Don’t hold your breath.

Although Buss could have lauded Jackson any time over the past two years as the Lakers won back-to-back NBA titles, the owner’s silence on the matter has been deafening.

I’ve been pointing this out for months, by the way. And Mark Heisler of the L.A. Times, who just this week has offered a ringing endorsement of Byron Scott as a Jackson replacement, has repeatedly taken me to task for it.

But the truth that insiders have been telling me for months is clear.

If Jackson’s going to return as coach, he’s going to have to do it to despite the stony silence of the owner. And he’ll likely have to take a pay cut despite his success.

If Buss doesn’t want to pay Jackson the unheard of price of $12 million per season to coach the team, then he should never have agreed to such a deal when he gave Jackson a pay raise two years ago. You wanted and needed a championship so badly back then that you agreed to boost his money, Dr. Buss?

And now you don’t need a title very badly? That’s what you’re saying with this silence.

To complain about money now that Jackson has delivered two championship teams is unheard of. Win titles and take a pay cut? That’s a low blow, Dr. Jerry. And it’s not just me saying that. It’s your remarkable team captain, Derek Fisher, who discussed the issue in an interview with Ramona Shelbourne.

“As much as it is about his quality of life and how he’s feeling, his energy levels,” Fisher said, “I think his decision could be easier if he wasn’t maybe feeling as though he’s not being fully appreciated, which is how it ultimately makes you feel.

“It’s sad to me,” Fisher told Shelbourne recently, “when you think about what he’s accomplished in his career, that he still always has to deal with these type of scenarios where there’s a question of whether or not he’s the best person for the job, or he’s not really coaching because of the players that he’s had. He’s just a remarkable human being in terms of his approach to managing and coaching the team.

“I think not even just the Lakers, but the NBA as a whole, would lose a big part of what this game has been about the last 20 years if he’s not back. If he’s not back, it changes the whole landscape.”

Fisher, of course, is a free agent guard and will turn 36 in August. Has there ever been a braver, more forthright NBA player? The guy not only laid his heart on the line for the franchise’s 17th title (yes, Lakers won one in 1948 in the old National League), but Fisher is speaking up right now, even though it could cost him dearly.

Teammates Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol have also spoken up, although their contracts are secure and in place. They’ve made it clear where they stand.

Some Lakers fans may let you off the hook for this one, Jerry. It’s obvious you’re gambling that your season ticket holders won’t protest if you let Jackson and Fisher slip away.

I’m not asking you to pay Jackson. I’m just calling for you to speak up and declare publicly how important he has been to the franchise.

I know that you don’t like that Phil’s an odd, distant kind of guy.

I know you don’t like the triangle offense he runs.

I know you don’t like paying him so much money.

I know you’re eager to prove that you can win one without Phil.

I know you’re not elated that he shacks up with your daughter and sometimes offers his disrespect in all those subtle little ways.

I know you like showing that it’s you, not Jackson, who is in control of the franchise.

I know you think your reputation and image are secure with all those championships you have in your pocket.

I know you’re a proud, stubborn man, but does this have to come down to ego and pride?

Yes, it’s a poker game. Lakers assistant Brian Shaw, one of two top candidates to replace Phil, is “close to accepting” the Cleveland Cavaliers job, according to his agent. What’s the last time an agent made such an announcement? And Byron Scott declared that he’s not waiting around on anyone, another obvious bluff. Are Phil, Scott and Shaw all trying to out-bluff Jerry Buss?

Does it all come down to yet more tiresome games?

Is that what you want as your legacy?

You have a chance to eclipse the Boston Celtics as the team with the most NBA titles, and you’re going to let ego and pride get in the way?

Say it ain’t so. Speak up and ask Phil to return. Show us you’re bigger than these silly games.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

Take Game 2 of L.A.’s title bout with the Boston Celtics, for example. After the Lakers took it in the shorts, she started telling friends that she was worried her father, team owner Jerry Buss, already had a deal with assistant coach Brian Shaw to coach the Lakers next season.

“She was worried there was already a deal in place,” explains my impeccable source deep, deep, deep within the Lakers’ inner sanctum, wherever that cave is.

“Everybody is circling like vultures,” said the source, referring to hopefuls Shaw and former NBA coach Byron Scott.

It’s been that way all season, of course. What can you expect if your boyfriend — Lakers coach Phil Jackson — and your father — Southern California’s playboy owner Buss — are the ultimate control freaks?

The two of them have been engaging all year in a tit for tat about whether Jackson will return to coach the team next year.

Buss could have cleared up the situation at any time, but the owner really didn’t want to, as my source explained. “He wants us to remember who’s in control.”

Jackson’s former aides say the same thing about him: The guy is a bitch of a control freak, eager to jump your ass just to show he’s in charge. And while those tendencies were already large for Jackson during his days coaching in Chicago, his ego has ballooned to Thanksgiving Day Macy’s proportions with all the worship and money (better than $12 mil a year) he gets in California.

So all the poor Lakers fans and media have been caught up in a tug of war between these two giant narcissists.

The sign that it might be coming to an end came just this week. No, not at the Lakers evening their series with the Celtics at three games apiece, but in the fact that the Lakers have decided to again raise ticket prices.

A serious Depression has settled up the entertainment industry in L.A., so there’s no way Buss would raise prices with only Brian Shaw as his hole card. “I don’t know how Jerry Buss could raise ticket prices and get everybody (season ticket holders) back next year if he doesn’t have Phil as a coach,” offered the big source, who studies the Lakers’ parlor games and internal divisions up close.

Jackson will try to get the last little twist in their control game by taking as much as a month to announce he’s coming back for another shot. He’ll have a hard time, though, because Buss is determined to get him to take a pay cut, right after supposedly paying him yet an additional $2 million bonus if Jackson wins the title.

That remains a decent-sized IF heading into tonight’s Game 7.

Jackson hasn’t had much fun goosing Buss lately because the Zen Master has had his hands full coaching against these Celtics in the playoffs. “Phil has been resolutely focused on getting through this series,” says the deep insider.

The inner circle can’t think of a more out-of-whack series since 2000 when Rasheed Wallace led Portland in coughing up a huge lead against L.A. in Game 7 of the Western Finals. There’s substantial delight in Jackson’s group in contemplating the fact that Rasheed’s tank job in that game was the thing that jump-started his Lakers dynasty.

They all say, thank you, Sheed. And they won’t mind at all if you go ahead and play a role in assuring a Lakers’ win this Game 7 too.

As for Brian Shaw, everyone in and around the inner sanctum is used to his incessant self-promotion, so nobody sees this thing as horrific disloyalty to Phil, the insider explained. “Brian Shaw has been out for Brian Shaw ever since he joined the staff… He’s always looking to improve his position.”

Excuse me, but that describes just about all assistant coaches in the entire realm. The NBA pays its head coaches millions while its assistants get plumber’s wages. So who can blame BS?

Even without Jeanie’s Shaw assumption, there’s abundant drama in this Game 7, with both Jackson and Boston coach Doc Rivers potentially coaching their last games for their respective teams.

The even money says that Jackson returns in L.A., that Jerry Buss, long a skeptic about Jackson’s approach, has been made a believer this season, watching him make things work.

Perhaps, perhaps. But let’s not forget how crazy things have gotten this season every time the Lakers lose. And, hey, these are the Celtics. They lead the world in making the Lakers loony.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

To celebrate that time when all the ghosts were finally sent packing in Boston Garden, I’m posting this excerpt from The Show, my oral history of the Lakers published by McGraw-Hill.

BREAKTHROUGH

Unfortunately, the Lakers couldn’t get out of town after the 1984 Finals, a series that had brought the franchise an eighth championship defeat at the hands of the Celtics without a single victory. They had to spend one more night in their hotel, trapped inside of Boston with the Celtic blues again. Needless to say, it was a sleepless night. Owner Jerry Buss chain-smoked. Michael Cooper spent the time in deep and miserable mourning sequestered in his room with his wife, Wanda. Coach Pat Riley quickly put away the white tuxedo he had planned to wear for the championship celebration and began thinking about next year.

Joined by his friends Isiah Thomas and Mark Aguirre, Magic Johnson talked the night away. About music. Cars. Old times. Anything but the series. Occasionally the conversation would drift that way, but they’d steer it away. He had not played well, and the loss was too tender a subject.

Isiah Thomas: “We talked until the morning came, but we never talked about the game much. For that one night I think I was his escape from reality.”

Early the next day Kareem had agreed to appear on the CBS morning news.

Josh Rosenfeld, former Lakers PR man: “When we showed up at the studio, Cedric Maxwell was there. The producer’s idea was to have Cedric and Kareem on together. We were there about 10 minutes, and Cedric was sitting across from Kareem. Cedric had said a lot of things during the series. Kareem asked the producer, ‘Is he on first, or am I on first?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, we want the two of you on together.’ Kareem got up and very politely said, ‘Thank you for inviting me. I can’t do that.’ This poor girl, the producer, she was frantic. She was in tears. She followed us out to the limo and said, ‘We can reformat the show. You can go on after Maxwell.’ Kareem said, ‘No, I’m not in the mood anymore, but thank you.’ Then he explained to me, ‘Maxwell accused Worthy of choking. I can’t be seen on national TV with him. It would be offensive to my teammates.’”

The Lakers’ humiliation would remain for months. Johnson returned to California, where he was set to move into his new Bel-Air mansion, only the furniture hadn’t arrived. His palace sat as empty as his heart, so he hid out for three days in his Culver City apartment. His mother, Christine, phoned to see how he was doing. He told her he just couldn’t talk about it.

Yet everywhere he turned there seemed to be something to read about it. The Celtics were having fun with their victory. McHale even dubbed him “Tragic Johnson.” Asked about the 1984-85 season, Bird said of the Lakers, “I’d like to give them the opportunity to redeem themselves. I’m sure they have guys who feel they didn’t play up to their capabilities.” Asked if he meant Magic, Bird replied, “You think we don’t love it? Magic having nightmares [about his poor play].”

Johnson retorted that he had no need for redemption.

Even worse than the Celtic cockiness was the trashing Johnson took from the LA newspapers. “I sat back when it was over,” he said later, “and I thought, Man, did we just lose one of the great play-off series of all time, or didn’t we? This was one of the greatest in history. Yet all you read was how bad I was.”

Michael Cooper: “Magic has had his trials and tribulations throughout his entire NBA career. That’s the thing I’ve always admired about him. He’s always met them head-on and conquered them to the best of his ability.”

His meeting this Celtics challenge began when the Lakers returned to Palm Springs for training camp that fall.

Byron Scott: “When we walked on the floor that first day of camp, we saw it in everybody’s eyes. This was going to be a serious year.”

Especially for Riley.

Gary Vitti, longtime Laker trainer: “Pat was screwed down pretty tight, like a spring. And it escalated from there.”

Byron Scott: “Riles made us aware of exactly what he wanted. He let us know from day one, ‘I’m gonna work you from the first day of camp to the last day of the play-offs.’ He didn’t let up. That’s the main reason we kept going all year, because we had a coach who wouldn’t let us stop.”

Riley later explained that his team’s psyche was fragile. They had won two championships on their talent, but the Celtics had challenged them with psychological warfare in 1984 and won. The Lakers would have to either form as a team and fight back or fall apart.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “That first series that we gave them in ‘84 really seasoned us. It gave us the mental tenacity that we didn’t always exhibit. We couldn’t outrun everybody. We had to understand that sometimes there were other ways to skin the cat.”

It was something that Paul Westhead had lost his job trying to tell them.

By the 1985 play-offs the Lakers had regained their composure and their strength. The frontcourt was bolstered by the return of Mitch Kupchak and Jamaal Wilkes to go with Kareem, Worthy, Rambis, McAdoo, and Larry Spriggs. The backcourt showed Magic, Scott, Cooper, and McGee. As a group, they were driven by their ‘84 humiliation.

“Those wounds from last June stayed open all summer,” Riley said as the play-offs neared. “Now the misery has subsided, but it never leaves your mind completely. Magic is very sensitive to what people think about him, and in his own mind I think he heard those questions over and over again to the point where he began to rationalize and say, ‘Maybe I do have to concentrate more.’ I think the whole experience has made him grow up in a lot of ways.”

After all, Johnson was a mere 25, and at a time when most pro players were just beginning to feel comfortable in the game, he already owned two championship rings. Across pro basketball, observers sensed that he was about to add to his jewelry collection. The Celtics, however, were conceding nothing. With a 63-19 regular-season finish, they had again claimed the home-court advantage. The Lakers had finished 62-20. And neither team  dallied in the play-offs. Boston dismissed Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadel- phia in quick succession. The Lakers rolled past Phoenix, Portland, and Denver.

For the first time in years, the Finals returned to a 2-3-2 format, with the first two games in Boston, the middle three in Los Angeles, and the last two, if necessary, back in Boston. The situation set up an immense opportunity for the Lakers to steal one in the Garden, then pressure the Celtics back in Los Angeles.

Yet on the eve of the Finals they were struck by old doubts.

James Worthy: “We really weren’t sure of ourselves. We got back to the Finals and said, ‘Golly, we got the Celtics again. How’re we gonna do it?’ We just came out and played like a bunch of women, really. Didn’t have any aggressiveness. No killer instinct. We paid the price for it.”

Which was one final, profound embarrassment. Game 1 opened on Memorial Day, Monday, May 27, with both teams cruising on five days’ rest. The Lakers, however, quickly took on the appearance of guys who had just come off two weeks on the graveyard shift. The 38-year-old Kareem, in particular, slogged up and down the court, while Boston center Robert Parish seemed to glide. Often Kareem would just be reaching the top of the key to catch up to the play when all of a sudden the action raced the other way. He finished the day with 12 points and three rebounds. And Johnson had only one rebound. Meanwhile the famed Showtime running game had been slowed to a belly crawl.

And the Celtics?

They placed a huge red welt on the Lakers’ scar from the previous year, 148-114. Scott Wedman hit 11 for 11 from the floor, including four three-pointers. Danny Ainge fired in six straight buckets at the end of the first quarter to finish the period with 15 points. “It was one of those days,” Boston coach K. C. Jones said, “where if you turn around and close your eyes, the ball’s gonna go in.”

Abruptly, the Celtics quieted their trash talking, as if they sensed that they had gone too far. They hadn’t expected it to be this easy. And the last thing they wanted to do was rile the Lakers. “It’s definitely time to back off,” Maxwell said. “It’s not like backgammon or cribbage, where if you beat someone bad enough you get two wins.”

But it was too late. The teams didn’t play again until Thursday, and there was an uneasy air in Boston despite the big win.

The next morning in the Lakers’ film sessions, Kareem moved to the front row, rather than recline in the farther reaches as he usually did. And he didn’t blink when Riley ran and reran the gruesome evidence of his terrible performance. In fact, the captain went to each of his teammates later and personally apologized for his effort.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “That horrible game, the Memorial Day Massacre. That was mainly me. I remember watching the film of that game. The camera would follow the ball, and I would always be at the back of the pack. I’d be out of camera range, always bringing up the rear. I realized I simply wasn’t keeping up with the play. I had worn down over the course of the playoffs. So we had like three days before we played. The massacre was on Sunday, and we didn’t play again until Thursday. And I did like a mini training camp. I just made myself get my cardiovascular back to where it should be. I told everybody, I promised, that whatever happened on the next game I would give my best, whatever that was. Pat was trying to accommodate me minute-wise, but I don’t get into shape unless I work myself into shape. I got to play. So the more time I spent on the bench, it really wasn’t getting the job done. We needed a different way of approaching it.”

James Worthy: “A lot of the discussion was pointed at Kareem. But it was all of us, because none of us played well. But he was our leader.”

“He made a contract with us that it would never happen again. Ever,” Riley said later. “That game was a blessing in disguise. It strengthened the fiber of this team. Ever since then, Kareem had this took, this air, about him.”

James Worthy: “That set the tone. That game was the turning point in Laker history, I think. We came back strong and Kareem led the way. Riley, too. He stepped forward. It was the turning point in his career, too. He took his coaching to another level. It brought the last development of his coaching technique. It was to utilize all aspects. After that particular game it wasn’t pretty. It was factual. It was the truth, and it was presented to us in a way we couldn’t deny. We had to go out and do something about it.”

As the second game approached, the Lakers knew exactly what they had to do. “Our break starts with good, tough defense,” Rambis said. “That forces teams out of their offense. Then we must control the boards. That’s where the work comes in. If we do those two things, the fast break is the easiest part.”

Before Game 2 on Thursday, Kareem went to Riley and asked if his father, Al Alcindor, could ride on the team bus to the Garden. Riley consented and thought of his own father.

Gary Vitti: “Pat talked about when he was a little boy. His big brothers would take him down to the playground. He was the smallest guy out there, and he’d get beat up every day and go home crying. They’d take him home, and his father would say, ‘Take Pat back down there tomorrow.’ And the big brothers would say, ‘Dad, the guy’s getting beat up.’ His father said, ‘Take him back. At some point, you gotta plant your feet, kick some ass, and make a stand.’”

Just before he died, the elder Riley had reminded his son that to survive you had to make that stand. Riley recalled those words to his players in his pregame talk. It was time, he said, to make a stand.

Gary Vitti: “That’s why Pat is what he is today, those types of influences. Riles is an inspiring guy. I mean after hearing him, I wanted to go out there and kick some ass, too.”

And the Lakers did. Kareem, in particular, reasserted himself with 30 points, 17 rebounds, eight assists and three blocks. Cooper hit eight of nine from the floor to finish with 22 points. And just like that, the Lakers evened the series, 109-102. Best of all, they had stolen a game in the Garden and now returned to the Forum for three straight.

“They expected us to crawl into a hole,” Lakers assistant Dave Wohl said of the Celtics. “It’s like the bully on the block who keeps taking your lunch money every day. Finally you get tired of it and you whack him.”

They hosted the Celtics on Sunday afternoon and really whacked ‘em again, returning the favor of Game 1, 136-111. This time Worthy was the man, with 29 points. But Kareem’s presence was felt again, too. He had 26 points and 14 rebounds.

At one point, Boston had led, 48-38, but Worthy dominated the second quarter and Los Angeles charged to a 65-59 edge at intermission. The Lakers ran away in the second half, during which Kareem became the league’s all-time leading play-off scorer with 4,458 points.

Bird, meanwhile, had fallen into a two-game shooting slump, going 17 for 42. He had been troubled by a chronically sore right elbow and bad back, although some speculated his real trouble was Cooper’s defense.

As with ‘84, the series was marked by physical play, although this time it was the Lakers who gained an edge. “We’re not out to physically harm them,” Kareem offered. “But I wouldn’t mind hurting their feelings.” Before Game 4, the NBA’s vice president of operations, Scotty Stirling, warned each coach that fighting and extra rough play would be met with fines and suspensions. Riley told his players of Stirling’s warning, but K. C. Jones chose not to. With their uninhibited play, the Celtics stayed in it, and the game came down to one final possession. Bird had the ball but faced a double-team, so he dumped it off to D. J. above the foul line. From there, Johnson drilled the winner with two seconds left. Boston had evened the series and regained its home-court advantage, 107-105.

Game 5 two nights later in the Forum was another showdown. The Lakers went on a 14-3 run at the close of the half to take a 64-51 lead. They stretched it to 89-72 after intermission, until the Celtics closed to within four at 101-97 with six minutes left. But Magic hit three shots and Kareem added four more, giving him 36 on the day, as the Lakers walked away with a 3-2 lead, 120-111.

“People didn’t think we could win close games,” Johnson said afterward.

From there it went back to Boston. Lakers GM Jerry West didn’t dare make the trip for fear of spooking the proceedings. Across the country old Lakers held their breath and watched the tube. After eight painful losses, this seemed to be the best chance yet to end Boston’s domination. The Celtics would have to win the final two games. With a mere 38 hours’ rest between games, that just didn’t seem possible.

Kareem was there again, this time with 29 points, 18 of them in the second half when it mattered. The score was tied at 55 at intermission.

Kareem sat much of the second period in foul trouble while Mitch Kupchak did admirable work as a backup. The Celtics had played only seven people in the first half, and Magic could see that they were tired. It was written on their faces. Riley told him to keep pushing it at them, not to worry about turnovers. Just keep up the pressure.

He did.

And the Celtics did something they had never ever done before. They gave up a championship on their home floor, on the hallowed parquet, 111-100. Boston forward Kevin McHale had kept them alive with 36 points, but he got his sixth foul with more than five minutes left. And, thanks in part to Cooper’s defense, Larry Bird was closing out a 12-for-29 afternoon. “I thought I’d have a great game today,” he said afterward.

In the end, the Lakers’ victory was signaled by the squeaking of sneakers in the deathly quiet Garden as the crowd slipped away. It was the same crowd that had so riotously jostled the Lakers the year before.

“We made ‘em lose it,” Johnson said with satisfaction.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “They fought as dirty as they could until they realized they were gonna lose. Then they came back with Celtic pride and all this crap. Being able to shut those people up in Boston Garden, that was so satisfying. Even though we came back to LA and lost a game, we didn’t lose any momentum. That was the first year where James really just started to dominate. He just emerged in such a spectacular, wonderful way. It was a nice thing to see. He could finish the break and he could post up. He was just so versatile. And we had Mitch Kupchak and Bob McAdoo on the bench. It was just great stuff.”

Kareem was named the MVP. “He defies logic,” Riley said of the 38-year-old Laker center. “He’s the most unique and durable athlete of our time, the best you’ll ever see. You better enjoy him while he’s here.”

Johnson’s trophy was the sweet redemption he had said he didn’t need. “You wait so long to get back,” he admitted afterward. “A whole year. That’s the hard part. But that’s what makes this game interesting. It’s made me stronger. You have to deal with the different situations and see if you can come back.”

For Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss, the celebration was quieter and very personal.

Jerry Buss: “The Garden was nearly empty with the reporters taking notes in the locker rooms and writing their stories.  Hampton Mears, one of my old friends, and I slipped out to the center of the Garden parquet. We giggled and exchange high fives. The most odious sentence in all of sport — the Lakers have never beaten the Celtics— wasn’t true anymore.”

From the Garden, the Lakers retreated to their hotel, where at last Riley got to celebrate in his white tuxedo from the year before.

The team’s next business was to vote on Pres. Ronald Reagan’s invitation to visit the White House. If the coaches hadn’t cast ballots, too, the team might have passed. It was a close vote, but the ‘85 champions visited the presidential quarters. They were tossed about on a bumpy flight into Washington, but once there Kareem and Riley had a nice chat with Mr. Reagan. Then it was on to LA.

Byron Scott: “We wanted to get back home to party with our families and friends.”

Across the country, old Lakers felt a weight lifted.

Pat Riley: “All those Celtic skeletons came out of the closet.”

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

All good Lakers fans worth their salsa know about the balloons.

Game 7, 1969 NBA Finals. The Lakers have lost six NBA Finals to the Boston Celtics, but for the first time in the history of the rivalry the L.A. guys have home-court advantage. Game 7 is being played in the Forum.

Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke is so sure that his team is finally going to win a title that he orders the rafters filled with balloons. As soon as the Lakers win, Cooke wants the balloons released as his pep band plays “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Celtics player/coach Bill Russell walks into the Forum before the game, looks up in the rafters and says, “Those balloons are gonna stay up there a hell of a long time.”

To this day, Jerry West remains furious over Cooke’s blunder. The owner had ceded the emotional edge to Russell and his Celtics, who promptly sealed the Lakers in their private hell despite West’s furious effort with 42 points, 13 rebounds and 12 assists.

The moment revealed two seriously important truths about championship play in American professional basketball:

1) Emotion is the huge factor because it drives focus. The team that finds a deep emotional edge in the championship series is going to win, forget what should happen.

2) You better watch what you say in the Lakers/Celtics rivalry because it all sticks around forever. You could be eating your own trash talk for decades.

Now, there remains a long way to go in this series, which the Lakers lead 2-1 heading into tonight’s Game 4, but there’s absolutely no question that Pierce, the outspoken Celtics forward, presented the Lakers with a huge emotional edge when he announced after Boston won Game 2 in Los Angeles that the series was headed to Boston and wouldn’t be returning to L.A. for the sixth or seventh games.

His meaning, of course, was that the Celtics were going to win all three games on their home floor to take the title, four games to one. Los Angeles sportscaster Jim Hill heard the comment and couldn’t wait to pose the question to Lakers guard Derek Fisher on camera.

“Your reaction to Paul Pierce saying that the series is not coming back to LA?”

You can see the whole sequence in the excellent Fisher highlight video put together by up-and-coming producer Chris Manning ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hShtVQxuJQ ).

Fisher, the emotional leader of the Lakers, says nothing in response to Hill’s question. He simply stares with indignation.

If there’s any question about the depth of Fisher’s anger over Pierce’s comment and other insults from the Lakers, you need look no further than the fourth quarter of Game 3 of the series, when Fisher personally closed out a pivotal win for Los Angeles.

Now, the emotional and motivational power of Pierce’s words has become all too clear for the Celtics.

It’s true. The series could end in Boston — with Los Angeles taking all three games played in the Garden.

You’ll never hear Lakers players express anything close to that notion, yet there is no question that the insult drives their focus in the series. Fisher was answering post-game questions for the TV cameras immediately after Game 3 when he changed gears and began talking about Game 4.

Manning’s video also offers a scene from the ESPYs with the Celtics gloating over their 2008 humiliation of the Lakers in the championship series. The camera quickly cuts to a stone-faced Fisher, sitting in the audience.

There is a deep, deep reserve of emotion driving Fisher and his Lakers in this series.

The Celtics realize that all too well now. That’s why Boston coach Doc Rivers has stepped up his media complaints that the officials allowed Fisher to be too physical defensively in Game 3. The counterpoint to that, of course, is that Fisher has to move through the series of moving and brush screens that the Celtics set for Ray Allen every time down the floor.

So, in addition to an emotional war, the championship series is a public relations battle, with either side willing to pay the league fines for criticizing the officiating this time of year.

Boston minority owner Jim Pallotta reportedly went off on Commissioner David Stern over the officiating immediately after Game 3. Expect to see a hefty fine for Pallotta and possibly Rivers. If they can sway the officiating of the series, it will be money well spent.

Too bad they can’t come up with some strategy to erase Pierce’s fool-hardy boast. If the Lakers can ride the emotional tide to the superior kind of focus that allows them to out-rebound and out-defend the Celtics in Game 4, they’ll take a 3-1 lead and put huge pressure on Boston.

There’s no question that proving Pierce a good prophet is just the kind of motivation Fisher craves. He doesn’t have to say a word to confirm that.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon recently released by ESPN Books.

On the good side for the Lakers, they’re older and wiser. They now have Ron Artest to help them defend Boston’s Paul Pierce, who is a major load.

And James Posey, Leon Powe and Eddie House no longer anchor Boston’s bench. They’ve been replaced by Tony Allen, Rasheed Wallace and little Nate Robinson.

More important for Boston is the growth of Rajon Rondo as a point guard. He’s fantastic and should cause Los Angeles plenty of trouble. Then again, the Lakers have played against an array of talented point guards in the Western playoffs and should have some confidence that they can at least stay in the gym with Rondo as Kobe Bryant will slip over and help teammate Derek Fisher deal with that headache.

But the things that worried Tex Winter then still play on my mind. Boston’s half-court defense is excellent, and their frontcourt still has the muscle to intimidate the Lakers.

Back in 2008, Tex told me that the Lakers couldn’t play well against the Celtics in the half court, that they needed to run, to get into the open court to have a chance to score more before Boston’s defense set up and smothered them. Some folks might think that’s funny, coming from Winter, the architect of the triangle offense.

Winter’s favorite method of attack is largely his controlled, half-court offense that stresses floor balance, spacing and team play. But he had always allowed for a break in his system, and he liked to use it when circumstances called for it.

Against the Celtics, circumstances scream for it.

He told me in 2008 that he thought Lakers coach Phil Jackson waited too long to try to get the break going. The Celtics got control of the series and the Lakers never recovered.

Of course, there was this other little problem. To run, you’ve got to be able to rebound, to get the ball and get it out and go.

The Lakers couldn’t win the battle against Boston’s frontcourt. The Celtics kept them bottled up for the series and wound up humiliating them.

Lakers forward Pau Gasol has stated many times this season the importance of rebounding. He knows what it means now. If the Lakers can win the rebound game with the Celtics, they should win the series in six or seven games. If they can’t win it, they’re going to have to come down the floor each time and play against that impressive Boston defense.

The Lakers do not want to do that.

Thus, the battle for the boards will be fierce and could well determine the champion this year. It’s obvious that Phil Jackson wants to do everything he can with his commentary to get Kevin Garnett and Kendrick Perkins to back off their physical play.

If the Celtics can control the boards and the tempo, they have a chance to win even though the matchups elsewhere are a mixed bag. Of course, rebounding is a team issue. The guards will have to do their part on both sides. Bryant and Rondo, in particular, have gotten to the ball a lot in these playoffs. They will join in the battle for the boards.

So it’s down to Pat Riley’s adage from the days of Showtime: No rebounds, no rings. Lamar Odom must be aggressive for the Lakers. And Jackson has to hope that Andrew Bynum can play through his injured knee to have an impact.

Bryant obviously is another huge factor. He is playing the best basketball of his life, less athletic, wiser. In a way, his knee injury and other ailments have been a blessing for the Lakers. Those things mean he usually hasn’t tried to do too much. If he gets impatient and tries to win it all and attack the Celtic defense off the dribble, he’ll play right into Boston’s hands this time around.

Obviously, Game 1 and 2 are huge. The Lakers were humiliated by Boston in 2008, and if they fail to hold home court in the first two games, their doubts will grow through the series. On the other hand, that humiliation could steel the Lakers’ resolve.

Either way, hopes are high for a classic series, one that folks will remember for years to come.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

Can Rondo prolong the careers of the Big Three? Garnett just turned 34, Pierce 33 in Oct, + Allen 35 in July. Prolly not much past this year.

Note: Question should include Doc Rivers? Can the rewards of coaching Rondo keep him in the job?

Dwight Howard has gotten better in the post, but the truth? He’s still a year or two away, and that’s if he works insanely hard.

But his post play has been one of the glaring weaknesses for the Magic. Hell, post play has been a glaring weakness for the league. Teams that have it fare well. Teams that don’t ultimately get embarrassed. Want to win, LeBron? Get yo ass in the posts. Don’t believe me? Ask MJ.

Watching Celts/ORL is like watching 1 of those horror flicks where the monsters pull out the victims’ hearts and eat ‘em raw. It’s bloody.

This offseason is the grandest game of pickup basketball in the history of hoops. Who knows how to pick a side? Gonna take mucho smarts.

Now’s the time for young free agents. It’s pickup. Get your team together and u can play Bill Russell for a decade. Hesitate + lose. Pickup.

I don’t think Jerry Buss will sit with a pat hand after the season, but you have to wonder because he isn’t rushing to sign up Phil Jackson. That’s letting personal get in the way of business.

Celts’ message to LeBron + others: Don’t waste time; band together; build a force. It’s pickup. Get your team together. Can’t do it alone.

Truth: If Michael Jordan had been a free agent with the power to pick his own team, he’d have Joe Wolf + other UNC blood. Gotta be careful in pickup.

Truth: MJ is lucky he had Jerry Krause helping him play pickup, even though Krause was far from perfect and pretty whack a lot of times.

Some years the playoffs go on and on like a bad joke. This feels like one of those years, but we’re all hoping for a great punch line June 1

Jerry Sloan says it’s a simple game if you lay your heart on the line every night. What happens when a team like Boston takes your heart?

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

It’s just that the match-up issues are more profound in the playoffs.

So now we have a fresh four-team tournament before us, the NBA’s version of a super-sized Final Four. It’s fun to try to figure where things are headed.

As LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers can tell us now, the Boston Celtics look really scary. They can embarrass you. And the Lakers still carry that memory from two years ago, when the Celtics took their manhood in the ‘08 championship series.

Two factors make them so dangerous now. The rise of Rajon Rondo and the recovery of Kevin Garnett. Matching up with either of those guys is a nightmare for the other three teams left in the fray.

Then you throw in Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and the rest of the Boston roster, and the reasons for concern grow. Tony Allen makes their bench a threat, and folks are starting to speak of him as they did James Posey in 2008.

Hey, we’re not even talking Orlando here yet. It seems pretty simple in the Eastern Conference finals. If Orlando continues to make all those jump shots and three-pointers, they’ll give Boston a run for the money. Plus Orlando has a better means of attacking the basket this year in Vince Carter.

But if the jump shots don’t fall, the Celtics advance with their pack-it-in defense. Even if those shots do fall, Boston still might just outlast the Magic. Yes, Orlando is a fine team, undefeated in these play-offs. But if Boston has some gas in the tank, the Magic will discover they’ve met nothing this season like the revived Celtics.

In the Western Conference finals, the Lakers should advance because of their size and their triangle offense, which will help them control tempo. You do have to sit back and admire the Phoenix Suns, how hard they’ve played, and the fine job Alvin Gentry has done with them.

Plus, it’s not just about their older players. Jared Dudley is a player to watch among their youth corps.

But the Suns are only a feel-good story in this equation. Absent of a major development/injury, the Lakers advance to take on the Boston-Orlando winner.

If it’s Orlando, they’re a better team this year, but L.A. still wins those match-ups. It maybe goes six games.

The hoops world hasn’t gotten around to announcing it just yet, but everybody’s itchin’ for another Boston/L.A. thing in the championship series.

It has tradition, the promise of big markets, the allure to make the whole world take notice and to make David Stern wiggle with delight.

If it’s Lakers/Celtics, L.A. center Andrew Bynum and his fragile health become a large factor. If Bynum’s healthy and feeling all right, the Lakers fare much better in the match-ups. That means L.A. will have more depth to throw at Garnett with long-armed Pau Gasol and versatile Lamar Odom.

Lakers small forward Ron Artest looms large as well, with his ability to factor in lots places defensively. L.A. should be able to assure that Paul Pierce won’t be the MVP of the 2010 NBA Finals.

But does L.A. have an answer for the guy who has made himself the game’s newest force, Rajon Rondo? Kobe Bryant and proud old Derek Fisher will have their say on that one.

Surviving that mismatch will require all of Phil Jackson’s cunning. Phil sorts that Rondo thing out, and Lakers owner Jerry Buss has little choice but to re-sign him next year to another big contract.

When Jackson was an adolescent sitting around playing board games with his evangelist mother Betty, the stakes were high in terms of pride. Now it’s the time of year where Jackson, the old man, really gets to feel like a kid again. He’s locked in for the challenge, full of concentration, feeling totally alive.

Yes, we’re at the NBA’s version of the Final Four. Let the mind games begin.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

So how could you even consider him the All-Time MVP of the NBA Playoffs?

Well, you have to at least consider Baylor among the nominees along with Boston’s great Bill Russell (the centerpiece of 11 championship teams), Chicago’s Michael Jordan, and a select few others. By the way, the number of once and former Lakers on this list is strong: Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, George Mikan…

Mikan? Hey, the dude powered Minneapolis to six championships back when the lane was shaped like a keyhole (yes, that’s why they still call it the “key,” although the lane was long ago widened and no longer looks remotely like a keyhole).

So you have to nominate Mikan, just as you have to nominate Baylor, who was the motherlode of talent that took extremely weak Lakers teams all the way to the league championship series. To look at Baylor, we’ll consider this brief excerpt from my biography, “Jerry West.” After all, West and Baylor teamed together to make the Lakers one of the most consistently good teams in the history of pro hoops. They just couldn’t beat Bill Russell and the Celtics.

ELEGANT ELGIN

The Minneapolis Lakers had made Baylor the first pick of the ‘58 draft, not long after he had led the little University of Seattle to the NCAA championship game against powerhouse Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp. Baylor was called for a run of fouls in that game and his little team lost that title game. It would start a run of frustrations for the Magnificent Elgin.

Baylor, a Washington, D.C., native, sent his uncle to negotiate the contract, a $22,000 deal. As a rookie he had averaged 24.7 points and 15 rebounds for 1958-59. He was second in the league in the most minutes played and led the Lakers in assists, scoring, and rebounding. Midway through that rookie season, he scored 55 in a game, the third highest total in NBA history.

The team clunked along to a 33-39 record, while the roster learned to play with Baylor. By the play-offs, his Lakers teammates had gotten the hang of it, and that’s when Baylor showed his true value.  First, Minneapolis dumped Detroit, then Baylor and company got everybody’s attention by beating defending NBA champion St. Louis for the right to meet Boston and Russell for the 1959 league title.

The Celtics promptly swept the Lakers, but everybody knew there was an amazing new force among them. “Baylor was clearly the most exciting player in the league,” said his coach, former Laker great Jim Pollard.

The Lakers quickly hustled to increase his money to $50,000 a year, a huge figure at the time. Baylor opened that next season by scoring 52 against Detroit. A few nights later, on November 8, 1959, he rang up 64 points against the Celtics, breaking the league’s single-game record set a decade earlier by Jumpin’ Joe Fulks.

With almost no help, Baylor couldn’t lift Minneapolis to the championship series for 1960, but that off-season the club drafted Jerry West and announced that it was moving to Los Angeles for the 1960-61 season.

If people in Los Angeles didn’t know much about pro basketball, Baylor gave them the first big clue that November 15 when he scored 71 points, a new NBA single-game league record, against the Knicks in Madison Square Garden. The news would hit Los Angeles like a lightning bolt, giving sports fans the idea that they needed to get out and see this talented Lakers team.

The veterans around the league, though, weren’t surprised by anything Baylor did. “You couldn’t defend Elgin,” explained Detroit guard Gene Shue. “He had such good outside shot. He could stare you down. He had a quick jab step. He would catch the ball at the top of the key or further out and he’d get you going back and forth. He’d just explode by you. He had a nervous twitch. He was very, very hard to defend. Not only was he a good outside shooter, but he had a good deceptive first step. He had incredible strength and could hang in the air with the ball. When you put all those things together you couldn’t stop him.”

Baylor supposedly had gotten his name at birth when his father glanced at his wristwatch and liked the sound of the name on the face. And later, his college coach, John Castellani would say, “Elgin has more moves than a clock.”

Driving to the basket, he would leave the floor, often not quite sure what he wanted to do, simply relying on his hang time to open his options. Because he was an excellent passer, he could usually find someplace to put the ball for a teammate. Failing that, he could resort to a lay-up, as he seldom chose to dunk.

Even so, Baylor was no gliding featherweight. He was 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds, a powerful rebounder with another special gift for following his own shots and correcting the misses.

“Elgin was very strong,” said John Radcliffe, the Lakers’ longtime scorekeeper. “He would get bumped all the time, but it never seemed to throw him off stride. Even in the air, he would get bumped a lot, but his concentration was so good that the shot would still go where he wanted it to go. He used the glass a lot. I never saw him dunk. It wasn’t the thing to do in those days.”

“Baylor was really the first to have body control in the air,” former Laker and longtime NBA broadcaster Hot Rod Hundley said. “He’d hang there and shoot these little flip shots.”

“He just might be the best player I ever saw,” Chick Hearn offered. “He was doing things that Dr. J. made famous 20 years later, the hang time and so forth. But Elgin didn’t have the TV exposure. Nobody did in those days.”

Added to Baylor’s dynamic mix was the curiosity of his nervous tick, a twitching of his face, leaving defenders confused as Baylor headed around them to the basket. “We used to kid about it,” recalled Johnny “Red” Kerr. “If he gave the nervous tic to the left, he was going left. If he gave it to the right, he was gonna go to his right. But when he shook both ways, that’s when you fell on your ass, and he was gonna go around you.”

“Some players, they struggle when they score,” Gene Shue said. “Elgin, his instincts were so good. He kept you off balance. There wasn’t one forward in the league that wanted to play Elgin. Elgin was one of those players that could embarrass you. He could do 60 on you. And you couldn’t stop him.”

The opportunity to play with a talent like Baylor was one of the major strokes of good fortune in West’s career, something he would genuinely cherish. West came to rely on his multi-talented teammate that first year.

“It was an honor to play with him,” West said later. “I never considered Elgin Baylor as someone I competed against. He is without a doubt one of the truly great players to play this game. I hear people talking about great players today, and I don’t see many that compare to him, I’ll tell you that. He had that wonderful, magical instinct for making plays, for doing things that you just had to watch. I learned from him, from watching him. I was young, wanting to learn. I had an incredible appreciation for other people’s talents. It was incredible to watch Elgin play.”

Baylor’s performances seemed to entrance his less-talented Lakers teammates, especially the forwards, Tommy Hawkins and Rudy LaRusso. Which left little doubt that the Lakers were Baylor’s team, on and off the court.

“Tommy Hawkins was the hardest worker on the team, but he always had trouble getting the ball to go in the hole,” said John Radcliffe, the Lakers’ longtime scorekeeper. “He was a tremendous leaper but he had small hands. He and Rudy LaRusso worked so hard for Elgin. They’d battle and battle, setting picks, getting rebounds, whatever it took.”

Baylor’s mastery extended far beyond the floor with those young teams in Los Angeles, explained Merv Harris, who covered pro basketball for the old LA Herald Examiner: “It was fascinating to see the domination of his personality over that team. Elgin was the boss. He was the most physically dominating player, and his status began with that. Whenever Elgin wanted to play poker, they played poker. Wherever Elgin wanted to eat, they went to eat. Whatever Elgin wanted to talk about, they talked about.”

And in that age before trash talking became an art in the NBA, Elgin pioneered that element of the game, as well. “Elgin knew he was good and he’d let you know,” Gene Shue recalled with a chuckle. “He did it out on the court. He was really an unstoppable player.” “Our nickname for Elgin was Motormouth,” Hot Rod Hundley said. “He never stopped talking. He knew everything, or he thought he did. We had a lot of fun.”

For the Baylor and the Lakers, 1961-62 was one of those golden, fun-loving seasons in which almost everything seemed to go right.

“It was an enjoyable year,” Baylor remembered. “Our camaraderie was great. On and off the court, we did things together. We enjoyed one another. As a team we gave the effort every night.”

Baylor turned in one of the most remarkable performances in NBA history — and he did so while serving his country in the armed forces.

After opening the season on another scoring tare, Baylor was called into reserve duty with the army near Fort Lewis, Washington. As a result, he was able to appear in only 48 regular-season games. He made the lineup mostly on weekends or with an occasional pass, and when he did, he was fresh, ready, and virtually unstoppable. His 38.2 scoring average was second only to that of the prodigious Wilt Chamberlain, who averaged better than 50 points per game that season.

Even with Baylor’s intermittent schedule, the Lakers won the Western Division with a 54-26 record, 11 games better than Cincinnati and Oscar Robertson, and whipped Detroit 4-2 in the division finals series. For the league championship they faced the Celtics, who had ousted Chamberlain and the Warriors in the Eastern playoffs.

The series opened in dank, smelly Boston Garden, where the smoky haze hung over the floor. In that diffused light, the air took on a green hue. It was clearly Bill Russell’s lair, and the Celtics emphasized that in Game 1 with a 122-108 victory. The Lakers’ edge was that their legs were younger, and they used that the next night to deliver a 129-122 upset in Game 2.

A record crowd of 15,180 packed the L.A. Sports Arena for Game 3 on April 10. The Lakers had never seen the place so crazy. All night the noise fed their adrenaline. In the closing seconds, the Lakers were down 115-111 when West scored four points to tie it. Then Boston’s Sam Jones tried to inbound the ball to Bob Cousy with four seconds remaining. Guarding Cousy, West laid back, then surged into the passing lane, stole it, and drove 30 feet for the winning lay-up, 117-115. Boston coach Red Auerbach complained to the refs that it was impossible for West to dribble the distance to score with only four seconds left. The Lakers bench had feared as much. Everyone there shouted for West to pull up and shoot. But he kept digging for the goal and laid the ball in. It fell through the net as the buzzer sounded.

“I had deflected the ball on the run,” West recalled. “I knew I would have enough time. Most things in my life have been instinctive. I played basketball that way. I always knew what the clock was.”

Unfortunately, the Celtics never allowed dreams to linger. They promptly killed any thoughts of prolonged jubilation in LA by taking Game 4, 115-103, and headed back to Boston with the series tied at two. There, it was all Baylor in Game 5. Despite fouling out, he scored 61 points (the record for an NBA Finals game) and had 22 rebounds, while the Celtics’ defensive specialist, Satch Sanders, contemplated another line of work.

“Elgin was just a machine,” Sanders said later.

But his was the kind of performance that elevates Baylor onto the list of nominees. Unfortunately, his Lakers fell short in overtime of Game 7 of that 1962 title battle.

His LA teams also lost Finals series to Boston in  ’63, ‘65, ‘66, ‘68, and ‘69. His Lakers teams also fell in seven games to the New York Knicks in the famous 1970 championship series.

Baylor suffered what was thought to be a career-ending knee injury in the 1965 playoffs, but he defied doctors’ expectations and worked his way back to compete the next season.

Baylor finally retired early in the 1971-72 season, the year the Los Angeles Lakers finally won a championship.

Time has obscured Baylor’s major performances early in his career, especially his superb showing in the 1962 championship series. But he deserves to be considered among the game’s all-time best when it comes to playoff performances.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

That’s because Durant, the promising young star for Oklahoma City, has already let Jackson inside his head by acknowledging one of the Lakers coach’s patented mind games.

Here’s a hint for Durant and his teammates: Whatever Jackson says, ignore it. If you give weight to Jackson’s air, then you’ve allowed him to disrupt your focus, which he loves to do and does quite well.

That advice is too late for Jackson’s first sortie. He picked up on a comment from Boston’s Kevin Garnett, who had offered the opinion that game officials seem to pamper Durant because he is the NBA’s star of the future, if not the present.

Apparently, the beat writers in Oklahoma City thought it a good idea to ask Durant about the commentary from Garnett and Jackson. They should know better than to egg that shit on.

Durant gave them a “young” answer, good for copy but bad news for the Thunder. Jackson is in the head of their leader. Once inside the head of an opponent, the Zen Master has been known to dance a jig or two.

Mark Medina of the L.A.Times Lakers blog had  merely asked Jackson about Durant’s rising star. “In my question to Jackson, I never cited Durant’s free throws. I simply asked him if he sees Durant as the future torchbearer of the league. That’s what prompted jackson to say, “Yeah, by the calls he gets.”

Jackson also replied. “He really gets to the line a lot, I’ll tell ya.”

A major effort there to set the agenda by the Lakers coach.

However, as far as Jackson’s mind games go, the comment was pretty mild. But OKC beat writer Darnell Mayberry asked Durant about it. And Durant took the bait, claiming Jackson had disrespected him. Like that, Jackson was in business.

“That’s a part of my game, getting to the free-throw line and being aggressive,” Durant told Maryberry. “If you say that I get superstar calls or I get babied by the refs, that’s just taking away from how I play. That’s disrespectful to me. I don’t disrespect nobody in this league. I respect every coach, every player, everybody. I never say anything bad about anybody else or question why they do this or do that. So for them to say that about me, I don’t even want to use no foul language.”

If Durant manages to turn all this silly stuff into motivation and punishes the Lakers in an upset, he’ll have the right to the high ground. On the other hand, if the top seed Lakers defeat his eighth-seeded OKC club, then Jackson will have stolen his Thunder, so to speak.

And it won’t be just for this playoffs, either. When Jackson gets a mind game going, he knows how to play it for seasons.

My advice?

Make it go away, young fella. Don’t acknowledge it again.

That’s going to be a challenge, because reporters are now going to ask about it at every turn of the series. Which means that Durant is going to have conversations he doesn’t want to have with the media.

He’ll get an up-close lesson in how Jackson “seeds” ideas with the media. The last thing he wants to do is give them a little attention to make them grow.

Roland Lazenby is the author of 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…”