Jerry and I were, in so many ways, undivorceable.

When I saw early on the morning of June 12 that he was “trending,” I was both devastated and strangely bemused by what I knew that meant: “Trending” was the last thing Jerry West ever wanted to be doing. I knew the last eighteen months had been very hard for him, in and out of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and his nephew had tried to prepare me. But let’s be honest: You never are. Within minutes, Scripps TV phoned and asked me to come on via Zoom. I told them my “lighting” was subpar, but they were not taking no for an answer. New York Magazine asked if I would write something, but I said I simply could not, that I needed time to pass.

I had always worked alone as a writer, as nearly all writers do, but when Jerry’s agent inquired if I had any interest in collaborating with him on his life story, I found myself saying yes. I had grown up a fan of the Boston Celtics, primarily of Bill Russell, and Jerry West, the Lakers guard who had been an All-Star for every one of his fourteen seasons, was the player I feared most, the one who could change the mood and complexion of my teenage summers if, somehow, the Lakers could get past the Celtics. Relentlessly curious my whole life, I felt driven to know more about someone who, at least to me, somehow always felt just out of range, the silhouetted figure who became the symbol—the Logo—of the NBA. 

* * *

On a Wednesday in April of 2008, I was instructed to make a phone call—at precisely 2:17 pm—to a number with a 304 area code.

“Hello, this is Jerry West.” His voice was authoritative, but friendly. Well, friendly enough.

“I didn’t expect to find you in West Virginia,” I said. “I thought you were there only in the summers?”

“I am hunting,” he said.

“Hunting? For what? And why the request to phone at such an odd time?”

“I am turkey hunting, and I have been up since four-thirty or so. You have to secure your place in the woods very early, have to be ready. I said 2:17 because I thought you, as a writer, might appreciate the exactness of that.”

“I do. It captured my attention. But hunting season in Virginia”—I was phoning from Charlottesville—“is in November. So that’s why I asked.”

“You sure don’t know much about hunting,” he said, his disappointment clear. “Perhaps this was a mistake on my part. My instincts are usually right. Listen, call me back at 9:40 tonight, we’ll try this again. The playoff game should be over by then.”

Right from the start, he was jousting with me, testing me, in a barely concealed attempt to find out if I measured up, if I was ready to play, if I was ready to compete.

* * *

For the next five hours, I submerged myself into the world of turkey hunting, and by the time I phoned back, I was ready, pardon the expression, to talk turkey.

Three days later, we met for the first time, in White Sulphur Springs, where he had a home. He asked that I meet him at the Sporting Club, which is part of The Greenbrier resort, and he arrived right on time, as did I. In his hand was a copy of my previous book, Long Way to Go: Black and White in America, annotated from front to back.

“I guess the purpose of this dinner,” he said, jumping right in, “is to see if I feel I can trust you with the story I want to tell. It’s a very personal, painful story that many in my family don’t want me to write. I grew up in a home where I never learned what love was, and I am still not sure I know what it is today. I witnessed and experienced some awful things. I want to work with someone who doesn’t cover the sport of basketball for a living but who has a deep appreciation for the game and the people who play it. Someone who can understand what a deeply flawed person I am, and why. For so many years, I traveled with a group of men, both black and white, in a country that claimed it was trying to desegregate. There were places we were not allowed to stay. I was extremely quiet then, still am in many ways, and I could never figure out why I felt closer to my black teammates. I never even played against a black athlete until I was at West Virginia. I wish I had spoken up more about the injustices I saw. I read your book, and I still can’t believe you spent eight years of your life trying to figure all this out. I came to the conclusion that you are as crazy as I am.”

“Maybe this can work out then,” I said, and we both laughed.

* * *  

And so we embarked on a journey together, one of the most intense, delightful, and inspiring experiences of my life—and one that would include more than a few wild car rides on both coasts, Jerry being, you might say, an easily distracted driver. A short trip, full of hairpin turns, from his home in Bel Air to the Bel-Air Country Club would always leave me with white knuckles and heart palpitations. Jerry at the wheel of a golf cart was even worse. I was nearly thrown out three times. We would frequently (and deliberately) wind up in remote areas of the course, where he would attempt—and often succeed in making—the most impossible shots to the green. This is what he wanted—for things never to be easy, not in golf, not in anything. I was there because he wanted to keep talking about whatever it was we had been talking about. I might ask what, at that moment, was nestled in his mind’s eye, and he might answer, all the colors in a Monet or a Picasso, or trying to figure out the genius of Stevie Wonder, forever curious if it was true that people who are legally blind can see far more sharply than those who aren’t impaired at all. As a player, and later as an executive who was generally considered the greatest evaluator of talent in the game, vision and anticipation were particular strengths of his, things he quietly prided himself on.

When he focused again on the shot he was trying to make, I asked if he wanted me to learn to play, as Taylor Branch had done when he collaborated with Bill Russell on Second Wind. “God, no,” he said. “Why would I inflict that on you, a game that was designed by the Devil?”

But that never stopped him from inflicting things on himself. On my first long, two-week trip to California, we attempted to see his ailing Olympic coach, Pete Newell, before he died. We arrived in Rancho Santa Fe ninety seconds late because Jerry took a wrong turn, a mistake he blamed himself for weeks afterward. On the night before I left to return home, just before we were to have dinner, Jerry casually informed me that I had overpacked. I pushed back, ever aware that the testing of me was open-ended, reassuring him that it was mostly stuff related to work, our work. Karen, Jerry’s wife, stood up for me, reminding him that “not everyone has to do things the way you do them.” That didn’t stop him, though, from bringing out a small suitcase that he used in nearly all his travels and demonstrating, with 2:17 pm precision, how he rolled and folded a pair of pants, a sport jacket, a sweater, a shirt. Even when I offered up my defense—that I, a child of divorced parents forced to move a lot, found that packing for trips caused such anxiety that I just “threw things in” at the last minute—he was having none of it.

Another “teaching moment” occurred at their home in West Virginia. We were having dinner to celebrate the completion of the book and Karen had prepared crab legs. The moment Jerry discovered I was struggling with them, he said, “Hell, you’re a grown-ass man and you don’t know how to open crab legs? Lobster, too, I imagine. Why?” 

“Because I am lazy,” I said, “and I try to focus my energy on work.” 

One night, at a small Italian restaurant he favored in Brentwood, he ordered a salad of heirloom tomatoes, his favorite kind. When the dish arrived, he immediately said the tomatoes were not heirlooms and the waiter made the mistake of insisting they were. The chef eventually emerged from the kitchen and confirmed that Jerry was right. 

It was a slightly awkward, culinary moment, which we were able to get past when he shifted his attention to a woman seated nearby who was having a beer with her pasta. Jerry could not imagine why she wasn’t having a glass of wine instead. Naturally, a conversation ensued—a good-natured, jocular one in which the woman claimed that she simply didn’t know any better—and Jerry wound up buying her and her friend’s dinner, something that gave him great pleasure. 

* * *

One big and enduring reason Jerry trusted me is that he sensed that I was no stranger to the dark spot in the wood—something we shared in common. For three consecutive January nights in 2009, we talked about depression and suicide, about books on those topics we had both read more than once, William Styron’s Darkness Visible and A. Alvarez’s The Savage God. Jerry revealed his skepticism about both therapists and medication. He talked about how much he loved the work of Joan Didion, which I had introduced him to, and about his mild surprise they had never met. Like me, he never tired of one particular line of hers, even though overuse has, by now, made it almost a cliché: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I was aware we were going into things (including physical abuse by his father) that most people in his position, of his repute, would have never wanted to address—at least not publicly. But Jerry was different, and he wanted me to both push him and stick with him, and we were both proud of the way his candor made it easier for other athletes to open up about such matters and how it contributed significantly to the NBA’s decision to designate May as Mental Health Awareness Month. 

Jerry came to feel he could discuss anything with me, but that didn’t prevent him from often threatening to abandon the project, or from telling me that he had been awake all night and come to the conclusion that I would never be able to fully understand him, that in fact he had already written out a check to compensate me for the time I had wasted on him. Year after year, he had said similar things to the Lakers organization when he was running the team. But the real reasons behind his threats to quit went far deeper than the surface explanation that he couldn’t take it anymore. In our case, I wouldn’t take the bait—and he knew that. I would merely say that whenever he finished breakfast and the morning paper—a routine that was inviolate, sacred—we would get to work. And that work sometimes consisted of an hour’s discussion about one particular word, or a six-hour one, spread over two days, about whether he and the Lakers had done everything “by the book” in the negotiations over one particular player’s contract.  

* * *

In March of 2011, not long before West by West was published, we were invited to dinner at the home of Gay and Nan Talese, along with Robert and Ina Caro. Unbeknownst to Gay and Bob, Jerry had read a good bit of their writing. Had Jerry not been a voracious reader, with so many different interests, it would have been more difficult to share and discuss the many books and articles I sent his way—literature, I felt certain, that would help give his story a larger context and an enduring power. I had never seen anyone attack things the way he did, with zest and determination, and then want to talk about it, all of it, in such great detail. As time went on, it became more and more apparent to me why he had excelled, regardless of how tormented he felt and how depressed he could get. The truth is that he was always looking ahead, propelled by raw, gut instinct, and yet never losing sight of where he had been. His appetite for knowledge was beyond inspiring. It was as if he wanted to devour the world. 

Jerry had flown in from California not long before the dinner and seemed rather low when we met at the hotel. His shifting moods were, by then, something I quickly picked up on. Nan and I had been editorial colleagues at Simon & Schuster, and she has always been, for me, the sister I never had. I had been to the Talese home many times, but bringing Jerry there, to introduce him to people who mattered to me, was special. As we sat in the living room, having drinks, Nan told Jerry that she had always been most interested in joining Gay at the Garden for Knicks games when he was in town with the Lakers. Always gracious in his responses to things like that, Jerry said that he always looked forward to playing at Madison Square Garden. It was his favorite arena, in large part because the fans understood and were so knowledgeable about the game. He told Gay how much he liked his work, especially the piece he had written about Joe Louis, one of Jerry’s heroes (along with Sugar Ray Robinson, Sam Snead, and Jim Brown). 

Once the Caros arrived and joined us, Nan asked Jerry how his flight had been. Jerry looked pensive, then somewhat faraway, a look I knew well. “Have you ever,” he said, slowly and softly, “had the feeling that you didn’t care if today was your last day?” 

A stunned silence ensued.

“Well, that is how I felt today,” he said, but he did not elaborate, nor did anyone ask him to. They had never met Jerry before, and they were respectful of his privacy. But they were clearly intrigued, and, naturally, quietly concerned.

We moved from the living room to the dining room, and Bob lightened the mood by saying he was pretty sure he had been invited because Gay knew he was a fan of Jerry’s game. “I used to be pretty decent at basketball,” Bob added, “and played into my thirties until I hurt my back.” 

When Jerry asked him if he knew President Obama, Bob said that he attended lunches with other presidential biographers that the president hosted at the White House on a fairly regular basis. Jerry’s eyes lit up, and he said how much he wished he could be part of a group like that. He told Caro how much a figure like Robert Moses—the subject of Caro’s magisterial The Power Broker—enraged him because of the way he regarded and treated people without means. Jerry explained that he had come from such a background and that he was always offended by the stereotypes many had of West Virginians. 

Jerry told Gay that it was not only his work he liked but how much he respected his sartorial style, and they spent a happy moment talking about tailors (Gay’s father had been one, which Jerry knew) and clothes that were made by hand. Looking sharp at all times was important to Jerry, to who he was, to his sense of self. He talked about France to Ina Caro, who had written two books set there, and about editing to Nan, whom he found enchanting, as has anyone who has ever met her. 

But it was what happened the day after the dinner that I will never forget. I had sent Nan a thank-you email, and she phoned back. The three people whom the Taleses had hired to help for the evening—three people who had worked a number of parties for them before—had told Nan that no one, no one, had ever treated them with more courtesy, had ever expressed more genuine interest in them by the sort of questions he asked, than Jerry had. I was not in the least surprised. I had seen Jerry speaking with each of them, and I had grown accustomed to seeing him do things like that. Within a week, Jerry had sent Nan three handwritten notes to be delivered to them, along with a note for her and Gay, which said he was sorry Karen couldn’t have been there.

* * *

One thing I will never forget about Jerry is how easily slighted he could feel, a recurring lesson to me in never assuming someone else’s feeling of security about themselves, about who they are, regardless of individual accomplishment. 

In 2010, Jerry was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame for the second time; his first was as a player, in 1980, and this was for being part of the 1960 Gold Medal-winning Olympic team. It was the only medal or award that he truly valued. He was also supposed to be one of the “presenters” for the induction of Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss (a presenter being a person who accompanies the inductee to the stage and stands with him or her but does not speak), and yet for some odd reason, his name was never called. He sat there, stone-faced and quietly seething, but, far more than anything else, he was embarrassed. Karen was back in West Virginia, where she was entertaining a houseful of friends. As the ceremony continued, we spoke on the phone and she told me that she had already arranged for her friends to leave before Jerry and their sons Ryan and Jonnie arrived home the next day. Fran Judkins of the Hall, who adored Jerry and was perhaps even more upset than he was, had discovered the mistake before the ceremony and had tried to reach Jerry to alert him, but Jerry had not picked up his phone. Honest and inadvertent as the mistake might have been, it still did not prevent Jerry from being convinced that someone from the Lakers had had a conspiring hand in it. 

Flash forward to the winter of 2024. A statue of Kobe Bryant was being unveiled and dedicated outside Crypto.com Arena, not far from Jerry’s own statue, whose dedication I attended during All-Star Weekend of 2011. At the time, Jerry Buss, who was a father-figure to Jerry, was still alive, and in his remarks he pointed out that only “one in a million” people ever get a statue in their lifetime, but that Jerry just happened to fall into that select category: “You are that one in a million, Jerry,” he said, before the two men embraced, tears in their eyes. Jerry felt awkward and uncomfortable that day because he believed (and said in his remarks) that Elgin Baylor should have been honored at the same time and in the same way—as he finally was, seven years later, with Jerry speaking on the occasion.

But for Kobe Bryant—the player Jerry brought to the Lakers at age seventeen and viewed as a son—he was not asked to speak. There had been tensions between Jerry and the Lakers even before he began working with the Los Angeles Clippers in 2017, after an extremely successful stint with the Warriors for six years. Part of him ached to return home, where he had begun his professional career. But home was not the home he remembered, and he knew that when he left the Lakers in 2000, at the end of a season of much turmoil and anguish, but still resulting in a championship. 

As I saw it, Jerry was telling himself a story of how it could have played out, the story of the return of the Prodigal Son, but Jerry Buss was gone, there had been too many brushfires along the way, and there was no room at the inn. And so he fell into the arms of Steve Ballmer, owner of the Clippers, who revered him and eagerly sought his counsel, and whom Jerry, in turn, would praise to anyone who would listen. Much as he loved Ballmer, though, Jerry would sit alone at home games, hidden behind the basket, reassuring Ballmer that he was doing him a favor. There was truth to this. Jerry knew how unpleasant he could be when a game was being played, when all he wanted to do was focus on the game. In his mind, he was sparing a guy who represented the last important business relationship and friendship he had. (As Ballmer told ESPN, he and Jerry had spoken ten days before he died, Jerry leading him to believe that he would be ready to go for another season and make one more attempt to help bring the Clippers a championship.)

* * *

Much as Jerry tried not to think about the Lakers and just concentrate on the Clippers, I knew things continued to eat at him. He talked about the time the Lakers had unexpectedly taken back the four season tickets that Jerry Buss had bequeathed to Jerry—for life—after he left the organization. What is worse, the Lakers did not contact Jerry directly but sent an impersonal email to Karen instead.

He and I talked about this more than once, and much as I urged him to stay on the high road, I knew that it was the sort of painful insult he would carry with him forever. The more he said, “I don’t fucking care,” the more I knew he did. I had become used to this, his inclination to say the opposite of what he felt, his denial, at times, of things we both knew to be true.

Then, in the midst of all this, came HBO’s “Winning Time,” about the Lakers’ Showtime Era. Jerry was, rightly, upset and angered enough—as were many—by the over-the-top, crude portrayal of him that he threatened to sue. That threat alone caused a much larger discussion about docudramas and how they get made, and resulted in thoughtful pieces in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.

All of these things took an increasing toll on Jerry, and I increasingly worried about him. One bad sign was his loss of interest in a project that once excited him. I had learned that Jerry was a hero of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., when he was growing up in the Piedmont area of West Virginia. So I asked Gates if he might be interested in having Jerry sit down with him on “Finding Your Roots,” his successful series on PBS. Gates said absolutely. A great lover of history, Jerry watched the show on a regular basis and was enthusiastic about the idea. But when the HBO series began, he was consumed by what he saw as the utter unfairness of it, and his enthusiasm for participating in “Finding Your Roots” sharply waned. 

* * *

At Kobe’s livestreamed statue dedication, the camera showed Jerry with the same haunted look of embarrassment and sadness I had seen many times in the past. We texted during the ceremony. “It is painful for me to be here for a lot of reasons,” one of his texts read. It wasn’t right that he wasn’t up there on the dais. Even though he had made some intemperate remarks about the Lakers, some things in this life are not that complicated, much as we claim they are. This, to me, was one of them. When Kobe died in January 2020, Jerry was the first person the press wanted to speak with. He went on national television twice in three days and barely held himself together. 

Eight days after Kobe’s statue dedication, Jerry learned that the Hall of Fame was going to induct him—the first person to be enshrined for the third time—as a Contributor. This deceptively understated title would recognize not only the work he had done in presiding over the Lakers and their run of championships spread over two eras but also his work with three other franchises (including two championships with the Golden State Warriors). When I texted to congratulate him, his response was what I expected: “I really wish everyone would forget about me. It’s so tiring. This has become overkill.”

This was a familiar refrain to me. He, once again, had reached a point of self-fatigue and ennui, so wanting to distance himself from being “Jerry West.” When I phoned later that day, knowing that some time and a change of subject always seemed to help, I asked about his granddaughter Makenna, who was soon to turn four. This Jerry became someone else—alive, joyful. “Jonathan, I wish you could see her,” he said. “She was just sitting on my lap, eating fruit, telling me what each kind was, then reciting her numbers.” 

* * *

From April 2008 until his death in June, our relationship held strong, though we had plenty of ups and downs, moments we had to navigate between the rocks and the shallows. He hated confrontation, and I was born for it. We were strong enough for each other, and we challenged each other and pushed each other’s buttons every step along the way. Working with him gave me something I would never have experienced otherwise—the scintillating feeling of playing in a seven-game series. Nothing less would have satisfied either of us.

I spent a long summer of grieving, then mourning. But as Robert Anderson reminds us in his play, I Never Sang for My Father, “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on….” I don’t have to look it at that way, but I do. It is the truth, and that is what we both sought.

Shortly after Jerry died, Adam Silver, the Commissioner of the NBA, finally confirmed and clarified what had been the longest-running, wink-wink story in all of sports: that Jerry West was indeed the figure that the NBA Logo was based on, and had been since 1969. It made me think, though, of what Bill Russell had said of Jerry in 2011 at Jerry’s statue dedication: “As you all know, Jerry is the Logo Man. But to us [players], he was a man with a soul.”

* * *

Beyond his barely disguised vulnerability and the way conflict—and the vicissitudes of life itself—exquisitely tortured him, Jerry Alan West (not Jerome, never Jerome; with someone’s help, I was able to have it recently changed in Wikipedia) wanted, more than anything, to be loved and accepted, and, most crucially, to be understood. And part of what he wanted others to understand is that he never felt worthy of all the attention that was lavished on him. Many of the reasons for that were uncovered during the journey we set forth on years before. 

* * *

The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement of Jerry West, for an unprecedented third time, took place on October 13, 2024, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Nearly all of his presenters had played or coached for the Los Angeles Lakers. Jonnie West gave a touching speech about his father, a final farewell.

Opening Night of the NBA’s 2024–25 season is October 22, 2024. In honor of West, the Lakers will wear a purple band with his number—44—in gold on the left shoulder of their jerseys throughout the season.