The Ballad of Mr. Clutch

RIP Jerry West, 1938-2024

When I was a boy in Cleveland, there was a little library two blocks away. All I had to do to get there was walk down Warrendale Road, turn left on Fenwick, cross Colony and then the big intersection at Cedar, and I was there. Twice a week, starting when I was eight years old, I would walk to that library and go to the tiny sports section to see if there were any new books. I didn’t even care which sport. Any new book was like finding buried treasure.

One time I went in there, and there was a basketball book I had never seen before. I don’t remember the title, and I don’t remember what the cover looked like. All I remember is that it started with a story about an NBA Finals game that had been played a few years before between the New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Late in the game, New York’s Dave DeBusschere—I remember being so taken by that exotic name, “DeBusschere”—made a jump shot from the free-throw line with just three seconds left to give the Knicks a two-point lead. And then, in my memory, words like these followed:

“The game seemed lost, and all the Lakers, at once, turned to the one man who could save the day, Mr. Clutch himself. But this seemed beyond even his powers. Wilt Chamberlain grabbed the ball and inbounded to Mr. Clutch, who took three dribbles and two steps and launched a 60-foot shot toward the basket.

Bill Russell guarding Jerry West, (Bettman/Getty Images)

“There was something extraordinary about the way Jerry West shot that ball. For any other player, this would have been a last-gasp, desperation shot. But Mr. Clutch seemed to know something that nobody else knew: He had practiced this very shot again and again while growing up in West Virginia. He had taken half-court shots at every practice for just such a moment. Everyone in the Fabulous Forum watched the ball soar toward the basket, but Mr. Clutch was the first to know that it would go through the net.

“And when it did, the crowd erupted in sound. Yes, Mr. Clutch had done it again.”

Obviously, those weren’t the exact words*… but it was something like that, and it exploded my imagination, and the impact has stuck in my memory for almost 50 years. Mr. Clutch! Made a 60-foot shot to tie the game! He could do anything!

*I’m pretty sure the author used the title “Mr. Clutch” even more times than I did.

By the time I found that book, Jerry West had been retired for a good while. It would be a few more years before I found out that the Lakers actually lost that game in overtime, a sad but fitting tribute to West’s star-crossed playing career.

All I knew then was that Jerry West must have been some kind of superhero.

All these years later, that’s still how I see him.

You can read all about Jerry West’s career and life successes and lifelong fight with depression all over the internet. You can read about how he would practice and practice and practice—in part, to escape home and his abusive father—until he developed the most perfect form of any player before him. (He is the NBA Logo, after all.)

You can read about how he was a breathtaking basketball player for teams that, almost always, were second-best. He’s surely the greatest player to never win an MVP award, and he’s the only player to win an NBA Finals MVP for a losing team (and one of the few to be named Final Four Most Outstanding Player without winning a national championship). He averaged 33 points per game in the first seven NBA Finals he played in. His teams lost them all. Mr. Clutch raged against his fate, and finally won his championship in 1972, when he was near the end.

His record as an executive is jaw-dropping—six championship rings as general manager of the Lakers and a couple more as an executive and advisor for the Golden State Warriors. His ability to both identify talent and build teams is second to none.

I spoke with Jerry West only once, a few years ago, when I was writing a story about Steph Curry. After so many years of writing about sports and spending time with the greatest athletes of our time, I’ve learned to calm my nerves and keep it together. You have to be a professional. But with Jerry West… I couldn’t do it. All I could think was: This is Mr. Clutch. I was 8 years old again.

I asked my Steph Curry questions, and West answered them with some enthusiasm. (“He never looks off-balance,” he said, with the admiration that only a fellow great shooter could really feel.) Then he asked me if I had any other questions. And I did, a million of them, but none I could put into words.

“All right then,” he said, and I silently watched him walk off, and I thought about that 60-foot shot from all those years ago, and I wondered, really wondered, if, deep down, he knew it was going in.