Home Improvement : Crenshaw’s Famed Willie West, Son Shoot for Mutual Respect

Years of turning away from his father’s wishes have put Willie West III in a curious position. He has become a son who would make any dad proud.

Along the way, he has picked up some valuable lessons:

Don’t take your family for granted.

Sometimes vocal disagreement beats the heck out of silence.

Sometimes you let people be who they are instead of who you want them to be.

Maybe his father needed reminding too.

Willie West Jr., 54, is the most successful high school basketball coach in the state, the architect of the longtime City Section dynasty at Crenshaw. He wanted certain things out of his son, the way any father does.

Willie West III lived with his father and attended Crenshaw for three years after spending his childhood in Texas with his mother. He wanted certain things out of his father, the way any son does.

After a while, all they wanted was nothing to do with each other.

Three more years have passed. Now, the son talks to the father three times a week on the telephone and often makes the hour-and-a-half drive to visit. The father watches the son play basketball for Ventura College, a team undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the state.

Draw few parallels to the widely publicized ongoing rift between former heavyweight boxing champion Ken Norton and Ken Norton Jr., the San Francisco 49er linebacker. The West’s family feud is all but forgotten. If anything, the son tries too hard to please his father.

“It seems like everything he told me when I was a young kid, that I ignored, now I agree with him,” says the son.

They agree, for example, that West-the-player gets too few minutes at Ventura. A sophomore who redshirted two years ago and rode the bench last season, West plays sporadically on a team loaded with enough talent for two junior college teams.

“He wants to contribute more and be a part of their success,” the father says. “He feels he can do more. He felt he’s been there a while and his role would be different this year.”

They also agree that West-the-coach was wrongly accused of illegally recruiting players at Crenshaw in 1993.

“For somebody to say you are doing something wrong when you aren’t, that’s the most hurting thing in the world,” says the son.

They feel each other’s pain acutely, perhaps the best proof that their days of causing each other pain are behind them.

The problems began in the summer of 1991, before West’s senior year at Crenshaw. He had been on the junior varsity as a junior and was looking forward to finally playing for his father, a Los Angeles coaching legend who posted a state-record 19 league championships in a row from 1972-91 and has 13 City championships and six state championships.

As a veteran coach, dad had developed the ability to leave basketball in the gym. His son stubbornly took it home with him every night.

“Things would happen at practice, I’d get upset and couldn’t shake it,” the son says. “He’d try to help me with it and I didn’t want to listen.

“My dad wanted the best things for me, but it was hard for him to show it.”

Father wanted son to take up baseball, believing the 6-foot-3 Willie would never be tall enough for big-time basketball.

“I hated baseball, he loved it,” the son says. “I loved football, he hated it. We both love basketball, but he discouraged it.”

Lines of communication began to close. West hurt his back during his junior year but never told his father. He even saw a chiropractor on the sly.

But there was a deeper problem, one with roots to the day his parents split up when he was a toddler. The only child of Willie Jr. and Edith West grew up in Houston, surrounded by his mother’s family. Grandparents lived across the street and his uncle lived next door.

Edith never remarried, and young Willie secretly hoped his parents would reconcile.

In 1991, however, Coach West was oblivious to the deeper yearnings of one of his players, the player who shared his name. He married his longtime girlfriend, Denise, a week before his son’s senior year began. Two weeks later, he came home from practice and his son had vanished.

Willie had returned to Houston and enrolled at Yates High, although he never told his father. The coach learned details of his son’s departure from the player’s mother.

Father and son, coach and player, would not speak for nearly a year.

“There was a communication gap,” the father says. “He wasn’t too mad at me, well, maybe he was, but that hadn’t been expressed. I don’t really know. It was a big surprise.”

His father’s marriage had ended the son’s fantasy of a family reconciliation. Denise was a wonderful woman, the son agreed, but she was not his mother.

“At that point, me and Denise didn’t see eye to eye,” the son says. “She did her best. I didn’t want anyone trying to be my momma. I only had one mother. I can see now she was trying her best and it was my fault.”

Filled with anger, the son began to stray from a life that had been filled with books and balls.

“I started doing things I’m not proud of,” the son says. “I thought, ‘I wouldn’t do this if my father was here.’ ”

As the school year wore on, he began to regret his decision to leave Crenshaw. Father and son missed each other, but both were too proud to pick up the phone.

“A lot of my friends had fathers who didn’t want anything to do with them,” the son says. “One day, the mother of one kid who was always in trouble asked me to talk to him. As I was counseling the kid, I was saying things my father had said to me. I realized I needed my father back in my life.”

He wrote his father a letter expressing those feelings that February. His father left the letter unopened until his son’s birthday a month later. Tears were shed, and he wrote back.

“It was time,” the father says. “You have a disagreement, no one talks, then maybe someone dies and you never took the opportunity to apologize. I didn’t want that.”

The following summer, Willie nearly started another disagreement when he told his father he wanted to return to Los Angeles to attend L.A. Southwest junior college. “I wanted him away from Los Angeles but close to me,” the father says.

He spoke one day in the off-season with Cedric Ceballos, then of the Phoenix Suns, during a shoot-around in the Crenshaw gym. Ceballos recommended Ventura, where, under Coach Philip Mathews, he had been an All-American in 1988.

The 80 miles that West lives west of West is ideal. The son has established his independence while staying close enough to visit his father.

Despite West’s lack of playing time--he is averaging only 2.8 points a game this season--he has come to enjoy Ventura’s strong points. He briefly contemplated leaving but agreed with his father’s comment that he had to learn to work through hardship rather than flee.

“I get frustrated about not playing, but I like this situation because it is making me more of a man,” the son says. “And the town was too slow for me at first, but now I love the laid-back lifestyle. This place has made me what I am.”

A strong influence has been Nancy Davis, his one-on-one mentor in a program Mathews employs with all his players. Davis, Ventura’s financial aid officer, meets with West several times a week. Their discussions range from schoolwork to his girlfriend to his father.

“I think an awful lot of Willie; he has a lot of character and integrity,” Davis says. “Willie is quite proud of his dad. He talks about the guys who have played for his dad and that makes him quite proud. He cares about what his dad feels about him.”

So much so that West is finally willing to give baseball a try, although he has not played since before high school. He is left-handed and possesses a strong arm, he points out.

“I’ll work out with my dad this summer and see where it gets me,” he says.

If baseball turns out to be merely a whim, perhaps the career choice of the two most influential people in his life--his father and Mathews--won’t be. Already, he advises younger teammates who are living on their own for the first time and occasionally serves as a buffer between them and Mathews, a demanding coach.

At breakfast with his father on a recent morning, West was diagraming Ventura’s plays on a napkin.

“You are destined to become a coach,” the father told the son.

If so, maybe he will start off as an assistant to his father. The West winds finally would have blown him all the way home.

“That’s the most important thing to me, the relationship with my father,” he says. “The absence of that relationship left a void, and we’ve worked on it ever since.”