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Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads OAKLAND, Calif.—Karen West watches as her husband fidgets inside a suite at Oracle Arena on the first night of the NBA Finals. He laces his fingers together, still able to feel the grip of a basketball on their tips all these years later, like a phantom limb. At 77, Jerry West hasn’t played in 35 years—says he won’t even shoot around in the driveway for fear he won’t live up to his famously high standards. But he cannot give up the game. These are his 18th Finals. He’s made nine trips as a player and eight as a GM, all with the Lakers. This time, he is an executive board member for Golden State. It’s a position he’s held since the spring of 2011, when Warriors primary owner Joe Lacob lured him out of semi-retirement with the promise of a partial ownership stake and the chance to help rebuild a tattered franchise. In the years since, West has played an important, often behind-the-scenes role in the team’s ascension. He’s been a mentor, counselor and, often, the loudest voice in the room on both trades made (Monta Ellis) and scuttled (Klay Thompson for Kevin Love). Talk to people around the team and they’ll tell you: The Warriors likely wouldn’t be who they are, or where they are, without Jerry’s influence. And now West is trying to do something he rarely could as Lakers GM, when the stress of big games exiled him to the parking lot to pace, or to his car to zip up I-5 in anxious silence, awaiting a phone call with a result: Sit and watch a Finals game. Like a normal person. Or so he’d planned. The game begins and the Warriors come out cold, missing easy shots. They look jittery, careless. They fall behind early. West frowns. “We should be up eight,” Karen hears him say at the first timeout. He can see it happening—the season, and a life’s third act, crumbling before him. Four days earlier, on a warm Sunday afternoon, West welcomes a visitor into his ranch-style home in a gated community in Bel-Air, where he and Karen have lived for 35 years.Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads It’s a little after 3 p.m. and they’ve just returned from the driving range. Even in his late 70s, Jerry can hit it 275 yards off the tee and, he notes proudly, shoot his age. And, because he’s Jerry West, and he lives for competition, he plays for stakes, whether it’s golf or cards. Two weeks earlier, he took home a tidy sum playing gin. • MORE NBA: Playoff coverage | Finals schedule | SI's best feature stories West’s arrival sends the family’s four dogs into a frenzy of yapping, yipping and, in the case of Gatsby, a 90-pound, two-year-old English sheepdog, herding. Ignoring the din, Jerry leads the way to a large, high-ceilinged living room. Magazines and a well-thumbed copy of the Los Angeles Times rest on a coffee table. This is where West spends most nights during the season, on a long blue couch, watching games on a flatscreen or, when Karen puts it down for him, a giant projector screen. Sometimes they watch together. Other times, when Jerry starts cursing and screaming, Karen goes to a different room. “He yells about what’s going wrong,” she explains, “and I like to yell about what’s going right.”West cannot help it, though. He sees everything. Turnovers before they happen, foretold by a player’s body angle and speed. Bad shots moments before they’re jacked up. This sounds like a gift, and it is, but it’s also a burden. “It’s a horrible feeling,” says West. “Knowing something’s going to happen and not being able to do anything about it.” Now, even as the Finals approach, West is focused on what could be rather than what is. He’s worried about a player’s knee. Concerned that the Warriors desperately need a third scorer to step up, “and it has to be [Harrison] Barnes or [Andre] Iguodala.” All season, he’s argued the team needs another shooter, too, someone to help stretch the floor. He wishes they had one now. Later this night, he will call Warriors GM Bob Myers. They talk so frequently that it feels like one ongoing conversation. West is driven, as always, by a simple goal. “You get so addicted to winning,” he says, “that you don’t want that feeling to The idea sounded bizarre at first: the face of the Lakers working for the Warriors. West was famously opinionated, demanding and proactive. The Warriors were famously inept, lackluster and passive. Wrote Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle, in May of 2011: “It could work out beautifully; it could blow up like trick cigar.” These were not the same Warriors, though. Lacob ran the team like an elite company, hiring the best people, no matter the cost. One of his first priorities was an advisor—"a consigliere” in Lacob’s words—and West topped a list of three candidates (Lacob declines to name the other two). The two met in Los Angeles for a series of dinners. West didn’t want control, and worried that his presence might overshadow management. Lacob provided assurances. After mulling the offer for a month, West signed on.Immediately, the Warriors gained credibility. To Lacob and co-owner Peter Guber, West provided them, as they called it, “the cover of darkness.” Explains Lacob: “Our feeling was, even if we made some mistakes, at least if we had Jerry West involved, how much of idiots could we be?” At the same time, Lacob set about building the rest of the franchise foundation. Myers, a personable 36-year-old agent who’d worked under Arn Tellem, was introduced as the GM-in-waiting at the same presser as West. Nearly 10 years earlier, Myers had given West a heads-up before flying to meet clients in Memphis. West, then the Grizzlies GM, not only picked Myers up at the airport—“most of the time your friends don’t even do that,” says Myers—but insisted he stay at his house. (Hospitality is a recurring theme with Jerry). From the start, Myers leaned on West for advice, especially once elevated to GM, replacing Larry Riley. The Warriors’ unique collaborative process evolved, with decisions undertaken by a team consisting of Lacob, Myers, West and assistant GMs Travis Schlenk and Lacob’s older son, Kirk (and, later, coach Steve Kerr). Strong opinions were expected. Disagreement was encouraged. One rival coach calls it, “one of the healthiest organizations in the NBA.” • MORE NBA: Tellum on jump to NBA | Myers wins Executive of the Year West delivered his opinions with equal parts passion and profanity. As anyone who knows West can tell you, his level of certitude can reach gale-force levels. After all, this is a man who traded Vlade Divac for Kobe Bryant because he saw greatness in the lanky teenager. A man who sent off All-Star Norm Nixon for the unknown Byron Scott, causing Jack Nicholson to wear black at the Forum for a week (or so the story goes). A man who subtitled his autobiography, “My Charmed, Tormented Life.” “When Jerry feels strongly about something,” says his son, Ryan, assistant director of scouting for the Lakers, “he feels very strongly.” Adds Jonathan Coleman, West’s co-author and friend: “He’s never, ever not going to offer his opinion.” Even though they were close, West never went easy on Myers, who Lacob remembers as, “nervous at times because Jerry is so tough on everybody.” Myers says it’s all a matter of perspective. “If you can understand that all Jerry wants to do is win and everything he says and does is geared toward that, then you can have a great relationship with him,” says Myers. “But if you’re not driven in the same capacity, or prone to settling, then you’re probably not going to have a good relationship with Jerry. People might sometimes think he slants negative, but it’s all in pursuit of perfection.Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads