As the N.B.A. lockout continues to eat its way through the season, the principal view of pro basketball, despite some recent advertisements by Nike attempting to convince us otherwise, is of a stalled and bloated financial beast, made up of wealthy squabblers deadlocked over abstractly large amounts of money. The whole thing, to use a current formulation, feels very 1%—more boardroom than locker room, and not much to do with the redeeming qualities of sport.
Funny, then, that a measure of relief, at least for this fan, would come from Jerry West, whose jaunty silhouette has adorned the N.B.A. logo since 1969. Though West achieved greatness as a player—first as an All-American for his home-state West Virginia Mountaineers, then later as co-captain of the 1960 Olympic team, and as a fourteen-season flag bearer for the Los Angeles Lakers—his greatest successes may have been cemented as an executive, most notably for a nearly twenty-season run as the general manager of the Lakers, beginning with the Showtime glory years of the eighties and ending in 2000. West was a Hall of Fame player, but as an executive assembler and massager of talent, he was, according to many around the league, unparalleled.
His new memoir, “West by West,” is deeply thoughtful in a way rare among books by former athletes. West never tries to separate money out of the game. In a brief passage from his playing days, for example, he recalls a flashpoint in the N.B.A.'s labor history, when before the 1964 All-Star Game in Boston, he and his fellow players threatened to boycott the game unless progress was made with owners toward a pension deal. He remembers it as an uncomfortable but necessary stand, perhaps in a way that today's players may look back at the summer of 2011, though that seems unlikely. And much of the book, written with Jonathan Coleman, is devoted to West's life as a basketball businessman—from his complicated relationship to Lakers owner Jerry Buss to the ins and outs of keeping players (James Worthy) or begging ownership to send others away (Dennis Rodman) to the deal that brought head coach Phil Jackson to Los Angeles.
The relief, then, isn't that West is some amateur purist standing against the complex business of basketball. Instead, it comes from a chapter near the end of the book that unites those two ideas. During a bout of sleeplessness—the book is as much about depression, self-doubt, and insomnia as it is about basketball—West gives his mind over to the construction of the perfect game, played by two rosters built from the best players across the years.
West is seventy-three, but here he dreams with the gusto of a boy, imagining the precise and improbable conditions of a world wherein anything is possible: the location is Madison Square Garden on a mid-afternoon in May. Playoff time, maybe Game Seven. The stands are full of his favorite fans living and dead: Jack Nicholson, Spike Lee, Frank Sinatra, Monet, and Picasso, along with West's high-school English teacher, his friends, family, and others. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama agree to set next to each other. Old-fashioned organ music fills the dead air; no laser-light shows or T-shirt cannons. The rules of the game are amended, back to those in place the days when West played, and other more improbable rules are laid down as well: players are all in their primes, they have undergone the same contemporary conditioning programs, they've arrived at the game flying in coach, and they've travelled alone. “No entourage, no bodyguards, no publicists, no Twittering.”
His old teammates Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain are there. So is his nemesis, Bill Russell. Magic and Bird square off one last time. Shaq lumbers through the paint. The younger generation is represented by Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade. Building a pair of dream rosters is the great general-manager fantasy, a test of his skills as an evaluator of talent. And in a way, this kind of thinking about basketball—puzzling over historical and statistical possibilities, comparing players across eras, optimizing talent—has also become a significant part of the fan experience: in fantasy leagues, in basements, and on barstools. Perhaps it always has been; today's advanced computer metrics and inky box scores from the fifties both inspire the same kind of day-dreaming. Yet the difference between all of us and Jerry West, for example, is that West can realistically imagine how he would fit into his dream game. He makes one of the teams.
The last time I could imagine making any team was when I was a kid, shooting alone at a hoop after school as the evening turned to night. Basketball, despite being a team game, is in many ways a lonely sport, as much about boring solitary repetitions as it is about feats of athletic grace. The outside shot, for instance, is constructed by persistence and time. Most anyone who has spent hours taking jumper after jumper at the elbow has felt his mind wander to grander accomplishments. To the final seconds, down by one, the ball in your hands with the game on the line. Soon, the scenarios grow more baroque, the odds more dire, and begin to incorporate all the particulars of a real game. For me, that would start spinning out into the names of my teammates, their backstories, to entire games, and even to seasons. This was the real fantasy basketball, before cap space, Player Efficiency Rating, or labor negotiations meant anything to me. I lost myself in stories, and forgot to practice my backspin.
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