This resonates with West, 85, who spent much of his life trying to make sense of a succession of painful events, including the annual denial of an NBA championship that eluded him until the 12th of his 14 seasons as a player, all with the Los Angeles Lakers. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion wrote at the start of a seminal essay that hopscotched through a series of tumultuous events of the late ’60s, pointing out the folly of trying to explain the inexplicable, as most do to cope with sadness or loss. West was deep into recounting an imaginary game in which he’d bury winning shots at the buzzer, with an announcer to hail his makes and a referee to forgive his misses, when his mind jumped to the opening of an essay by Joan Didion, an acclaimed writer whose memoir is stored on his iPad, ready to be re-read. As a boy, he’d spend hours there shooting, often to avoid the abusive father he was likely to encounter when he headed home. Jerry West leaned back in a soft chair in his Bel Air living room, tracing his obsession with basketball back to a hoop in a neighbor’s dirt yard.
When you picture all-time NBA royalty, the image is not complete without Jerry West.
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