Jerry West, the Los Angeles Lakers and a simmering 20-year feud
Credit to Author: Baxter Holmes| Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2024 10:02:56 EST
IT WAS NEAR midnight on the evening of Feb. 27, 2020, and Jerry West was sitting in his car, parked outside his Bel-Air home. He was contemplating retirement.
“Sometimes,” West told ESPN, “I feel like I just need to work on myself.”
“Sometimes, I just think not being involved might be good for me.”
As one day turned to the next, he added: “Sometimes, enough is enough.”
The subject would come up every year, maybe during the season, or perhaps in the offseason. But it arrived, without fail, for decades, those close to him say. There was a process he’d work through. He’d declare this year was his last, that he really meant it this time, but then a new season would approach, and West would think about the challenge of piecing together a puzzle to win it all, of finding the right pieces that aligned just so. His competitive fire would burn again, and he’d return for another chance.
It became something of a running joke, one person close to him said — here was Jerry West talking about retiring after nearly six decades in the NBA. But West needed the game, those around him said. They believed that the game would restore some balance within him, and that Jerry West would be back — because Jerry West would always be back.
But, to those within his inner circle, this period of anguish in 2020 was especially pronounced for West, then an 81-year-old consultant for the LA Clippers.
Back in his car, West continued. “Look at all the tragedies every day that go on. You just wonder, ‘Are you pushing your luck by putting so much pressure on yourself to try to help make a difference?’ … And I like pressure, but, after a while, I really don’t know if it’s good for you. I really don’t — and particularly at this point in my life.”
It was almost one month to the day after Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, Bryant’s daughter Gianna, and seven others died in a helicopter crash.
In the spring of 1996, West, then the Lakers’ general manager, watched 17-year-old Bryant’s predraft workout with the Lakers and, after a few minutes, declared, “To hell with this. I’ve seen enough.”
West knew Bryant was special, knew the Lakers had to acquire him by any means necessary and relentlessly pushed to make it happen. The two remained close for decades, forging a relationship in which West considered Bryant to be nothing short of a son.
After Bryant retired in 2016, ending a 20-season Lakers career, West admired Bryant’s efforts to build a storytelling empire with books, TV shows, podcasts and films, with Bryant even winning an Academy Award in 2018 for an animated short film titled “Dear Basketball.”
Bryant’s sudden loss a month earlier, at age 41, marked a tragedy West had not fully grasped or accepted.
Bryant had focus and direction beyond basketball, West said, and then, he looked inward.
“I don’t know if I’d even be qualified to do anything else,” West said. “Maybe dig a ditch, that’s it.”
That feeling, West said, was compounded when he looked at not only Bryant but also LeBron James, Magic Johnson and an array of modern players who were constructing media companies and production companies and investing in myriad ventures outside the game.
“Those people have really had a career away from basketball,” West said. “The only thing I’ve done in my whole life is to be involved with teams.”
On Sunday, West will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor, honoring his executive roles with the Lakers and Memphis Grizzlies and his consultant roles with the Golden State Warriors and the Clippers.
It will mark a record third entry into the Hall for him: West was inducted as a player in 1980, then as a member of the 1960 U.S. Olympic gold medal team in 2010. The ceremony will carry an undercurrent of sorrow; West died earlier this year, on June 12, at age 86.
In a series of unpublished interviews with ESPN, West described reaching a crossroads in life and in work.
He had been deeply wounded, he said, by events the previous summer and continuing into that fall — ones that fully and finally severed any remaining ties to the Lakers, the franchise he spent 40 years helping to build.
During that tenure, first as a player, then a coach, then an executive, West had helped lift the organization to historic heights before this coldest of wars. In the years since, he had hoped for reconciliation. Then, in 2019, after his family became involved, one of the most famous Lakers in history shared a once-unthinkable sentiment, one he’d repeat privately and publicly in the years ahead.
“I almost wish,” West told ESPN, “that I had never played or worked for them.”
SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER, on July 9, 2019, the Clippers sent shockwaves through the NBA by landing Kawhi Leonard, the top free agent on the market who had just led Toronto to a championship.
Inside the Clippers, there was jubilation. Inside the Lakers, there was frustration. Both teams had competed for Leonard, who had expressed a desire to return to his Southern California roots, but he spurned the Lakers to join the organization they shared an arena with and one that, for decades, was mostly well-known for its pronounced losing.
The day after Leonard joined the Clippers, they traded for star swingman Paul George, instantly making the team a title contender.
Later that month, on July 27, Adrian Wojnarowski (then with ESPN) reported that Jerry West’s son Ryan, who had spent 10 years with the Lakers and last worked as the director of player personnel, was leaving the organization.
Team sources made it clear that Ryan West wasn’t leaving of his own accord. Two sources close to the matter said Ryan’s departure was tied to the concept of there being no room for growth within the franchise, as ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne reported.
Jerry saw it differently.
“They let him go because of me,” he said one week after Ryan’s departure.
He considered his son, who now works as a pro personnel scout for the Detroit Pistons, to be collateral damage in his clash with members of Lakers’ leadership.
The Lakers declined to comment for this story.
Jerry said he apologized to Ryan, whom he described as “devastated.”
“It’s like a soap opera,” a former longtime Lakers executive said. “There is fallout, which is hurtful. Ryan, to me, it looks like he paid the price for all this pettiness.”
THREE MONTHS LATER, on Oct. 26, 2019, West’s face contorted into a grimace. He shook his head, pursed his lips and fidgeted in his seat. In front of him was an iPhone propped up against a table centerpiece, broadcasting a Clippers game with the Suns in Phoenix. The Clippers were behind, making too many mistakes — too many turnovers, bad passes, unnecessary fouls. It was the third game of the season after the team’s roster was overhauled with the additions of George and Leonard.
Seated beside his wife, Karen, and a Clippers official, West was living and dying (mostly dying) by every possession, doing so from a front-row table during the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation 20th Anniversary Gala, held in a ballroom at the J.W. Marriott in downtown Los Angeles. West was being honored with an award, which he received at the end of the evening.
Standing behind a lectern atop a stage, West thanked the event organizers and offered thoughtful, humorous remarks about Murray, a legendary Los Angeles Times sports columnist West once called “the Michael Jordan of sportswriters.” As he closed out his five-minute speech, he paused and looked across the ballroom at a handful of college students from across the country who had received scholarships from the foundation.
“I don’t know if you people like to read,” he said. “I hated school because I didn’t want to read. All I do is read now, but I read to learn.”
He closed his speech a beat later, but West wasn’t exactly finished. His mind couldn’t escape the latest episode, the latest grievance, in his longstanding feud with the Lakers.
It had been a week since the team had severed the last remaining tie between the two parties — and broken a promise made by the franchise’s patriarch.
“Can you believe they took my tickets away?” West asked quietly back at his table. “I just can’t believe it.”
For the past few weeks, West and his family had checked the mail for a delivery that had arrived every year during the preseason for almost two decades: four season tickets to all 41 Lakers home games at Staples Center.
The seats themselves were prime real estate — Section 101, Row 8, Seats 1-4, located along the aisle, behind the scorer’s table and near midcourt. They offered West and members of his family an ideal view of the team he played 14 All-Star seasons for beginning in 1960 (winning a title in 1972) and later led as its general manager for 18 years (during which the Lakers won five more championships). They could look at the team’s retired jerseys and see West’s No. 44.
“Those were always Jerry’s seats,” one longtime ex-Lakers staffer said.
The tickets, West said then, were promised to him by Dr. Jerry Buss, the Lakers’ owner when he left the team in 2000. West said Buss specifically added that West would have the tickets for as long as the Buss family owned the team. Buss died in February 2013. One person close to the Buss family said that they weren’t aware of that particular promise but that it would’ve been in line with Buss’ wishes.
“He always wanted to make sure Jerry was taken care of,” the person said.
But with the season about to open on Oct. 22, and with the tickets still failing to arrive, West began to suspect the worst.
After attempts to reach Tim Harris, the Lakers’ president of business operations, West said his family received an email from Dan Grigsby, the team’s general counsel, saying that they were welcome to request Lakers tickets game by game and that they’d be accommodated.
West considered the canceling of the season tickets to be personal — “That’s about as low as you can go,” he later said.
Some Lakers executives were shocked when they learned about the situation, which began circling through the organization.
“You don’t just take something away with no explanation — given who they did it to,” one team source said then.
West wanted the story to go public — and parts of it did. But, at the time, those who knew West and the Lakers’ internal politics considered it a petty but ultimately harmless turn in the decades-long feud between West and members of the Lakers’ hierarchy.
To West, it represented something more.
THOSE WHO HAVE worked inside the Lakers and remain close to the franchise say the bad blood dates back nearly 30 years.
Kurt Rambis, a player on the 1980s Showtime era teams West helped construct, had served as the team’s interim head coach in the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season. He had posted a 24-13 record after taking over for a fired Del Harris, and the Lakers reached the Western Conference semifinals.
Rambis had turned down other head-coaching opportunities, believing he was in line to become the Lakers’ head coach.
But West, then the team’s general manager, pushed Dr. Buss to hire Phil Jackson, a decision that would come to define an entire era of Lakers dominance. Multiple staffers present at the time said the decision to hire Jackson over Rambis sparked friction between Rambis and West as well as between West and Rambis’ wife, Linda, the Lakers’ executive director of special projects who is a close friend and confidant of Jeanie Buss, now the team’s governor.
In the ensuing months, a second element compounded the tension: the romantic relationship between Jeanie and Jackson, a partnership West was uncomfortable with and one about which he privately voiced his concerns to confidants. Word of his displeasure eventually reached Jeanie.
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The relationship between West and the team’s leadership began to splinter even more, with West increasingly iced out of the only NBA organization he had ever known. In 2000, after the team won its sixth title with him in an executive role, he retired. “I felt underappreciated by leadership, and leadership is ownership,” West told the L.A. Times. “As we left the Forum to Staples Center, I’d say, ‘What am I doing here? What am I doing to myself?’ Destructive feelings, a different drama every day. Leaving was the biggest relief of my life.”
Two years later, West joined the Grizzlies as their general manager, then the Warriors in 2011 as a consultant. Throughout, though, he privately rooted for the Lakers, sources close to him said. Then, in 2017, West began to hope not only for reconciliation but also for a reunion. That February, the Lakers overhauled their front office in dramatic fashion, with Jeanie firing her brother Jim and longtime general manager Mitch Kupchak.
West, who was still with the Warriors, hoped the Lakers would call, but they never did.
“Sometimes I thought in my life that might be something that I can revisit, or they would want me to revisit,” West told “The Dan Patrick Show” in June 2017. “But that didn’t happen. At times, I wouldn’t say I was disappointed. But it kind of sent me a message.”
One source close to West said, “I know for a fact that [Jerry] would’ve liked to come back, but there was no way they were going to bring him back.”
Instead, that spring, the Lakers hired Rob Pelinka, who had previously served as Bryant’s agent, and Magic Johnson, who led the Lakers’ 1980s Showtime teams. In June, West joined L.A.’s other NBA team, the Clippers. In his introductory news conference, West appeared to take a dig at the Lakers, saying, “My last stop along the way, [I want] to be associated with people who are really basketball people, people I have respect for and, more importantly, I think, an incredible owner.”
The comment rankled the Lakers’ leadership, one source with direct knowledge said.
From his new position, West continued to monitor the Lakers, expressing dismay to confidants about a franchise he considered to be lacking leadership and direction. Linda Rambis and Jeanie Buss would hear his criticisms through the grapevine, sources said, and considered West painfully bitter, even mean-spirited.
The toxicity of his relationship with the Lakers now underscored West’s every conversation, those who knew him well said. No matter what the subject was, it always came up. Said one former colleague: “Jerry was a tortured soul.”
BACK INSIDE HIS car, in February 2020, West talked about how much he took the game home with him — all the winning and losing, the pressure to continue the former and stave off the latter, this endless cycle.
“It makes me so crazy when you want a team to win so badly,” West said.
His routine was ingrained. At Clippers games, West would sit behind the basket nearest to the Clippers’ bench, not far from owner Steve Ballmer, who sat along the baseline.
The dichotomy of the two men was striking: Ballmer front and center, pumping his fists and gesturing wildly in excitement; West stoic, almost obscured from view. Sometimes, Ballmer would walk over to West and seek his opinion.
West always had information to share, Ballmer told ESPN. It might be something small. “He’d look at anybody’s shooting,” Ballmer said, “and he’d say, ‘Oh s—, that guy’s got to move his thumb a quarter of an inch.’ Or maybe he’d talk about someone’s defensive effort. ‘God, he’s not working hard. God, he missed the angle, God, he missed this assignment.'”
He was blunt, the competitive fire still burning through his veins at 81.
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Sometimes at halftime, West would venture into the owner’s room opposite the Clippers’ locker room to consult with Ballmer. Other times he’d be so upset he stayed away. Regardless of the outcome, West would depart before the final buzzer, slipping out into the nearest tunnel with his head down, as if ducking out of the rain. Nearby fans would shout “Logo!” But West rarely slowed his determined stride.
He’d leave the arena where his statue — unveiled in 2011 — stands outside, then he’d begin the nearly 17-mile drive from downtown Los Angeles to his Bel Air home, where he would review the box scores from that evening’s games and read stories from around the league.
West never slept well, even as a child, always possessed by a seemingly endless reservoir of energy and restlessness. In bed, the game didn’t stray. Ideas, questions and memories poured in, keeping him awake for hours. “Even now, I dream of games,” he said in February 2020.
That nightly cycle played out for decades, but he found reprieve in reading. Growing up, he loved Field & Stream magazine and books on big-game hunting in Africa. Then, in 1951, older brother David died in the Korean War in what became a defining moment in West’s life. He found solace by shooting hoops with David’s basketball, but he also sought answers in books about war, generals, leaders and dictators. He read about Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler, the cartels in Mexico and Colombia, the latest historical tome from David Halberstam, anything from Joan Didion or John McPhee, from Joseph Campbell or Bernard Malamud.
“As you move along in your life I think it’s horrible to be ill-informed about a lot of things and more importantly history,” he said. “I’ve always been curious about everything in my life. I mean literally everything.”
He would read 10 books a month, he said, sometimes three in a week, either a physical book or on his iPad. “He read voraciously — a biography of so-and-so — [and he’d say], ‘What about this?’ Or, ‘Hey, I just learned that’; very thought-provoking,” Ballmer said.
But the pain West felt from so much of his life never strayed. In his Bel Air office, he said, he kept a Christmas card on his desk. It was the card the Bryant family gave him in December 2019, one month before Bryant died. West saw that card each morning as he read the newspaper, the smiling faces of Bryant and his family, looking back at him, the pain following him like a shadow.
“The hardest parts of my life,” he told ESPN, “I’ve been trying to erase those memories. I still haven’t. I still haven’t. I won’t.”
WEST COULDN’T HAVE known how the world would change just a few weeks later.
Soon after he was talking about trying to leave the game, the NBA suspended its season after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 before a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. West still talked with the Clippers’ leadership daily, but no one knew when games would restart, or what the world would look like when they did. The time away, West said, helped him feel rejuvenated.
“Honestly, this has probably been an eye-opener for me,” West said. When asked how he felt about trying to leave the game, he said, “You know, I was thinking one more year wouldn’t hurt me.” He wanted to see the Clippers win a championship. “That would be an incredible way to leave the game,” he said.
He was excited about their plans for a new arena. “It’s going to be special,” he said. He offered effusive praise for Ballmer. “He is just a great guy. And he’s so philanthropic, and his wife is just like him. They are such givers.” He would sit with Ballmer and it would remind him of time with Dr. Buss, when the two would talk for hours about trying to build the Lakers into something special.
“He’s just like Jerry Buss,” West said. “Except he’s a lot wealthier.”
West enjoyed his time away, but that familiar itch returned.
On May 22, 2020, West said he knew he was coming back.
“I’m still capable,” West said, “and I’m still performing. I know when I’m not performing. No one has to tell me. I just love winning. But more importantly, I love the process of helping and being involved with trying to build a team that can be there every year.”
“I’ll know when it’s time for me to say goodbye,” West said. “Trust me, I will.”
He continued with the Clippers, but the divide with the Lakers grew.
In December 2020, a year-old voicemail emerged in which West could be heard telling a confidant that the Lakers were a “s— show.” In an April 2021 podcast appearance with ex-NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, Jeanie Buss named her five most important Lakers and cited Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, LeBron James and Phil Jackson. One month later, during a podcast with journalist Peter Vecsey, West called the omission from Buss “one of the most offensive things I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Some people close to West downplayed her comments. She hadn’t even named her father as among the top five most important Lakers ever. But for West, it marked yet another slight.
In 2022, West told The Athletic, regarding his career, “One disappointing thing is that my relationship with the Lakers is horrible. I still don’t know why. And at the end of the day, when I look back, I say, ‘Well, maybe I should have played somewhere else instead of with the Lakers, where someone would have at least appreciated how much you give, how much you cared.'”
Reconciliation never came.
At 7:27 a.m. on June 12, the Clippers announced West had died, noting that his wife, Karen, was by his side. The Clippers then released personal statements from the team, Ballmer, Clippers coach Tyronn Lue and Lawrence Frank, the team’s president of basketball operations.
Soon after, Jeanie Buss issued a statement on Instagram.
“Today is a difficult day for all Laker fans,” she wrote. “I know that if my father were here, he would say that Jerry West was at the heart of all that made the Lakers great. He was an icon to all — but he was also a hero to our family. We all send our sympathies to Karen and the West family.”
West’s presence can still be seen across the Lakers organization.
Sunday, Oct. 13
Timberwolves at Knicks, 6 p.m.
Suns at Nuggets, 8:30 p.m.
Friday, Oct. 18
Lakers at Warriors, 10:30 p.m. (ESPN2)
All times Eastern
His No. 44 lines the wall of the team’s practice facility. Before tipoff at the Lakers’ first preseason game this past Friday in Palm Desert, the team recognized West’s achievements and held a moment of silence. The Lakers will wear a commemorative No. 44 band on the left shoulder of their uniforms this season. On opening night, an Oct. 22 matchup against the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Lakers will hold an in-game celebration of West’s legacy while gifting a No. 44 jersey to all Lakers fans in attendance. And this Sunday, the team plans to hold gatherings at the Hall of Fame to honor West and former Lakers guard Michael Cooper, who is also being inducted.
Two weeks after West’s death, Clippers front office personnel gathered inside a conference room at the team’s practice facility in Playa Vista, California. The NBA draft — an event that had long been one of West’s favorites — was about to commence. When they’d interview draft prospects, West would tell each player something he saw in their game that needed to improve — and would never mince words. At the combine, West and Ballmer would sit side by side, and West would offer insights on everything he’d seen.
But during the draft in late June, inside the room where decisions were being made, Clippers executives saw only an empty seat, which the team reserved for West in tribute.
On the back of the chair, they hung a jacket akin to those West always wore. On the table in front, they placed an NBA ball — featuring the logo of West’s dribbling silhouette — and a white hat with all-caps blue-and-white lettering reading “LOGO.” Next to those tokens was a small placard with a quote:
“I enjoy winning, but more importantly, I enjoy the people I’m around. – Jerry West.”
A FEW MONTHS later, on a Friday afternoon in early September, Ballmer sat in his second-floor office at the new Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California. On the speakerphone in front of him, he was asked for his memories of bringing West aboard in 2017. Ballmer’s detail-rich answer stretched 7½ minutes.
He began with his first meeting with West in July 2014, two months after Ballmer bought the Clippers for $2 billion. Ballmer had traveled to Las Vegas for the NBA’s annual summer league showcase, and during one of the many meetings held there between team and league officials, he saw West, who was still with the Warriors.
“You paid too much for the team,” West told him, giving Ballmer a gentle ribbing.
Ballmer laughed. But as Ballmer settled into his role, his college roommate Dennis Wong — a former Warriors minority owner who became a Clippers minority owner — offered advice: “We need a guy like Jerry West.” They kicked around some names but came up empty. Then, three years later, in the summer of 2017, West’s time with the Warriors came to an end.
“How about Jerry West?” Ballmer and Wong said to each other.
West and Ballmer met in a suite at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills and talked about the team, their goals, each other. “It felt right,” Ballmer said. “The chemistry felt good.” They hammered out a deal for West to become a consultant, and that was what West wanted — to be removed, to be a voice but not the voice.
Ballmer could always see the immense, unrelenting pressure that West put on himself to help them win season after season. “If I’m not of value, you let me know,” West would tell him.
But in West, Ballmer found a kindred spirit.
“Both of us were in a little bit of a weird position,” Ballmer said. “I used to run Microsoft, and I was in the mix. Every day, I was like a player, if you will. And now with the Clippers, I’m not in the day-to-day mix. I approve budgets and big trades — nobody’s going to make a blockbuster trade [without me weighing in] — but I’m not in the mix every day. So, I’m not exactly a consultant like Jerry was, but I’m a little closer to that than a guy who’s in the mix every day. And Jerry, at least with us as a consultant, he was here all the time, but it’s not the same for him as either being the GM or being the coach or being a player. We both had a role that was maybe alien to us, and yet we still brought the same fire to excel in the roles we could play.”
As Ballmer shared stories about West, he slipped between present and past tense. At times, Ballmer took long pauses to regain control of his emotions, his voice breaking often. But he continued on, trying to convey how much West meant to him. “I loved working with Jerry — loved, loved, loved working with Jerry,” Ballmer said. “Just really a special, special, special human being to me.”
Ballmer thought about how he wanted to remember West — and how he hoped others would remember him. The concept of West’s legacy had weighed on many who knew him well. They knew West could be complicated, that he could have good days and bad. His recent portrayal in the “Winning Time” HBO series deeply irritated many in his inner circle, especially West, depicting him as a raging caricature during the Lakers’ Showtime era. Those around him believe it missed his generosity, his humor, his warmth. More than that, it represented another wound for a man already scarred from so many others.
Ballmer saw West differently. Yes, he was a legend who had forged arguably the most storied career in the history of basketball, but he also was a friend, one who could always make him laugh.
When news broke that West was going to be inducted into the Hall of Fame for the third time, Ballmer congratulated him, but West shrugged it off, saying he wasn’t even sure what he was being inducted for this time.
Looking back, Ballmer said he harbored two regrets. “Regret No. 1,” Ballmer said, “Jerry and I always talked about playing some golf, and we never did. And regret No. 2, Jerry thought I wasn’t a very snazzy dresser. He brought me shirts one time, and he threatened to get me a suit because he didn’t think I dressed well enough. My regret is, we never got that done. We never got that suit.” As he recounted the memory, his body shook with laughter, but then his voice broke hard, caught in his throat. He took another long moment to gather himself.
Ballmer said the team’s habit of asking, “What do you think Jerry would say about this one?” will last for some time. West always said he wanted the Clippers to win because he loved the people there, and because it would mean so much to their longtime fans, to the city of Los Angeles and to Ballmer.
The Clippers provided West with a home when he lost the one he had with the Lakers, made him feel wanted at a time when he needed it most. “It’s not easy being rejected,” West said in February 2020. “And I’ve been rejected along the way.” He tried, as best as he could, to look ahead. There was always another season.
On June 2, he and Ballmer spoke about the coming season while Ballmer drove through Seattle, where he lives. It was a sunny and beautiful day, Ballmer said. “I remember it very vividly.” West shared especially good news: His health was improving. “I got this thing,” he told Ballmer. “I’m coming back.”
West was excited. He planned to be there for opening night, once again.
Ten days later, he was gone.