INSIDE THE LAKERS’ BRAIN TRUST : When Hollywood’s Team Hits the Floor, It’s Show Time. : When Jerry West Makes His Plays, It’s Pure Business.

“I WANT TO WIN MORE THAN anyone on my team,” Jerry West says evenly. “I want to win more than our coaches want to win. I want to win more than our fans. I think everyone has high expectations. My expectations are higher, so I put more pressure on myself, period.”

After 25 years with the Los Angeles Lakers, the general manager of Hollywood’s Team might be expected to be a little less intense. But Jerry West’s approach to basketball doesn’t leave room for glamour. Working quietly behind the scenes, making deals and scouting talent, he’s the hidden architect of a Laker team whose will to win reflects his own.

Jerry West, the player, is, of course, an NBA legend: the smooth, deadly jump shot, the tenacious defense, the ability to rise to the occasion that earned him the sobriquet “Mr. Clutch.” After retiring as a player, he coached the club for three seasons, then acted as director of player personnel and, since 1982, has been general manager.

West’s office in the Forum is a small, windowless cubicle. Dressed in a collegiate style that’s at once casual and immaculate, he sits behind a desk cluttered with league publications and scouting reports. There are few mementos of his former glories; the walls are mostly decorated with lists--of players from other NBA rosters, of the order in which teams will choose in the college draft on June 28. It’s a place where business is done, without the fanfare.

“I would hope that our players and coaches would get all that (fanfare),” he says, “because, frankly, I don’t need it, and I don’t want it. It’s easier to do this job if you’re not out front. I don’t really like to talk about the things that we do. My reward is if the owner says I do a good job. I don’t need encouragement from the media. I’ve almost gotten to the point where it’s awkward for me. I’ve had my share.”

At 49, West still looks trim enough to pull down one relic framed on his office wall--the purple-and-gold No. 44 jersey--and stick the jumper. But his qualities as a player have been transformed into those of a tough, shrewd NBA executive. And those are the qualities necessary to survive in the highly competitive, sometimes coldblooded world of professional basketball.

THE BOTTOM LINE IS HIGH

THE FOUR NBA TITLES produced since 1979 by teams put together by West and his predecessor, Bill Sharman, are but one measure of accomplishment. In the NBA, winning on the court means winning big on the balance sheet, and the Lakers are one of the most successful teams in the league. They sold out 38 of 41 home games this season, and their ticket revenues have increased about 10% each of the last three years. The player payroll of about $8 million is the highest in the league. The Lakers are a team of stars, paid to win and win with style, and it is West’s job to make sure the curtain never falls.

To his peers in the league, West is admired as a former star who isn’t stuck on his celebrity. He’s famous but accessible. “Listen,” says Boston Celtics’ general manager Jan Volk, “I want to be Jerry West when I grow up.”

“Great players are not usually very successful at coaching or general management,” former Philadelphia 76ers’ general manager Pat Williams says. “I mean, this is not glamorous work. It’s a lot of plane trips and late dinners. But Jerry’s developed an aptitude for the job. I think it’s got enough plot to keep him stimulated.”

“Jerry West has, without a doubt, done the best job of anybody in the NBA,” says Bob Ferry, the general manager of the Washington Bullets. “He knows the market, and he knows how to communicate with his peers. That ability to interact is one of the most important qualities a general manager can have. He has a grace and style about him that benefits the whole league. But he doesn’t project that Hollywood image. I’d say there’s a lot more West Virginia in him than there is Hollywood.”

In the Forum, there are frequently two Laker teams: the well-oiled juggernaut wreaking havoc on the floor, and the team in Jerry West’s mind. The latter is at once a work in progress, a source of anxiety and a perhaps unattainable ideal. That perfectionism has served the Lakers well. The moves West has engineered in the past five years--the drafts of A. C. Green and James Worthy, the trades for Byron Scott and Mychal Thompson--have helped transform a fine but flawed franchise into one on the verge of establishing a dynasty.

WEST VS. FANS OVER NIXON

WEST’S FIRST COUP remains his most controversial--the 1983 trade of Norm Nixon to the San Diego Clippers for the draft rights to Byron Scott. It wasn’t controversial among other general managers (“Scott was the top guard picked in the draft that year,” says Pat Williams. “Everybody knew the guy had talent”) but it was among Lakers fans. Nixon was a Forum favorite; Scott was virtually unknown. For several Lakers, the trade was emotionally jarring; Coach Pat Riley went so far as to gather the rest of the team together for a period of “mourning.”

West wasn’t part of the funeral. “I don’t mind making a decision,” he says flatly. “I have no trouble being objective. Fans will tell you they love this or that player--’Oh, don’t trade him!’ Coaches will get a certain group of players that they like, so maybe they’re not objective either. I’ll tell you, I think all our players are great personally; they’re really nice people. But if you don’t stay objective about it, then you’re asking for trouble.”

Nixon did not go gentle into that good night. He accused the Lakers of looking for an excuse to trade him, of hiring private detectives to tail him. Some observers suspected a personality conflict between the garrulous Nixon and the more conservative West.

West waves off the allegations. “Norm is a very emotional guy. He wanted to think that (there was a personality conflict), but he was one of my favorite players. I was very difficult on Norm Nixon when he played here. When you see a talented player like that, you want him to reach his maximum potential. And he got to be a tremendous player. We won two titles with him.

“But maybe you have a team that doesn’t fit well together, two players that play alike. Then age becomes a factor, and somewhere along the line you have to take risks. I felt a different kind of player would work better with Magic.”

Byron Scott has blossomed, while Nixon has missed most of the last two seasons with injuries. West clearly won his gamble. He says he doesn’t mind the flak he took for making the move. But there are times when his demeanor suggests otherwise. Speculation that losing Nixon might have weakened the Lakers in the short run--the team lost a tightly contested championship series to the Celtics that year--elicits a sharp response.

“You are wrong. You are absolutely wrong. You’re like all fans,” West replies. His voice is steady, but his intensity is visible--his hands are beginning to shake. “Just look at our record since we got that kid,” he demands. “That’s all you have to do. We’ve been right there every year. We made the trade we had to make. I would make it again.”

Mitch Kupchak, who became assistant general manager after retiring as a player in 1986, has discovered that the demands of management leave little room for emotion or loyalty. After six years with the team, Kupchak’s good friend Kurt Rambis spent most of this season on the bench, a forgotten man. “This eye looks at him as a friend,” Kupchak says, “and wants to cry and be with him and cuss out management and the coaches like I used to do when I wasn’t playing. Whereas with this eye”--Kupchak blinks--”I am management. So I still have some mixed feelings.

“But everything we have, all our revenues, are tied into the success of our team,” Kupchak says. “If you have a good product, everything else goes up--ticket sales, advertising, TV--so you want to have basketball people responsible for putting product on the court. That’s Jerry West. And he’ll take the hit. He’s even said to me, ‘If you screw up, don’t worry about it. I’ll take the blame.’ ”

THE CRAFTY SHALL OVERCOME

LEAGUE EXECUTIVES point to West’s draft of A.C. Green in 1985 as an example of his intuition. Almost every team in the NBA had a chance to pick Green, but the gangly forward from Oregon State was passed over because, as Pat Williams says, “nobody thought the guy would amount to much.”

Three years later, several of the Lakers’ opponents have revised their opinions. “If we could make that draft over today,” says Volk, “of course we’d take A. C. Green.”

The Mychal Thompson trade demanded subtler skills and stands as a textbook example of how a canny executive succeeds in the NBA. At the beginning of the 1986-87 season, the Lakers were in desperate need of a backup center for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Thompson, a highly paid forward and reserve center with the San Antonio Spurs, filled the bill. But the Lakers had no expendable reserve players likely to fetch a player of Thompson’s worth, and they were already well over the “salary cap,” a figure by which the league limits the amount teams can spend on free agents or players acquired in trades.

So how did the Lakers get Thompson? First, Mitch Kupchak, Abdul-Jabbar’s oft-injured backup, retired to work in the Laker front office, which freed a portion of his salary to acquire new players, according to league rules. Then, the Lakers signed free-agent centers Frank Brickowski and Petur Gudmundsson, players too slow to fit into the Lakers’ system, but with enough raw talent to be attractive to other teams. Third, as the trading deadline approached, West hit the phones and was surprised to discover that Thompson, the first player picked in the 1978 college draft, was considered something of a disappointment by the Spurs. “Maybe people were expecting more from Mychal Thompson than he could probably give them,” West surmises in retrospect. “San Antonio, you know, didn’t talk too good about him. They wanted to get rid of him, and we were in the right place.”

“There’s a sixth sense Jerry has that allowed him to pick A. C. Green, to make the trades for Byron Scott and Mychal Thompson,” Kupchak says. “And those are the reasons we are where we are today.” West agrees, to a point.

“Basketball is instinctive in the first place,” he says. “That’s usually what separates the good from the great. When we’re drafting, we want a good athlete, because our coaches and our owner like a fast-break team--you don’t bring a plow horse to a race track. Then I’m looking to see, does he have an instinct? And I’m looking for character in a person, because you want harmony on a team.”

One suspects that West, the consummate team player, is looking for “character” that reflects those values. The best NBA teams thrive as much on cooperative spirit as athletic ability, and self-sacrificing players such as Green, a devout Christian, or Worthy, whose professed ambition after leaving basketball is to be an undertaker, naturally complement the Lakers’ more charismatic leaders, Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar.

“In 1982,” West recalls, “we had the opportunity to choose between two great players, Dominique Wilkins and James Worthy. I love Dominique--but the question is, would you rather have five great individuals or a team that wins all the time? You need people that are unselfish, and we felt James Worthy would be a better player for our team.”

“(Green) still has a way to go as a player, and maybe that’s a plus for our future. But he’s stepped in and given us an energy boost. I think it was lucky that 21 teams passed him over. Sometimes you’re fortunate that way. It’s not necessarily because you’re smarter.”

West pauses, and allows himself a grin. “But we did draft him.”

THOSE CELTICS, AND THE AGONY OF COACHING

WEST STILL ISN’T sure what drew him to basketball. Growing up in the remote town of Cabin Creek, W. Va., he recalls, “I did have a lot more time to myself than some kids, which can be a very powerful thing. Your mind is like a television set, and when you’re a kid, you turn it to whatever channel you want to watch. For me it was sports, and then after a while it was nothing but basketball. Certainly it had nothing to do with my playing ability at the time, because I wasn’t very good.”

A few years later, West was very good. He led his high school team to the state title and became a two-time All-American at West Virginia University and a stalwart on the 1960 Olympic basketball team, still considered by many the best ever assembled. The Lakers chose him as the second pick in the draft (his great rival, Oscar Robertson, went first), and for the next 14 years West wrote himself a ticket to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Pete Newell, who coached the 1960 Olympic team and later became the Lakers’ general manager, recalls: “At first, Jerry had to work on certain aspects of his game. But you could feel he was destined to be a great player. He must have set the NCAA record for broken noses in college. I used to marvel at it--he’d break his nose and score, like, 32 points in the next game. Great players like West, or Bird, or Magic, it’s part of their makeup, that pride. It’s a willingness to commit themelves, and after a while that commitment rubs off on the players around them.”

The only blemish on West’s playing years concerned the Lakers’ nemesis, the Boston Celtics. Six times West helped pull his team into the finals against Boston, and six times the Lakers came up short. “That was no rivalry,” West says. “They beat us every time, especially when it counted. It was just frustration. Unbelievable frustration.”

West retired from playing in 1974, and for two years fell into what he calls “a lost period. It was probably important that I was away (from basketball), but it was also traumatic in that, personally, I didn’t do very well. I was very comfortable financially, but it was like cutting an umbilical cord. Basketball was the most important thing for me since high school. It wasn’t so much the playing anymore--I didn’t want any more cuts or broken noses or teeth knocked out. But suddenly I was forced to give myself direction. And I probably didn’t do a very good job of that.”

West’s first marriage broke up and, at 35, he was telling friends that he’d probably never work again. “The people who knew me best probably thought I’d gone a little crazy, and maybe I was,” he says. He spent a lot of time playing golf; he once shot a 28 for nine holes at the Bel-Air Country Club. But golf didn’t fill the void.

So in 1976, when Bill Sharman became assistant general manager, West returned to pro ball as coach of the slumping Lakers, “something I was ill-prepared to do.” Though his teams made the playoffs for the three years he coached them, West’s personal obsession with excellence was not easily transferred to players of lesser talent, and the team’s lack of consistency wore at him like an acid. “There were games we won where I’d be just as unhappy as if we’d lost,” he says. When he quit in 1979, he called coaching “the least favorite experience I have had in life.”

“It was a team in transition,” Pete Newell says. “Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry himself had all recently retired, and Jerry is a perfectionist--he had a hard time dealing with players who only give 80% of themselves. I think if Larry Bird became a coach he’d have the same problem.”

When Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979, he asked West to continue coaching. “I literally got down on my knees,” Buss says. Three years later, after the much-publicized firing of Coach Paul Westhead, Buss tried again to reinstate West, then a consultant to the team, as coach. At a press conference that turned into a confusing comedy of errors, Buss announced that West would be coming back to whip the team’s offense into shape with help from Pat Riley. Then, West got up and contradicted Buss, saying he would simply be assisting Riley. Two weeks later, Riley emerged as head coach, a position he’s held ever since. West eventually became director of player personnel, then succeeded Sharman as general manager in 1982.

WHY THE LAKERS WENT HOLLYWOOD

FOR WEST, one moment of his tenure as general manager remains particularly satisfying. In his office hangs a framed copy of a newspaper account from June 9, 1985, the day the Lakers won their first title against the Celtics. “That was a burden to me, because there were two times when we had a chance to beat those people: in 1969 and our first year, in 1962, when Frank (Selvy) missed that shot. Maybe if we’d won, that would have changed the course of history a little bit.” For a moment, West seems lost in the past, remembering when, in the last unbelievable second of the final game of the ’62 series, Selvy missed a 15-foot jumper. Then he snaps back to the present and shrugs. “Oh, maybe we just weren’t good enough. That sure was a frustrating time.”

The perception that the Lakers were destined to remain second-best wasn’t lost on Buss when he bought the team and the Forum from Jack Kent Cooke in 1979 as part of a $67.5 million transaction. “There used to be a joke that so many people moved here from the East that there was no such thing as a home-court advantage,” Buss recalls. “We didn’t have the long tradition of those other teams, but I wanted to make this team represent L.A. Our biggest industry out here is show business. So we were going to have a show-time team.”

Buss realized that one way to make Laker games appealing was to put on a good show, and in basketball that meant an exciting team with a fast-break offense. Another way was to fill the seats with celebrities. And a third way was to treat the Laker players as if they, too, were stars. Jack Kent Cooke hadn’t seen it that way, frequently embroiling the team in salary disputes. Even West, hired to coach in 1975, had once sued Cooke for breach of contract. “I don’t think he wanted me as a coach,” West says dryly, “but maybe he just couldn’t find anyone he liked to take the job.”

At the time Buss bought the club, Jamaal Wilkes, a star forward, had become so embittered over his contract that he vowed never to play for the Lakers again. “I could see this stuff was really tearing the team apart,” Buss says. “I told Jamaal this was a new era, a new game, and we re-signed him.” More recently, Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson have successfully restructured what were already multimillion-dollar contracts.

Wilt Chamberlain, the anchor of the Lakers’ great 1972 and 1973 teams, retired from basketball after the latter season because of a contract fight with Cooke, according to then-general manager Newell. “You see Kareem playing so well at 41,” Newell says. “Well, nobody was in better shape than Wilt. I believe he could have continued for three or four years more as the center of a championship team.

“You’ve got to give Jerry Buss a lot of credit,” Newell says. “West took the gambles, but Buss let him do it with his money. He likes to be clued in, and he puts in his two cents’ worth, but there are owners with less (basketball) knowledge who go a lot further than that.”

Says Buss: “An owner is generally someone who has been successful in his own business, and therefore feels his ‘game’ is a good one, so he’s not likely to change it. Sometimes that’s wrong. If I was to give a new owner one piece of advice, it’s to put it in the hands of competent people. Stay in there yourself and set a pattern, but let other people handle it.

“If we are in disagreement, we’ll do what Jerry (West) says, but that doesn’t mean we won’t argue the matter constantly. I want to be free to speak my mind.”

Laker Coach Pat Riley spent five years of his playing career guarding West during Laker practices (“I kid him that when they retired his jersey, they retired me with it,” Riley says). He sees the same qualities of leadership “and hatred of losing” in West, the general manager. “We don’t lean on each other. It’s ‘You get ‘em, and I’ll coach ‘em, and you have to fire ‘em, too.’ ”

“I was very much against” the Nixon-Scott trade, Riley says. “It was my second year. I hated to change, and I felt tremendous loyalty to the group we had. But Jerry was a step ahead of me. He saw . . . that Nixon was personally unhappy at no longer being the solo point guard. He finally convinced me the deal had to be done.

“I’m not going to fight him. It’s voluntary cooperation here. When you’ve got four or five strong-minded people who have a vote in these things, there’s got to be compromise, and you can’t feel like you got beat, then come back and say, ‘I told you so’ a year later. I would never want to hear that.”

West agrees. “If I felt I was somebody’s boss, I wouldn’t like it. I think we have six or seven general managers.” Like a team? “Yes, absolutely.”

It was Bill Sharman who made the key trade that gave the Lakers the opportunity to draft James Worthy in 1982. When voice problems forced Sharman to curtail his work that year, Buss hired him as president of the club. Now 61 and planning to retire when the playoffs are over, Sharman still consults with West almost every day. “I believe the Lakers’ front office does benefit a great deal by having personnel with long-term experience in pro ball,” says Sharman. “People who have actually played and coached in the NBA have a tremendous advantage over those who came up through college or other programs.”

Indeed, the deals by Sharman and West that brought Scott, Johnson and Worthy to the Lakers were made with teams saddled with financial problems, inexperienced executives or capricious owners. “The Lakers jumped on franchises that were reeling,” Pat Williams says. “The (other) teams panicked, felt they needed instant help, and it turned out to be disastrous for them.”

But the financial prosperity of the league in recent years has also tended to shore up its weak sisters, and one-sided deals have become rarer. Toss in the salary cap rules, West believes, and trying to make a trade today “is like going to the dentist.”

“Trades aren’t supposed to be one-sided, because then you can’t deal with anyone,” West says. “But look at the Dodgers; they went out and restructured their team, because there aren’t a lot of restrictions on those people moving around. We’re lucky if we can make one trade a year.” When it’s suggested that the Dodgers needed considerably more restructuring than the Lakers, West answers by noting that “the rules in this league aren’t designed for teams to stay good, they’re designed for parity. And parity , in my vocabulary at least, is not a very good word.”

GOOD TIMES ARE NOT TO BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED

FOR WEST, THE WORST part of the year falls between Christmas and the inter-league trading deadline in late February. After that, he says, “I have basketball burnout. I’m worn out; I need a break. It seems to happen every year about (that) time. It’s a fun job, but it’s very wearying. It’s like war fatigue, and you just try and fight it until you get your second wind.

“Trading deadlines, the health of the team, the uncertainty of how things will go--these are the kind of things that wear you out,” he says. “We’re worrying now about what we’d like to do in the draft.”Where we’re positioned every year, you just can’t get the quality of player you need to keep winning in this league. We have to move up in the draft. You need stars to win, and you can’t win with old players. It would be a lot of fun, keeping 10 players for 10 years,” he says. “But after that, you’ve got nothin’. Somewhere down the line, we have to make a trade.”

Meanwhile the Lakers roll on, achieving the best record in the league this season and winning 60 games for the fourth consecutive year, an NBA record. But whether or not they go on to win their fifth championship of the decade, Jerry West will be watching, quietly conjuring ways to make the magic last.

“Other players on other teams, I wish them well. I do. I hope they all prosper--but we’d like to beat ‘em. That’s the challenge,” says West, a gleam in his West Virginia sharpshooter’s eye. “I like a good challenge.”

; styling by Claude Deloffre