The Tribune

Maybe the greatest sports stars of the American West have passed in the past ten days.   Willie Mays, possibly the most multi-talented baseball player in history and talisman of the San Francisco Giants, died on Tuesday.  And last week the great NBA “logo,” Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers passed away.

You’ll read and hear about Mays this morning and through the weekend.  Much will be written about this man’s speed, slugging prowess, baseball intelligence and his defense.  He was without peer.

But for many who recall his brilliance, it was Willie Mays’ exuberance and smile that made him unforgettable.

Here’s more about West, and about his astounding achievements in Los Angeles and elsewhere.  And about California’s rise in American professional sports.

Among the greatest American cities, Los Angeles might be the most often discussed.  As the center of the American film industry, LA forms the backdrop for hundreds of movies and television shows.  It is full of glamour, traffic, the spectacular juxtaposition of snow-capped mountain ranges and glistening ocean beaches.  This giant, sprawling metropolis might just be the closest urban representation of the American Dream.

And no one personified the American Dream in sports in Los Angeles like the legendary Jerry West, who died last week at the age of 86.

If it were a state today, Los Angeles County would rank eleventh in population among the fifty US states, following only California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan. Geographically, it is larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware.  Economically, Los Angeles County has a larger economic Gross Domestic Product than all but five US states (California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois).

Los Angeles has grown in size and influence as its core business expanded.  But the entertainment business isn’t just the movies and TV anymore.  As those industries exploded in popularity and influence after World War II, the American sports industry raced right along.  Sports and entertainment – the first two initials of the phenomenon known around the world as ESPN – found anchor locations in America’s second largest city, starting around 80 years ago.

The first in a stunning series of sports franchise moves to Southern California occurred in 1946 when the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles.  (The Cleveland Browns were founded in that same year.)  While the Rams have switched stadiums and even cities numerous times over the decades since then, their move west was the first transcontinental professional sports move.

The next big sports switch to LA was the dramatic move of the Brooklyn Dodgers from New York in 1958.  This stunning maneuver was paired with the simultaneous move of the New York Giants - and Willie Mays -to San Francisco, and it shook New York City to its core.  The largest US city was left with only Manhattan’s haughty Yankees until the Mets began life in Queens in 1962.

The promise of vast and eternal riches drew the owners of these baseball and football teams to the Golden State with its explosive population growth and surging economy.   

Similarly, the Minneapolis Lakers of the National Basketball Association announced their move to Los Angeles in 1960.  The Lakers were the first NBA team on America’s West Coast.  Over the ensuing decades, the team became, together with the Boston Celtics, the standard-bearer for the NBA as it grew in stature and popularity.

The Lakers rank second in the all-time NBA records for wins and winning percentage, and hold the all-time record for most appearances in the NBA Finals (32).  Until the Celtics beat Dallas in the NBA Finals this week to capture their 18th championship, the Lakers were tied in NBA championships with the Boston Celtics, winning 17 NBA titles, and with many more Finals appearances than the Celtics.

The Lakers team has included so many NBA legends, including George Mikan, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jamaal Wilkes, James Worthy, Phil Jackson, Magic Johnson, Pat Riley, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Anthony Davis and LeBron James.

Even among that galaxy of NBA stars, one man stands out above all the rest.  That would be Jerry West, the “NBA logo” whose angled dribble stance still serves as the emblem for the league and whose achievements as a player, coach, executive and consultant are rivaled by no one in the history of American professional sports. 

West was a superb playmaker and scorer for the Lakers.  He was a 14-time All-Star and 12-time All-NBA selection.  He succeeded as their coach.  And later as their general manager, he surrounded Magic Johnson, James Worthy and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with enough talent to win five NBA titles during the 1980s.  Nearly 20 years later, West then constructed the team that won three straight NBA titles from 2000-2003.  That team was anchored by Kobe Bryant (a wise draft choice as a teenager from Philadelphia) and Shaquille O’Neal (lured to LA by West from the Orlando Magic). 

The Lakers under West’s direction seemed to succeed as inevitably as did the Celtics under Red Auerbach.  Stars from other teams were often willing to join LA in supporting roles to win a championship.  Critical draft choices were acquired seemingly by magic.  There were frequent unproven allegations that the NBA wanted and needed LA and Boston to succeed and somehow tipped the scales to make that happen. 

Other star players, coaches and executives came and went.  Jerry West’s skill and hard work made him relevant for decades longer than the others.

After a falling out with Lakers ownership at the turn of the century, West was still in high demand in his 80s, moving on to executive roles with the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and LA Clippers. Here’s just one example of his wisdom:  West’s refusal to sign off on a proposed trade of Klay Thompson for Kevin Love in 2014 kept the Warriors of Steph Curry and Thompson from breaking up before they went on their fantastic championship run from 2015-17.  West selected Draymond Green in the second round of the NBA draft and later lured Kevin Durant to the Warriors. 

West, still later in an executive role with the Los Angeles Clippers, managed to recruit the partnership of Paul George and Kawhi Leonard.  West was three times older than some of his associates.

As a teenager, Jerry West had won state high school basketball titles in West Virginia. He won at West Virginia University, where he led the Mountaineers to the NCAA national championship game in 1959, which the Mountaineers lost by 71-70 to the University of California. He won with the celebrated 1960 U.S. Olympic team, a team as dominant and hardly challenged as was the Dream Team led by Michael Jordan 32 years later.

That 1960 American Olympic team won its eight games in Rome at the Summer Games by an average of over 42 points per game. West, Oscar Robertson and several other team members were inducted individually into Basketball Hall of Fame, as was the 1960 team itself as a unit, in 2010. 

Basketball is in some ways America’s purest sports creation.  Jerry West was its most versatile and accomplished practitioner. 

• • • 

The debate upcoming next week between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is likely to dominate American political discourse for the upcoming seven days and perhaps for weeks beyond.  The agreement between their respective campaigns to toss out the previous sponsoring organization and agree on their own rules signaled an eagerness by both men to get it on before a national CNN audience.

While personal animosities have not infrequently characterized the relations between American presidential candidates, the hostility and stylistic differences between Biden and Trump may be the most pronounced in modern US history. These two really dislike each other.

And they’re both supremely self-confident of flaying each other in the kind of individual one-on-one oral combat that epitomizes debate.  That seems to be why they agreed to this unprecedentedly early TV faceoff, to be held a week from today in Atlanta.

Already, pundits are speculating about which rules will most benefit which candidate.  Is the lack of a live audience most beneficial to Biden, for instance?  The early views are mostly supportive of this theory.  But Biden is a lifelong politician who thrives by stirring an audience.  It is assumed that Trump will wilt without an adoring crowd.  Suppose it is Biden who fades instead?

There is much discussion also about the ability of moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper to mute the candidates’ microphones if they are exceeding their allotted time or simply misbehaving.  Again, this is widely seen as an advantage for Biden, since Trump is so rude and snide on a debate stage.  But what if Biden tries to rebut some of his opponent’s outright lies during the debate and cannot because his mike is muted?

There is little doubt this debate will draw huge audiences.  They might get surprised more than once.