Jerry West, who made the Los Angeles Lakers a dominant force in pro basketball for three decades, first as a high-scoring guard whose graceful dribbling silhouette inspired the NBA logo, then as the team’s astute general manager, died June 12 at 86.
Mr. West forged one of the most successful overall careers in National Basketball Association history. He was widely regarded as one of the league’s greatest players, and his late-game heroics for the Lakers earned him the nickname “Mr. Clutch.”
His most famous shot came against the New York Knicks in Game 3 of the 1970 NBA Finals. With three seconds remaining and the Lakers trailing by two points, Mr. West took an inbounds pass, dribbled three times, then from well behind the half-court line shot a 60-foot rainbow that dropped through the hoop.
“The crowd was in a frenzy, everybody was going crazy, and there we were looking up at the scoreboard wondering what happened? What the hell happened?” the Knicks’ Walt Frazier, who guarded Mr. West for most of the game, later told the Los Angeles Times.
After hanging up his No. 44 uniform in 1974, Mr. West engineered an even more triumphant second act as the league’s preeminent executive. His prescient draft picks, timely trades and knack for massaging talent helped the Lakers dominate the NBA in the 1980s, then again in the early 2000s, a run that included eight trips to the Finals and four championships.
Playing in the 1960s and early ’70s, he led the Lakers to the NBA Finals nine times, only to lose eight times. Six of those Finals defeats came at the hands of the Bill Russell-led Boston Celtics, leaving Mr. West repelled by the color green and unwilling to visit Boston for the rest of his life.
“Those losses scarred me, scars that remain embedded in my soul to this day,” he wrote in “West by West,” his 2011 memoir co-authored by Jonathan Coleman. Even his miracle shot against the Knicks was all for naught as the Lakers lost the championship in seven games.
Later, his accomplishments as the Lakers’ general manager and executive vice president seemed to produce more distress than elation and at one point landed him in the hospital with nervous exhaustion.
In his memoir, Mr. West revealed that he suffered from lifelong depression after growing up in rural West Virginia with a reclusive mother and a father who beat him. After one especially violent thrashing, Mr. West threatened to kill his father with a shotgun he kept hidden under his bed.
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