Lakernoise

Tags: 1960 U.S. Olympic Team, Boston Celtics, East Bank, Elgin Baylor, Fred Schaus, Hot Rod Hundley, Hubert Humphrey, Jerry West, John F. Kennedy, Los Angeles Lakers, Minneapolis Lakers, NBA Draft, Oscar Robertson, Pete Newell, Red Auerbach, Roland Lazenby, West Virginia Mountaineers, West Virginia University

An excerpt from my book, Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

It was 50 years ago this month, in April of 1960, that Jerry West was drafted by the Minneapolis Lakers. The draft wasn’t a big deal back then. Al Attles, who would be taken in the fifth round out of North Carolina A & T, recalled that he didn’t even hear about it until several days afterward.

West knew the draft was coming, but he had little time to think about it or even focus on it. His life presented a whirlwind in the weeks after his senior season at West Virginia University, with his schedule loaded with various all star games and the trials for the U.S. Olympic team. He traveled from New York to Denver and still had time to make various appearances around his home state.

He also informed his parents that he was getting married in a matter of weeks. He had dated Martha Jane Kane for better than two years, but he had never introduced her to his mother and family. So it came as quite a shock that spring when West’s mother Cecile learned Jerry and the young woman were making plans to get married in early April. The ceremony was to take place at a small chapel in the Catholic student center on WVU’s campus.

There was hardly time to make plans. First West dashed off to Madison Square Garden where he finally competed on the floor against Oscar Robertson in an East-West college all-star game.  For four years, he and Robertson had eyed each other from afar in college basketball. Somehow no one had managed to get them on the floor against each other. In the East-West game, Robertson scored 20, but West finished with 23 and helped lead his team to victory. The outcome hardly allowed anyone to draw any sort of conclusions, especially since Lenny Wilkens of Providence was named the game’s MVP.

From there it was off to Denver for the Olympic trials. Pete Newell, who had retired from college coaching following his University of California team’s loss to Ohio State in the 1960 NCAA championship game, coached the group of college stars who would take on the various AAU teams for the right to represent America in the Olympic Games in Rome that August and September. West shot the ball terribly in the first game as his confidence plummeted.

“We were picking the team and getting ready for the summer games in Rome,” Newell recalled. “In the first session of tryouts, Jerry didn’t play well. Afterward, he came to see me and said he didn’t think he was playing well enough to help the team. He said, ‘Maybe I don’t belong here.’ I told him, ‘Listen, Jerry. If you don’t go to Rome, I don’t go.’ The next day he had a great practice. He was never a person to seek adulation… But he was driven for it, driven for greatness. His drive was greater than his fear of not succeeding. It’s just that he’s never been one to sing his own praises, to laud himself.”

West’s nature as an intense perfectionist had already been established. He demanded perfection from himself every night and was inconsolable when he failed to deliver.

“As a player, he would get down on himself,” Newell said, a phrase often repeated by West’s teammates and coaches.

“I was nervous all the time,” West explained. “But then again, I was a nervous player. That’s where I got my energy from.”

“Jerry was never a very secure kind of person,” Newell said. “Believe it or not, he has never had a great self-esteem. Everybody thinks more of Jerry than he does of himself. That’s the West Virginia in him.”

West never stayed down for long, however. In the championship game against the AAU national champions, the Peoria Caterpillars, West scored 39 in a big victory that established that the college players would make up the bulk of the U.S. Olympic team.

West returned to West Virginia with both his wedding and the NBA draft looming in the coming week. He hoped to go to New York to play for the Knicks. The Cincinnati Royals would pick first, and it was clear they were going to exercise their territorial rights in the draft to take Robertson. Picking second were the Minneapolis Lakers, once the league’s dominant team but one that had recently fallen on hard times. Speculation stirred as to whom the Lakers would take. They needed a big man to complement their sensational young forward, Elgin Baylor.

Laker guard Hot Rod Hundley, a former West Virginia star, was back in his home state for an appearance that week and told a local newspaper, “Jerry’s just too good to pass up, no matter how bad we need a big man.”

An NBA All-Star in 1960, Hundley laughingly acknowledged that West just might be taking his job. The Lakers had finished 25-50 in 1960. They had acquired 6-foot-11 Ray Felix to help their undersized center, Boomer Krebs, in the post, but the combination was barely adequate. “We still needed a center,” Jim Pollard, the Lakers coach at the time, recalled in a 1992 interview. “But all of our informal scouting reports came back the same. They said Jerry West is the best white player available. I watched him play and said, ‘Forget white, outside of Oscar Robertson, West is the best player, period.’”

As expected, the Royals took Robertson with the first pick. So West fell to the Lakers and began contemplating the idea of spending his winters in Minneapolis and playing guard in the NBA. “West was lightning quick and he could score,” Pollard said, “so we figured he would make the adjustment to pro guard.”

The weekend of April 9-11 brought with it an insane schedule. That Friday, the little village of East Bank was renamed West Bank for a day, in honor of West, just as it was four years earlier when he led East Bank to the state high school championship. A motorcade came to his house in Chelyan and picked up West and his parents for the ride over to the high school, where West was presented the key to the town by the mayor.

Roy Williams and Duke Shaver, his old coaches, were there, beaming. “He’s East Bank’s first and only All American, God bless him,” Williams told the crowd.

That night, West played in a tournament in nearby St. Albans and scored 41 points. Then Saturday night, the night before his wedding, he again played in St. Albans and scored another 41 points.

On Sunday morning, Cecile, his father Howard, and the family rose early, got dressed in their best, packed into Charles’ car, and drove to Morgantown for the wedding.

Afterward, Jane West would move in with West’s family in Chelyan and spend her days helping out with the family chores, as much as Cecile would let her, and writing letters to her new husband as he flitted first around the country and then around the globe playing basketball for the good old USA.

That spring, the entire state of West Virginia was abuzz as Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy came down to the wire in the Democratic presidential primary. Kennedy had enjoyed a substantial lead in the campaign until his Catholicism became an issue that spring. Suddenly Humphrey had gone from far behind to showing a lead in the polls in West Virginia. The state would prove to be critical in deciding the primary, so Kennedy began pumping substantial amounts of money into the state, and both campaigns spent considerable time there.

Howard West, a Democratic party worker, didn’t support Kennedy because he had read about Joseph Kennedy’s checkered past. “My dad came home one day and said he had his picture taken with Kennedy,” Jerry’s sister Barbara recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, wow, are you going to get a copy?’ He said, ‘No, I told him I wasn’t going to support him. I was going to support Hubert Humphrey.’ I said, ‘How could you do that?,” As Jerry’s older brother Charles remembered, his father always seemed to have a knack for supporting the wrong faction of the party.

Howard made sure that Jerry made an appearance with Humphrey and his wife. Photographs of West with Humphrey’s family made newspapers around the state.

“The secretary of agriculture came through to speak for Humphrey,” Charles West recalled. “He told the crowd that Humbert Humphrey was going to sweep West Virginia the way Jerry West swept the backboards.”

Ultimately, West Virginia Democrats supported Kennedy in overwhelming fashion, and Humphrey withdrew from the campaign the very next day.

By the time it was over, many people in the state had grown weary of the politicking and alleged vote buying. A letter writer to the Beckley paper expressed a popular sentiment of the day when he wrote that the voters should ditch all the politicians and elect Jerry West president. That way, he said, we’d at least have someone who worked hard and told the truth.

In April, the Touchdown Club had a banquet for the WVU basketball team at the Hotel Morgan in Morgantown and brought in Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach as the speaker. Auerbach praised West, then called Schaus “a bad loser. And I like bad losers. If I lose, I don’t talk to anybody.”

Little could anyone have imagined on that happy night that Schaus would lose so many championship series to Auerbach and that the two men would end up despising each other.

The Lakers, meanwhile, badly wanted to hire Celtics guard Bill Sharman as coach. Auerbach told them he would release Sharman from his contract if they would give him the rights to West. The Lakers scoffed and went looking elsewhere for someone to lead their team.

“I was in Italy during the Olympics when I found out that the Lakers were moving to Los Angeles,” West recalled. “I read it in an issue of Stars and Stripes. That’s also when I found out that the Lakers had hired Fred Schaus, my coach at West Virginia. I thought, ‘This is going to be interesting.’”

The Lakers had first tried to hire Schaus in 1959, and after they failed to get Bill Sharman as their coach in 1960, they approached him again. At West Virginia, Schaus had won 146 of 183 games for a 79.8 winning percentage. “I had recruited Rod Thorn and he was a freshman and I knew we would win for the next few years,” Schaus once told author Jim O’Brien. “But the Lakers looked like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”

“Freddie had had a health scare, and Freddie was always health conscious and quite fearful,” former WVU sports publicist Eddie Barrett recalled. “I remember he was drinking milk on the bench. He was 36 when he left, and he was in despair. He’d say, ‘I hate this fucking recruiting. This college coaching is getting me down. I don’t know how I can do it anymore.’”

He had made $12,000 a year at West Virginia, where state law allowed only one year contracts. The Lakers offered between $20,000 and $25,000.

West, meanwhile, faced his own challenges in negotiating a contract. “Jerry went out there by himself,” Eddie Barrett explained. “He had no lawyer, no agent.” Before he became involved with the Lakers, Schaus had advised West to listen to the offers of the Cleveland Pipers, a team that would move into the upstart American Basketball League. In those days, AAU and industrial teams presented the only alternative to try to drive up contract offers from NBA teams.

The Pipers explained that West could work at several jobs in the Cleveland area and make as much as $30,000 a year while playing basketball. West’s own father, even though he held a union job, never made much more than $5,000 a year, which was a little better than most teachers made at the time. Once Schaus took the Lakers job, West soon dropped any idea of signing with the Pipers, although Willie Akers, his WVU teammate and best friend, later signed with them.

“The way it played out at that time, the only competition that the NBA had for players was the industrial league,” Eddie Barrett said. “The Cleveland Pipers made an offer to Jerry, which he took when he went to Los Angeles. Lou Mohs was the general manager of the Lakers, and he said to Jerry, ‘We think you’re such a great player, that we’re willing to offer you a no-cut contract for $10,000 a year.’ Jerry said, ‘$10,000?’ Mohs said, ‘What did you expect?’ Jerry said, ‘I expected fifteen.’ Mohs said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you $15,000.’ The Lakers got basketball’s great white hope for fifteen thousand.”

In time, West would come to see that he had immediately fallen behind in terms of his compensation for this game that he loved. But he was a Laker, and he would remain one through and through, always immensely proud that he could play his entire career for one team, then work for that team as a coach and executive.

“My days with the Lakers were extremely important in my life,” he said, looking back. “I cared so much…”