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 20^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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.

That was Tex Winter’s description of the coaching staff’s relationship with Bynum. Not mine. And that was almost two years ago, well before Winter suffered a debilitating stroke.

At the time, the Lakers were nursing their humiliation at the hands of the Boston Celtics in the 2008 championship series. Bynum’s approach was clearly a function of the disconnect between coach Phil Jackson and basketball operations chief Jim Buss.

As Winter explained at the time, Bynum was Jim Buss’s prize draft pick. Buss was apparently concerned about how Jackson was handling Bynum. In fact, Buss would advise Bynum to hire his own big man’s coach because Jackson wasn’t a good coach for big men.

Sister Jeanie Buss, well known as Phil’s girlfriend, questioned her brother’s take on the situation by pointing out Jackson’s large success with Shaquille O’Neal and lesser talented post players in Chicago.

Jeanie Buss had long confided to friends that her brother was the main impetus for the team’s firing Jackson in 2004. With trust between Jackson and Jim Buss already at a minimum, it’s not hard to figure that Jim Buss’s coaching advice for Bynum damaged the relationship further.

Then there was Bynum’s decision to involve his own doctors in his knee injury that season, rather than relying on what the team had to offer in terms of medical support. Frankly, it’s not all that unusual for pro athletes to seek medical advice outside the team. But the sum of the situation left Bynum oddly distanced from the coaching staff, Winter confided at the time.

Two years have passed, and Bynum’s situation with the team has perhaps improved. But the internal trust level in general is not great with the Lakers, so you have to wonder.

Recent games have shown that Bynum’s return to the lineup from his recent injury will be key for the Lakers prospects in this spring’s playoffs.

Even with the Lakers posting the top record in the Western Conference, the Twin Towers look of Bynum and c/f Pau Gasol has brought mixed reviews, but this much is clear: With the two big men, the Lakers have been able to overpower a lot of opponents. Though at times it has seemed that the best pairing is either one of the big men with sixth man Lamar Odom.

The truth is, questions such as these often never find definitive answers in the NBA. Some nights, Bynum and Gasol will play very well together. Other nights, the Twin Towers will have their issues.

As it stands now, those questions are small beside the questions about basic trust within the organization. There have been all sorts of strange signals and communications coming out of the organization this season.

And while Jeanie Buss has tried desperately to put a good public face on it, the situation seems fragile at best. Jerry Buss recently tried to pose that it was normal for Jackson to finish out the season without a contract for next year. But it’s not.

Consider the Denver Nuggets. They found themselves in a similar situation with coach George Karl and reached an agreement with him right before the All Star Weekend just so they could avoid just such late-season craziness as the Lakers are facing right now.

As Shaquille O’Neal told me a few years back, he felt no trust in dealing with Jerry Buss, had no relationship with the man. Now Buss is known for being quite loyal to those with whom he shares trust and warm feelings. But that’s not the case with these Lakers, no matter how many coats of paint you put on it.

Jackson himself has sought to emphasize in his recent public comments that the Lakers only have five or six players under contract for next season. The last time Jackson was fired, the team tried to make a transition to a running team. Are they preparing to do the same now? Has the decision already been made? That’s a fair and legitimate question.

Are the Busses quitting on these playoffs even before they happen? Another fair question.

And is Bynum’s return from injury a wild card in the hand that’s being dealt by the Busses? Another fair question.

And in all of this where stands Kobe Bryant, who can opt out of his Lakers contract after the season? A truly intriguing question.

If this Lakers season disintegrates into the foul gas of mistrust, the blame will lie squarely with Jerry and Jim Buss. Now, as an owner, Jerry Buss has been hugely successful, and he’s earned plenty of favor with Lakers fans. So it may just be that he and son Jim would be forgiven for ditching Jackson’s last team that runs the Triangle offense.

As a friend of Jeanie Buss’s said earlier in the season, Jim and Jerry Buss are gambling that fans won’t complain too loudly if they end the Phil Jackson era with the Lakers. Maybe not.

Of course, all this conjecture winds up lining the bottom of the bird cage, if Bynum returns from injury and the team gathers strength down the stretch.

In the meantime, all Lakers fans can do is wonder. And try not to get a whiff of the mistrust that blows in the winds of El Segundo.

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

After all, it’s going to take time and patience for Walton to work his way back in. He’s only played two dozen games this season and has been out since just before the All Star Game.

But when he resumes playing next week and if he’s able to round into form, Walton should improve a lot of things for Phil Jackson’s team.

The Lakers’ bench was decidedly exposed against the New Orleans Hornets in last night’s loss, and Walton should add considerable strength there. He’s had his highlight moments defensively, but it’s the execution of the triangle offense that should improve substantially with Walton on the floor.

Improving that execution should help the bench keep better control of tempo, which means they have a better chance of holding their ground, of not losing leads.

Walton’s presence should also help in forward Ron Artest’s adjustment to the triangle’s nuances and challenges. Walton will give Jackson more options in terms of lineups, particularly in the second half.

With Artest in the lineup, Bryant has gotten far less time on the wing himself, and as Bryant explained to me earlier in the season that has changed his relationship with the offense itself.

Bryant added that he doesn’t mind this. In fact, he said the addition of Artest has made things more interesting for him, given him fresh and different challenges this season.

Mainly, it has meant that Bryant gets the ball in different places than he did last year. That can be good and bad. Getting the ball as a guard means he’s operating higher and further way from the basket. It can mean there are fewer opportunities for him to work “behind the defense” because he is not on the wing.

With Walton on the floor with Bryant, perhaps that means the star will be able to return to some of his comfortable spots in the offensive execution.

Bryant has long shown an ability to turn all kinds of things that could be negatives into positives, and that appears to be his mental approach this season as well.

Bryant pointed out for reporters that because of the addition of Artest this year, the Lakers have changed substantially as a team, simply because it takes time for any player to learn and adjust to the triangle. The classic example of this is Ron Harper, who struggled for most of two seasons with the Chicago Bulls trying to learn the triangle. When he finally did, Harper became a key component of the Bulls, as he later was for Jackson’s first two championship teams with the Lakers.

So it’s only fair to allow Artest his time to learn and adjust, thus the help that Walton can bring in his return is key.

If the Lakers win the title again this year, they’ll win it differently than they did last year, Bryant recently observed.

That’s because last year they won the championship with some elevated execution of their offense.

This year Artest means the Lakers have a chance to develop as a good defensive team in the playoffs, although that obviously still remains a work in progress.

With Walton back, the execution of the triangle also should improve. Make no mistake, if the Lakers are going to win the title in June, they’ll have to improve dramatically, as they did over the course of last year’s playoffs. Walton’s personal improvement was a big part of the team’s progress.

There’s also the enthusiasm Walton brings to the task. He’s an upbeat person. His teammates like him. He’ll bring those tremendous mental positives to the team’s relationship with the offense, just as he always has.

In fact, even during his time on the injured list Walton found a way to emulate triangle offense guru Tex Winter, who has been sidelined himself for almost a year while recovering from a stroke.

Walton has donned a suit and sat amongst the coaching staff, furiously scribbling notes during the course of the game, then communicating what he sees to teammates during pauses in the action.

That, of course, has long been a role filled by the tenacious Winter. Obviously, Walton has been more diplomatic in delivering his observations to teammates than Winter, who was known for his brutally frank corrections of players.

As a player, Walton will confine his contributions to all the subtle things — the reads and passes and cuts — that make Jackson’s triangle teams so special, and secondary players such as Walton so crucial to the big picture.

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

The big guy is giving in. He’s not going to go tit for tat with team owner Jerry Buss over his coaching contract for next season and beyond.

Speaking to the media this week, Jackson acknowledged that he has a chance to come back next season. The only way of assuring that, he pointed out, is for the Los Angeles Lakers to win this year’s NBA title. And the odds of that are long, Jackson added.

“Odds wise, I serve at the behest of the Buss family,” Jackson said, then quipped that he serves Buss’ daughter Jeanie “all the time … ”

(Jackson can never resist a little dig at Jerry Buss, who has long disliked the fact that his coach dates his daughter, who also handles marketing duties for the team.)

Then Jackson added, “But (right now) I’m serving this basketball club as a coach. I think it’s the best way to approach it right now. Where this team is, the way it’s built, the way we’ve been going along this season, the direction the NBA is going right now.

“A lot of these things fit together,” he said. “If we win it’s almost imperative that (I) give it another shot, but that’s a lot of ‘if’s’ in there. Winning is a really big (challenge). There are four playoff (series) that you have to get through before you can say that ‘We won’ and then have a chance to do something special again, unique.

“So, that’s a long shot.”

Earlier in the season, Jackson had begun publicly nudging Jerry Buss about his contract for next season. The coach began the effort in front of the New York media with comments implying that the team was making an effort to get him to take a cut from his $12 million salary each season.

Jackson, of course, saw a scenario shaping up and wanted to change the direction that things were going. It was obvious he faced a scenario that forced him to win the NBA title this year to keep his job.

Jackson was really concerned about next year in that it provided him a window to win another championship. Jackson reasoned that if the Lakers didn’t win the title this year, then Jerry Buss and son Jim might decline to give him a new contract (they made a similar move in 2004 and fired him).

Jackson would prefer to have next season under contract, because it would still give him an opportunity to win one more title next year. Jackson believes the NBA is headed for contract troubles with its players union that could easily force a cancelation of the 2012 season due to an owner lock out.

Title opportunities this season and next are huge for the highly competitive Jackson, who has already won 10 titles.

First Jeanie Buss and now Lakers owner Jerry Buss have come forward to address my observations about the organization’s inner conflicts, particularly the job status of coach Phil Jackson (Jeanie’s boyfriend who used to wear a soul patch).

At least Jeanie addressed me by name. Jerry chose longtime Lakers writer Steve Springer to put together a story answering a tough column I did on this blog about Jerry’s poker face. In Springer’s story for ESPN Los Angeles, he addressed me only as an “Internet report.”

Hey, guys, if you want this to go away, don’t look at me. You gotta get Phil to quit talking about it.

That’s your cold, hard truth here.

It’s obvious he doesn’t feel entirely appreciated. And, puh-leeze, spare me Phil’s breathless response to this that everything is just fine.

It was Jackson who first launched this issue when he chose the team’s trip to the New York market earlier in the season to air his complaints that  Jerry Buss and his boy Jim, who is trying to establish himself as the guy running the Lakers basketball operations, were trying to get Jackson to take a pay cut.

“So they may not even want to hire me,” Jackson said at the time. “They may want to save some money.”

This started with Phil’s indignation over the money, folks. By the way, that’s what really got Phil rolling against Bulls GM Krause back in Chicago. Krause was pinching Phil’s money.

Most recently, I tried to soft shoe Jackson’s remarks about Jerry Buss by calling them “tender.”

But what the heck, let’s be frank about what Jackson did. He used one of his old tricks. Back in his battles with the Chicago Bulls front office, when Jackson wanted to tweak Jerry Krause, he would say something positive about him and then act like he was defending him against critics. In that manner, Jackson could introduce a negative idea to the media and still not get blamed for “seeding” it.

Very crafty.

For example, there are the frequent complaints by fans that Buss — who was not with the team for last year’s championship and was not there to accept the NBA trophy as the owner traditionally does — is detached from the team.

“I think he admires this team, I think he likes his athletes,” Jackson told reporters last week. “He has an ability to stay removed and yet attached to them.”

What does that mean? I think Jerry’s interested in this team?

I think?

C’mon. Let’s face it. Jackson’s trying to coach the team to a championship and he basically says the owner isn’t all that interested.

There’s the fact that Jerry Buss dislikes the triangle offense, which I have pointed out in my columns, because of his great love for his “Showtime” teams that ran with the basketball.

Here’s what Jackson had to say on the subject:

“I think Jerry was very close to his teams in the ’80s, the Showtime teams,” Jackson said of Buss. “And I think he learned something from that. He learned that you can be friends with these guys, but time passes, a generation passes. There’s some heartache involved in that. There’s some pain involved in it the closer you get to the guys.”

So Jackson’s pointing out that Jerry’s teams with Magic Johnson broke his heart. And because his heart is broken he can’t seem to muster any public interest in the current Lakers?

Is that it?

But it is good that Buss at least spoke up. He didn’t say anything much about Jackson’s contract status except what I had already pointed out in my columns: He said the organization will wait until the season is over to renegotiate with Jackson.

Buss pointed out that Jackson waited until the end of the 2008 season before signing with the club for three years on his last contract.

“If I were to go to him right now and said, ‘Phil, will you coach next year?’ He would say let’s wait until the end of the year and see how I feel,” Buss told Springer (not ESPN who bought the freelance piece). “So, I don’t think it causes any tension, I just have to wait until then before a discussion begins.”

No where in any of Springer’s report does it mention that Buss fired Jackson at the end of another contract talk, in 2004. You think that’s an important detail? (On the other hand, I should point out the piece is a hell of a fine interview with the owner, who provides all kinds of insight into his life and family and team issues.)

“I think from the Lakers’ perspective we really want to get through the year, then take a deep breath and see where we are,” Buss said.

Too bad Jackson and Buss didn’t appear together in a press conference, where they could take open questions and assure fans that there’s no problem. But that’s not going to happen, not in LA, where Buss has craftily used his public relations staff over the years to discipline the media.

I don’t want to belabor the point any further. Get on with the season. Just don’t try to blame it on me.

Phil’s the one doing the talking.

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

This blogging stuff is all brand new for all of us. And it’s changing every day as more and more websites and blogs come online giving more and more people power and voice, not just to write but to interpret things.

I spend months and months writing a book while I teach about 100 media writing students per semester. That doesn’t allow much time for blogging until my book is finished. Then I wade back into blogging and reporting, which is highly experimental these days.

We bloggers are on the edge of the world, the tip of the wave of thousands of years of human history.

The world of sports blogging is a rapidly changing and evolving thing. But it’s great fun to be a part of that.

My crazy work schedule leads to a strange pace here at lakernoise.com. I’m away intensely working on a book for months at time. Then I’m back. Lakernoise contributor and good friend Jorge Ribeiro has been able to help out by posting. And I look forward to his doing more, as well as more from any readers, regular or otherwise, who want to have their say.

Then there’s the online community. I can always count on certain sites, LA Times Lakers blog, FB&G, now Kurt Helin over at NBC’s pro basketball talk and the always reliable K brothers and Henry at Truehoop for an intelligent discussion of things. They and the many posters and readers are the heart of all the Lakers and pro hoops sites. They don’t always agree with what I write, but they take the time to read it and offer honest opinions.

Frankly, I love that sense of community and so do most of you.

And many of you have had opinions about my recent posting about LeBron James and the Lakers inner conflict on hoopshype.com. Frankly, it pissed off a lot of folks. Thanks, by the way, to those who took the time to defend me.

It was a gnarly story to write. There were two elements to the story: 1) LeBron’s quiet approach to the Lakers’ facilitators, 2) a more in-depth view of the conflict in Lakers ownership, management and coaching. I could have written about Jeanie and Phil and Jerry and Jim Buss at the top of the piece, but if I had put LeBron second I would have buried the lead. The big news is LeBron’s overture, and even if I had hidden that news down in my story, that’s what all the crazy websites of the sports world would have hyped.

Yet it’s all a subset of Phil Jackson. LeBron is a 25-year-old looking around at the major options in his life. Isn’t exactly thrilled with certain things about the Knicks and other options. Is a bit weary of Cleveland/Ohio where he’s lived all his life. He’s like Lloyd Dobler, really trying to figure out what he wants in life. Loves LA. The Lakers are cool, Phil is cool. Will Phil be available? That’s the option that LeBron finds very intriguing. He’s the most powerful person in the NBA besides David Stern and a few owners. He has the power of youth and talent.

In his world, the world of media and money and power, you very discreetly explore what you want.

But it’s upsetting to a lot of people that he would do that, and that I would report it.

The whole experience reminds me yet again how deeply people invest their emotions in their sports teams. Fans are insane about their teams. And that’s how it should be.

As for the intrigue of the Lakers, it’s a story that some want to know about. Others don’t.

In writing sports history, I am reminded every day that people, athletes and coaches and their agents, usually wait years to tell what really happened during a season.

My goal is not just to try to get the truth out about yesteryear. I also try to provide as much information as I can about what’s going on behind the scenes right now. It’s not always easy to get at that information, but I think it’s important to try.

I think fans have a right to know.

I also understand that such information can be jarring to fans and their teams.

But I like to emphasize what a lot of owners and commissioners and agents and certain fat cat players and coaches all too easily forget — it’s the fans who pay the bills, the fans who truly own the teams and the leagues.

And it’s the fans who have a right to know.

So I’ll continue to report stories and blogs just as I presented the LeBron James overture story.

If you like it or don’t like it, I trust you’ll let me know about it either way.

Peace,

RL

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

Roland Lazenby is the author of “Jerry West, the Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon”, set to be released by Random House/ESPN in February.