The Price for Shaq: West Emerges Spent

Aspirins.

Jerry West had more than he knew what to do with. Nine hundred, to be exact, three boxes with 300 each on his desk, within arm’s reach. Fitting.

They were part of the payoff for a promotional deal he did. Truth is, though, they could also come in handy. All of them.

West is the Lakers’ executive vice president, one of the best basketball minds ever to run a team and a hero anew to most fans in Los Angeles after signing Shaquille O’Neal. And he is a mess.

The weeklong pursuit that culminated Thursday in a seven-year, $120-million deal has left West bitter and frustrated. Mostly, it has left him a different man.

“Very bothersome, very, very distasteful,” he said of the process. “It’s taken a horrible toll on me. A horrible toll.”

Others around him celebrate the arrival of O’Neal. West heals.

He is tired, but not only from the lack of sleep. Tired of setting up trades and then having the other team renege on the deal, which happened as the Lakers tried to clear salary-cap room. Tired of the media, which ran with unfounded speculation that they had tampered with O’Neal, based mostly on the notion that Vlade Divac wouldn’t have been traded unless Shaq was in the bag, right?

“I’ve enjoyed a wonderful relationship with the media,” West said. “Absolutely wonderful. But to read some of the things that you read, that were not even close to being true, it’s really disturbing to me.

“If something is honest and right on, I have no problem with that. I just think because people [are] chasing stories and chasing rumors, it has left a scar on me.”

A big one.

“Huge,” he said. “Huge.”

He is asked if it can heal.

“I don’t know about that,” West responds. “That’s something I’m going to have to decide internally. I always take about a two-week vacation and always go back to West Virginia. I’ve always felt that’s the best place for me to put things in perspective, where it’s quiet and where I grew up, without any phone calls. Those are the times that I make decisions that are best for me.

“You know,” he continues, “the fans of Los Angeles have been wonderful to me. We have great Laker fans. To give them something for their loyalty and to give them some hope again, you just put so much pressure on yourself to get something done, and I’m really hopeful that these fans will understand what we have done here.”

Yeah, the pressure.

“I think sitting in [agent] Leonard Armato’s room and waiting for Shaquille O’Neal to show up at about 2:30 in the morning, I think if he hadn’t of shown up and signed that contract, I might have jumped out of that 60th-floor window. That’s how emotionally spent I was.”

In the end, he had lost about 10 pounds and countless hours of sleep during the week. This wasn’t merely a mega-signing, after all. To trade Divac, and then Anthony Peeler and George Lynch, meant so much more was on the line. Like the difference between a team being good and a championship contender.

Making a draft pick is a risk. This was a major gamble.

“A huge risk,” West said. “An absolutely huge risk. If this had gone much longer, we were dead. We were just dead. That’s why the stress and the toll that was taken on me at that point in time, it was just hard to get up and tell yourself, ‘We’re going to acquire this player.’ It was hard to do.

“I said [to owner Jerry Buss] that the way we’re going to do best is try to sign two players. We talked and he asked me, ‘Are you a gambler?’ I said, ‘You know, for a prize like this I am a gambler.’ And he said, ‘Well, I want you to hang in there.’

“For me, that’s when the real difficult part came. No sleep. I wasn’t interested in eating at all. All the things that are the essentials for us to live were not there anymore. No sleep, little if no nourishment.”

That came when Peeler and Lynch were traded to the Vancouver Grizzlies on Tuesday, freeing more room under the salary cap. West went to Atlanta the next day to deliver the new proposal to Armato and O’Neal. In the first hours of Thursday, they accepted.

“To get this prize, I think this is something that when I look back on history and the time that I’ve spent with this team, this might be the single most important thing we’ve ever done,” West said.

“I don’t think this will all sink in until I’m sort of back to normal again,” he said.

So for now?

“I’m tired. I feel wonderful for our franchise. I really do. And I feel wonderful for the city because I think it’s given this franchise some hope. It’s a wonderful day for us. But I am tired.”