West Gains Some Insight Off Court

This is Jerry West’s favorite time of year. His body clock was set forever by 13 1/2 seasons of National Basketball Assn. play and when the playoffs start, an alarm goes off deep inside him.

All hell breaks loose. Adrenaline and all sorts of other chemicals start churning and burning within the Laker general manager. What would be a scientific term for this cyclical state? A heightened awareness, maybe?

Around the Laker offices, the state is more commonly referred to as “Jerry’s getting crazy again.”

At home games, he can’t sit. He’ll watch most of the game standing in a Forum walkway. When things get really tense, he’ll pace the walkway, or he’ll retreat to the Forum’s concrete bowels. When those walls start to close in, he’ll stroll in the parking lot, a peaceful place during games.

West never travels with the Lakers during the playoffs, afraid that he might bring bad luck. He turns on a TV set at game time and paces his Bel-Air home, haunting the various rooms like a flitting, fidgety ghost.

All this nervousness and anxiety is good, because it drives West crazy and it keeps him sane.

This year’s playoff season is extra special to West for two reasons.

1. A lot of people, especially among the Eastern intelligentsia, don’t see the Lakers re-repeating as NBA champions. West likes his club and relishes the challenge.

2. He is alive.

West has been alive at playoff time in the past, of course, but this year he is acutely aware of it. Not long ago West was shown an X-ray of his lungs. One lung had a dark spot.

“It was very vivid,” West said.

He started feeling lousy around last Christmas, but it was nothing unusual. The holidays are a heavy travel time for West, one of basketball’s busiest talent scouts, and he chalked it up to fatigue.

Whatever it was, he couldn’t shake it. He felt bad all the time, tired. He went to the doctor twice, had a chest X-ray taken, but nothing unusual was found.

“I went to Houston for meetings at the All-Star game (in early February),” West said. “When I came back, I really felt terrible. I went to Hawaii for a day and a half with Mitch (Kupchak, West’s assistant), for meetings, and I came back from there really tired. I was losing weight, I lost about 14 pounds and I had no idea why. That was scary.

“Talk about weak. It was an effort for me to walk from my car in the parking lot to my office, a real effort. If you have to look at yourself every day in the mirror, you see yourself deteriorating, that is very, very awkward. I know age is not always kind to us, but that was really unkind.”

West keeps himself in good shape, has never smoked, drinks infrequently and lightly. His routine was to work out three times a week--run a mile, lift some weights, stretch. But as he grew weaker, he cut out the workouts.

At work he had trouble concentrating. Normally a talkative guy, West became quiet and introspective.

Maybe it’s the workouts, he said to himself one day. Nearly four months without working out, you become out of tune.

He went to his health club and hit the running track, which is 11 laps to the mile. After one lap, 1/11th of a mile, West was exhausted, panting, ashen. He was mystified. Sure he’s 50 years old, age takes a toll, but nobody falls apart this quickly. He walked two laps, then tried to run again, and again he fell out.

A couple runners saw him struggling, stopped and asked him if he were OK.

“It was almost like I was having some kind of heart problem,” West said.

He returned to his doctor again and said, “There’s something going on here I don’t like.”

He underwent a series of tests, then a special chest X-ray called an MRI, which produced a photo of a lung with a vivid black spot.

“I tell you, that was a really scary time,” West said. “It’s funny what emotions run through your mind. . . . You go over a lot of things in your life you wish you had done, and a lot of things you wish you hadn’t done. It was a very, very awkward time.”

Awkward might seem like an odd adjective to use in describing one’s own life-and-death situation. But this is a man whose playing career and whose executive career have been marked with a distinctive Jerry West style that is the antithesis of awkwardness.

Now he was awkward, and that scared him. The doctor told West that there was a good chance the spot wasn’t cancer, that it was a virus or abscess that could be handled with treatment of antibiotics.

Within a couple weeks, West was feeling a lot better, and six weeks after the discovery of the spot, he was X-rayed again and the spot was gone.

“That was my own personal playoffs,” West said.

He says the scare caused him to reassess his priorities, worry less about life’s trivialities. But when his internal playoff alarm clock went off three weeks ago, it set off the old chain reaction, the very same turmoil that one season caused West to explode for 447 points in 11 playoff games against Baltimore and Boston.

This is his favorite time of year and he would worry if he didn’t worry.

“Worry, that’s the thing that probably keeps me going,” West said. “When you don’t worry anymore, it means you don’t care.”