Heartfelt testimony to the basketball brilliance and capacious humanity of Jerry West has been pouring in all week, maybe you’ve noticed, including a beautiful remembrance in these pages from our own Paul Zeise, all of it making this humble addenda perfectly superfluous.
Yet because of Magic, I can’t resist.
Sure, Magic Johnson was among the most prominent and the most eloquent of the basketball legends trying to explain the generations-long impact of a skinny kid from West Virginia who turned himself into a hardwood god so universally revered they put him in the Hall of Fame through every conceivable portal, save the basement window.
And sure, Magic Johnson’s testimony was unassailable: “Beyond his basketball accolades as a player and NBA executive, Jerry West was a great man, a leader of men, fiercely loved his family and friends, and despite holding jobs with other franchises, he was a Lakers fan for life,” Johnson added. “Laker Nation, the only reason we have 17 NBA championships is because of Jerry West and his expertise drafting players, trading for players, and hiring the right coaches. Today is a sad day for basketball fans and sports fans across the globe.”
That was Wednesday, but it’s not so much Magic Johnson I think of when I think of Jerry West, it’s just regular old magic.
One lazy summer when Jerry West was still getting started on the monument he would carve into his basketball life, the kids in my neighborhood were shocked to learn that one of us, Davey, had been shipped off to basketball camp that was either run by Jerry West or featured an appearance by him.
The shock was mostly that any family on those streets had the money for that kind of thing, but further because Davey’s basketball aptitude was similar to our own, which was seriously unremarkable. When he returned a few days later, Davey was overflowing with descriptions of Jerry West’s technique (moderately annoying) and he was suddenly the best shooter on the street and nobody was close (really annoying).
It was like magic, small “m” magic, but magic just the same.
From that summer until the time Jerry West made his last jumper maybe a decade later, and pretty much ever since, I’ve never watched a shooter with the same kind of assuredness. When West put it up, I always felt it was money.
Dozens of shooters, maybe hundreds, have launched the basketball with similar skill and confidence in my view — Steph Curry, Lou Hudson, Kyrie Irving, James Harden, Larry Bird, the other Indiana kid who took the last shot in “Hoosiers” — but always without the precise magic of Jerry West.
Fortunately, a friendly chat with Don Hennon kind of snapped me out of all this, as Hennon not only played against West while he was still a blossoming college kid, but flatly rejected the notion that there’s anything mystical about shooting the basketball.
“Nobody’s born a good shooter,” said Dr. Hennon, who became a surgeon after his career as a noted sharpshooter at Pitt in the 1950’s. “It’s practice, that’s the only way. I did it at Wampum High School, which closed in 1961. My father was the principal and the coach, and he’d open the school at 6 in the morning. I’d go with him and go straight to the gym.”
Eventually the younger Hennon shot it so well he ended up an AP first-team All-American, the four others being Wilt Chamberlain of Kansas, Oscar Robertson of Cincinnati, Elgin Baylor of Seattle, and Guy Rodgers of Temple — four Hall of Famers and a surgeon.
Hennon averaged 25.7 points per game for Pitt in the 1958-59 season while West was putting in 26.6 per night with the Mountaineers. West’s team won 29 times that winter, falling a point short of a national championship against California.
“He was all business, every situation, offense, defense, every move,” Hennon remembered. “He was all intensity, but very quiet, didn’t say much. He was a year behind me, so I guess I played against him four times, and I was on the same team with him in an (East-West) All-Star game in Kansas City.”
West’s intensity was often inferred from his fierce concentration, which seemed most evident, again, in every shot he took.
In the final seconds of Game 3 in the 1970 NBA Finals, he took an inbound pass from Chamberlain with the Lakers trailing by two, dribbled thrice to his right to avoid New York Knicks legend-in-the-making Willis Reed, and launched a 60-footer that fell straight through the net.
In the days with no 3-point line, it merely tied a game the Lakers lost in overtime. But no one who watched it in the L.A. Forum or on any TV anywhere can forget it.
Also in those days, there was mostly no remote control, so you had to walk clear across the living room to turn off the TV (in the snow). My buddy Mark remembered for me the other day that that’s exactly what he was doing when West’s shot went in.
“I remember standing there stupefied,” he said, “But it wasn’t some chicken-(bleep) shot from the other end of the floor. It was a legit shot, with form. They could have made that into the logo.”
West averaged 31 points in that series the Knicks won in seven games, and of that indelible 60-footer he actually said, “You never think it’s going to go in.”
But really, why not? Jerry West shot it.
I’m pretty sure Davey wouldn’t have made it.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and on X: @genecollier.
First Published: June 15, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: June 15, 2024, 4:14 p.m.
