state basketball championship. But here he is, still buzzing at his success, and yet as the shutter snaps his eyes radiate this stern message: this is no time to smile, not even a goofy 18-year-old, I-rule-the-world-in-this-moment sort of grin. For mother and son, the visages are fixed fiercely, because there are things to be done. Houses to be cleaned. Clothes to be washed. Porches to be swept. Shots to be hoisted. Games to be won. Discontent to be nurtured. Unhappiness to be endured.
His face reflecting immense parental pride, Howard West poses there with his wife and son, enjoying this moment seemingly in ignorance of just how alienated he is from both of them. The elder West, a non-descript guy in the slightly worn suit of a 1950s working man, was said to be a nice person, one who had survived a harsh upbringing to become a community figure known for his warm deeds toward friends and neighbors. Yet there is something deep within him that is profoundly unfulfilled, something almost sinister that neither he nor his family can ever quite contend with.
On his father’s side, Jerry West’s English ancestors landed at Jamestown, and later helped settle the wild, bloody frontier that would become West Virginia. Yet this photograph suggests just how much of his persona Jerry West drew from his mother. Cecile Sue was a Creasy, a forthright clan that settled in West Virginia’s magnificent Kanawha Valley in the 19th century, hearty people who made their living on the keelboats that hauled salt and other goods along the Kanawha River down to the Ohio.
With his long frame and 38-inch arms, West would seem to have been right at home amongst the keel-haulers, pushing and pulling those boats in the hearty, hard-scrabble milieu along the river a century earlier. Like the keel-haulers before him, the brooding and sullen young man in the picture appears preoccupied with the constant and distressing need to find a place to employ his seemingly boundless energy.
“I’ve always been a nervous person,” West would admit many times. In fact, his restlessness before games is almost as legendary as his jump shot.
He and his mother would share a psyche often driven to distraction by this nervous energy. Later in life, this no-nonsense woman would greet warmly the occasional strangers who traveled to the family home in the little village of Chelyan (Shill-yan) to worship her son. She would serve cold home-made lemonade and even pull out scrapbooks to revisit his glory days. But, beyond such moments, there was little charm about Jerry West’s mother.
Patience was not her virtue, nor was it her son’s. An unadulterated demand for perfection was their shared burden. The mother saw it in her son at an early age, because she recognized it in herself.
“He’s always wanted perfection,” she would confide to sportswriter Bill Libby in 1969. “I think he’s come closer to it than most. But I doubt he’s satisfied. He’s still the boy he always was, who wants to be perfect and just can’t understand why he can’t be.”
The expectation of perfection is a gnarly and contentious quality, impossible to endure yet essential to greatness. It is the central quality in basketball’s select few, the truly great players, according to Tex Winter, who coached basketball brilliantly for six decades and intensely followed every detail of the game in the process. “That’s the one thing about those rare players like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan and Jerry West and Oscar Robertson—they want to be the best and they are never satisfied with anything less. That’s what makes them what they are. They’re all very complex.”
Such complexity would remain the core of West’s anxious persona his entire life. At age 70, reflecting on his career and trying to explain it, he said, “I’d like to see a perfect world in basketball. It’s not perfect, and that drives me crazy.”
Cecile West kept order in her limited world by focusing on cooking and cleaning her house. She kept her most developed relationships with her sisters, her cousins, and her closest neighbors. Sometimes they all got along famously, sometimes they didn’t.
“On my mother’s side, the Creaseys all lived together in Cabin Creek,” Charles West recalled. “Sometimes among one or another of the sisters there’d be some animosity. It had to do with my grandmother, who in her late age was having some difficulty. Her youngest daughter and her oldest daughter were fighting over who was taking the best care of her. But for the most part they all got along.”
James Creasey recalled that his own mother would join the tight-knit group of Creasey girls and their sisters-in-law for regular gossip sessions on the Wests’ back porch. “You’d have trouble getting a word in between the group of them,” Creasey remembered with a laugh.
Sitting in the shadows on that porch, taking it all in was little Jerry. He would come to harbor a lifelong love of gossip. When West first arrived in Los Angeles to play for the Lakers, teammate Elgin Baylor quickly picked up on that gossipy nature and nicknamed West “Miss Louella” in reference to the L.A. gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Later, as a team executive, he would be known as a notorious gossiper in NBA circles, with reporters, fellow NBA team figures, anyone who knew the good inside stuff. Of course no one in the NBA has the inside scoop like the GMs. By virtue of their jobs, the team executives spend their lives on the telephone, incessantly chatting about players and coaches, sifting through a zillion tidbits of information to decide which players to trade for, which ones to avoid, which coaches to hire, which ones to fire.
In many ways, Jerry West was born and raised to fill such a post. Actually the “Miss Louella” tag doesn’t quite explain his skill. Gossip is very different in a small town than in a city. As Jim Creasey said of the Wests, “We could look out our front window and see in their back window, so everybody was pretty close in town.”
In a small town, all of your neighbors know your business as well as your name and your daddy’s name. That knowledge becomes the grist of gossip, and talk in a small town can be prying. True, city newspapers have long featured gossip columnists to reveal details about celebrities. But the individual city dweller is protected by the anonymity that comes with population, while people living in small towns are at the mercy of their neighbors. Respectful and friendly neighbors such as James Creasey’s family are often abundant. Small towns can be wonderfully relaxed. Yet they can also be invasive and cruel, because the gossip is based on the ups and downs of people’s lives. Thus, everything is magnified in small communities. In fact, one could argue that only in a small town is shame truly shame.
Plus, gossip is often the premier entertainment in a place where life can unfold slowly and with more than a bit of boredom. That ennui can produce a gossip plump with intriguing and often exaggerated details, the everyday comedy, heartbreak, drama, exposure, all of the elements necessary for a good mortification when serious things really do happen. Unfortunately for the family of Howard West, the 1940s would bring them far too many moments of deep humiliation. Cecile West may have been a shy mountain girl at heart, but like her son Jerry, she was possessed of tremendous personal pride. Humiliation was not something she did well.
Like her mother before her, she was “ramrod straight,” an erect woman, with her red hair now graying with resplendent distinction as she entered her forties. Howard often teasingly called her “Red” when the mood between them was agreeable.
“She was kind of a tall woman,” Jim Creasey said. “Her husband wasn’t that tall. Jerry got his height and everything from her. Back then everybody had to walk to the store. The store was at the end of our street. That’s where you’d see her. You’d see her walkin’ to the store.”
So the Creasey girls likely had plenty to discuss on Cecile’s porch. If Cecile truly enjoyed those moments on the porch with her sisters, they appeared to be the few in her life.
In addition to gossip sessions, the house’s big back porch was where the West girls spent many hours ironing the constant flow of laundry that came through the household and made its way to and from the clothesline. One of the big chores was ironing their father’s work clothes, which were steeped in the strong odors of the refinery. They had to be ironed just right to meet Cecile’s standards. This may seem like a minor detail, but in an Appalachia cut from the frontier, clean households could be scarce.
“Mother was a workaholic,” Patricia said. “Well, her whole family, they were Creaseys. And all those girls, I always told them they were nuts about dirt. They always had spic and span houses. Whatever they had was clean. You didn’t tear anything up, and you didn’t get things dirty. You might get dirty yourself, but you were always cleaned up. I always remember if you were lying on the floor and went to sleep, Mom always woke you up and made you go in the bed room.”
“Mother was a perfectionist,” Hannah agreed. “You were never supposed to do anything out of line. You were supposed to be perfect.”
Of all the family traits, this perfectionist strain would loom in Jerry’s profile. As a woman who had grown up in the rural narrowness of early 20th century West Virginia, Cecile West’s idea of perfection was less grand in scope than that of her son’s, yet it embodied perfection’s every effort and element.
Her masterpieces were Sunday dinners. And the heyday of those dinners came in the thirties and forties before her family was crushed and broken by a series of events. Charles recalled attending Sunday services on his own as a boy, and as soon as he returned home Cecile would order her eldest son into action. “She’d say, ‘Get off those good clothes. We need three fryers.’ I’d cut the heads off with a hatchet, and she’d do the rest,” Charles remembered.
She would dress the birds immaculately, fry them to tenderest perfection, and plate them with an array of fresh vegetables, pole beans, carrots, peas, potatoes, all plucked fresh from the massive garden that Howard West tended and the chicken house that kept her family supplied with fresh birds and eggs. The main courses of the meal were all scrumptious, her children would recall decades later, but her fresh rolls and desserts, all made from scratch, were what qualified Cecile West. “My mother was the Van Gogh of rolls,” said Barbara West, the youngest of her six children. “She was an incredible cook but more important than that she was an incredible baker. She was a perfectionist. You’ve heard about her hot rolls. Her hot rolls were like a masterpiece, the structure, the uniformity. They were delicious.”
On the spot she could turn out from scratch a white cake with apricot filling, a three-layer cake with white meringue icing, Charles recalled longingly. “Her idea of recognition and praise was cooking a great Sunday dinner. That was an event at our place.”
As with so many basketball players, West also drew his size from his mother. She was red-headed, and almost 5-10, maybe taller.
“Mother’s family was always big-boned,” recalled her eldest child, Patricia West Noel. “The boys were big. My mother was bigger than the other girls. My mother was like a horse.”
And she was filled with contradiction. To begin with, her name was Cecile, and her family pronounced it “Cecil,” like she was somebody’s uncle or brother.
She had to have been an awkward teen, large, painfully shy, and profoundly unhappy, just as she was most of her adult life. Supposedly, her eyes were the giveaway. Photographs taken of her often caught her unhappiness, no matter what the occasion. Oldest daughter Patricia was struck by this while looking at an old family picture. “Mother had the most stern look on her face. I don’t think she ever enjoyed much of anything,” she said. “She never stopped to smell the roses. She just felt like she had to go at a terrible pace her whole life.”
Family members suspected Cecile’s many insecurities begat a coldness to her children.
“Her insecurities came from the way she was raised,” explained Barbara West, her youngest child. “I don’t think the Creaseys were warm as a family.”
“My mother was not a loving woman,” sister Hannah agreed. “She never said I love you, she never put her arms around you. Dad rocked you and told you he loved you. But her mother was kind of cold like that.”
Her children would struggle with the fact that she rarely, if ever, told them she loved them. Not any hugs or kisses, not a lot of coddling or cuddling from Cecile. And when they got kids of their own, she would warn her daughters sternly not to spoil them with kisses and sweetness. To modern sensitivities, this might seem grounds for psychiatric intervention, but there were mitigating factors. Cecile was a child of a harsh and unforgiving world. She was a machine of a female, a product of generations of conditioning, built and bred to withstand the brutality of the frontier. Her own mother and grandmother had lost three children each. Her mother would live into her nineties, but would spend her later years lost in a world of dementia where she often fretted and wanted to keep track of her babies.
So in a very real sense, Cecile learned her lessons well. She coddled no one. And for her children she required a standard every bit as rigid as her own mother’s. That was the pioneer way. Protect your children; protect your heart.
“Hannah didn’t think Mom paid much attention to the children,” said Patricia. “Now she took care of us. When we were growing up, we didn’t have much. I tell you one thing. We always were clean. We had a clean bed to sleep in. But she never really went anywhere with us or never really did anything with us. She was set in her ways. She liked to cook and keep house.”
“She and I we weren’t as close,” Hannah admitted. “She was a fault finder. And this is where I’m like my Dad, I need someone to approve of me and he did too. Mother was a perfectionist. You were never supposed to do anything out of line. You were supposed to be perfect.”
“I wouldn’t say that I was very close to my mother at all,” said Jerry’s sister Barbara. “She worked very hard her whole life. I think she was crippled by her insecurities. While my mother and I had a cold relationship, I appreciated her for her accomplishments and abilities.”
Those modest achievements would be reflected in the accomplishments of her children. And that would perhaps be a fair and final measure of Cecile Sue Creasey West. Through a haze of disappointment and profound heartache, she raised up a brood that would be known for intelligence and kindness, the fine fruit of a mysterious tree, a brood that also happened to include the one great player to become the NBA Logo, the symbol of a game that would grow to find fans and devotees all around the globe.
In that regard, she is like her famous son, emblematic of basketball mothers everywhere.
