Jerry West’s beef with the Lakers complicated his legendary history with a legendary franchise

Jerry West’s beef with the Lakers complicated his legendary history with a legendary franchise

– [Narrator] For one of the NBA’s most successful franchises, the Los Angeles Lakers have quite a lot of drama and palace intrigue in their history. Jerry West is perhaps the definitive L.A. Laker, a multi-decade, multi-level contributor to so much of that success. West is also, in his own words, rebellious, defiant, obsessive, and enigmatic. In 2022, West did an interview with The Athletic’s Sam Amick. The occasion was the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team, of which West was an obvious member. West didn’t take the opportunity to celebrate his career in L.A., though. Instead, he said all this. Yeah, 60 years into their mutual history, the connection between a brilliant, complicated franchise and its brilliant, complicated star, the one with a statue outside the arena, was beef. (plaintive string music) Jerry West probably isn’t the best Laker ever, but he might be the most Laker ever. He played with Elgin and Wilt, he coached Kareem, built around Magic, signed Shaq, traded for Kobe. West’s story is intertwined with nearly every glorious chapter of Lakers history. For most of that history, the Lakers were owned by one family, that of Jerry Buss, but West’s Laker tenure actually predates the Busses. His relationship with the prior team owner, Jack Kent Cooke, previews our beef in several ways. Even though he was an incredibly productive, celebrated player, Jerry West regretted that he only won one championship late in his career, losing seven NBA Finals, almost all of them to the Celtics before he finally got that ring in 1972. In his autobiography, released in 2011, West says he felt some resentment for Cooke, the Lakers owner, because of disrespectful things he’d said and done during those defeats, as well as growing disconnect over issues like money and West’s health. The point is, West retired as a player in 1974 on pretty bad terms with his boss. When West agreed to come back and coach the Lakers in ’76, it was only after settling a lawsuit with Cook over whether the Lakers owed West a permanent job. This is all peculiar, but so are the Lakers and so is Jerry West. That lawsuit surfaced an important conceptual component of our beef, Jerry West, Laker for life. A couple years into West’s coaching tenure, 1979, another Jerry bought the Lakers, Jerry Buss. Even when he tired of coaching, West stayed with the Lakers as a consultant and scout. He enjoyed working for the new, ambitious team owner. When Buss tried to convince West to be head coach again, West instead passed that job to his old teammate, Pat Riley, and took over in yet another role, L.A.’s general manager. In that position, West would finally lead L.A. to sustained glory. He had a hand in building both the Showtime Lakers and the Shaq-Kobe Lakers, rosters that collected a lot more rings than West won as a player. Throughout their decades of success, Buss and West clashed over several personnel decisions and even over money. But they moved on. That dynamic is worth noting because it changed around the late 1990s. West was assembling the team that would eventually win three straight titles around Shaq and Kobe, but he didn’t stick around to see it through because the process destroyed him emotionally. West has been open about his lifelong experience with depression. He writes in detail about his mental health and past trauma in the autobiography. And he was pretty open at the time too about how work was weighing on him. As early as the ’97-’98 season, West went on the record with candid descriptions of career burnout, stuff that kind of alarmed the people who were listening. Already, there was talk of West’s second in command, Mitch Kupchak, stepping up to replace him. After settling some scores with Buss, West did sign a contract extension and remained in his post, but the work only hit him harder. In ’99, it was the addition of Dennis Rodman, an absurd failure of a roster move that Buss pushed despite West’s reservations. West was so worked up by April of that season that his wife Karen wrote a letter to Buss raising alarms about his employee’s state of mind. The following season, the Lakers moved from The Forum in Inglewood to a new downtown arena, then known as the Staples Center. Jerry Buss visited his franchise less often in their new office. He was busy, I guess. And West writes that he once again felt a growing disconnect from his boss, and in that vacuum of communication, he felt underappreciated. The disconnect played out in one particularly humiliating incident. The prior season, the Lakers had traded for a big time scorer, Glen Rice. Rice was worried at the time that a diminished role beside Shaq and Kobe might hurt his value. West soothed that concern by promising L.A. would decline an upcoming contract option and allow Rice to hit free agency. But come summertime, Jerry Buss said, "Nah, we’re picking up that option. Rice is locked into his salary next season." Buss wasn’t the one who made the promise and had no qualms about breaking it, to West’s dismay. And in October of ’99, at a meeting in Santa Barbara, West confronted Buss right in front of Rice and his agent. It was tense. In retrospect, West described this display of L.A.’s "distressing lack of communication" as the moment he started to sour on the franchise he had loved for 40 years. It wasn’t just Jerry and Jerry, though. Two of Buss’s adult children, Jeanie and Jim, had joined the family business. Jeanie followed her father’s footsteps on the money side of things, ticking over as the Lakers’ VP of Business Ops. That would eventually matter beef wise, and so would this. The Lakers made an outside hire in ’99, Phil Jackson, former Finals rival of Jerry West, recent coach of the dynastic Chicago Bulls. Just like in Chicago, Phil helped the Lakers win titles. Just like in Chicago, Phil bristled at management. West tells of Jackson throwing him out of the locker room and generally being cold and disrespectful. Unlike in Chicago, Phil was dating an executive. He and Jeanie Buss became boyfriend-girlfriend during that first season as coworkers. Jerry Buss didn’t mind. Jerry West did. So here you had a precarious love and beef arrangement, the technical term is beefsoceles, that only deepened the misery of West’s work days. And then there’s the other Buss kid in the office. Jim Buss was less about business, more about team building. Jim’s dad tasked West and Kupchak with mentoring his son in the ways of basketball ops. Jim Buss was a bit of a noob, but by all accounts, West took the mentorship seriously enough that whenever he was ready to step down, both Kupchak and Jim could take over team management. That day came in August, 2000 soon after the first Shaq-Kobe title. The pressure had become unbearable, and West writes that he was tired of being the sore spot in the brain trust. It wasn’t a terrible shock given how Jerry had been talking for a couple years. And West didn’t go far. He hung around as a consultant to Kupchak and Jim Buss. This was the shock. In 2002, West got hired as lead executive of the Memphis Grizzlies. Instead of fading into the background as a Laker for life, West reentered the spotlight for a hopeful conference rival. L.A. tipped their caps to the departing legend, but it felt really weird. Years passed at a distance. West won an award for building the lowly Grizzlies into a real team, Jeanie remained in charge of L.A.’s business, Jim handled more and more of the basketball, receiving a title promotion in ’05. Meanwhile, the Lakers stalled out in the ’04 Finals, fell apart, and then endured three straight seasons of mediocrity. By 2007, Kobe Bryant was openly angling for West to come back and help run the Lakers again. Or else. West didn’t wanna undermine his old friends, Jim and Mitch, though. He left Memphis, laid low for a few years, then took another Western Conference resurrection job with the Golden State Warriors. That one turned out pretty well. But even while working elsewhere, West retained personal connections to the Lakers. For one thing, his son, Ryan West, had risen up the ranks of the Laker scouting department, and Jerry kept in touch with Jim Buss, even writing him a letter of encouragement during tough times. He really had his former mentee’s back. In 2011, the Lakers put up a statue in Jerry West’s honor. At this point, you might rightfully ask, "Beef over? Did it even begin?" Whatever problems Jerry West had with Jerry Buss and the Lakers organization sure look resolved in photos like these, and West has written about resolving differences with his old boss. For tensions to inflame anew between West and the Lakers, the franchise needed a new boss and new in-house beef. In 2012, L.A.’s brain trust, Jim Buss among them, strongly considered hiring Phil Jackson as coach for a third time, and then shockingly pivoted to Mike D’Antoni. Didn’t go well. Jeanie, who was still dating Phil at the time, felt stabbed in the back by her own brother. In 2013, Lakers patriarch Jerry Buss died at the age of 80. Six Buss children inherited equal shares in the team. And on top of her ownership stake, Jeanie succeeded her father as team governor, meaning she had ultimate oversight of business and basketball. And the team was struggling, which is to say Jeanie became Jim’s boss, and Jim’s department was in kind of bad shape. Four losing years later, Jeanie fired her brother. There was a lawsuit, there was a restraining order, an attempted coup. It was very ugly. Jeanie replaced Jim with a front office of Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka. West didn’t get a call, ostensibly since he was still with Golden State. However, West left the Warriors in 2017 and wished he’d had the opportunity to return to Los Angeles. Which, he actually did with the L.A. Clippers. Awkward. In 2019, Magic abruptly resigned as Lakers executive. Again, there was a push to bring back Jerry. Again, Jeanie Buss didn’t even contact him. This time, West said he wasn’t interested anyway. West insisted he didn’t dislike the team, but he detected some hostility from the other side. Before that summer of 2019, you could chalk up any animus to old stuff. Maybe West’s history with Phil and Jeanie, who had since separated, maybe West’s closeness with Jim Buss, who Jeanie had alienated. That may have been enough beef for Jeanie to keep a supposed Laker for life at arm’s length. Either way, in July, 2019, Jerry put one more coal in the fire that we didn’t learn about until later. That summer, Jeanie’s Lakers and Jerry’s Clippers pursued free agent superstar and L.A. native Kawhi Leonard. Jerry’s team won the recruiting battle, and in its aftermath, West got sued by someone who said they helped broker Kawhi’s Clipper deal. During those legal proceedings in late 2020, this voicemail found its way to TMZ. – [Jerry] I heard this morning that everyone over in the Lakers camp think they’re going to get him. I find that hard to believe that he would want to go to that shitshow. – [Narrator] The voice in that clip, allegedly calling the Lakers a shitshow, allegedly sounds a lot like Jerry West. Jeanie Buss never returned fire at that insult, but it didn’t feel to Jerry like a coincidence when his son’s career in the Laker scouting department hit a dead end that same year. Nor did it feel like a coincidence when his wife received a text out of the blue saying their family would no longer have reserved seats at Laker games. Nor when Jeanie, challenged on a podcast to name the top five Lakers ever, left Jerry off her list. West was very, very offended by that omission. Which brings us to that 2022 interview. Over 60 years into his NBA career, a supposed Laker for life with a statue outside their arena said he felt like a piece of trash, that he had a horrible relationship with the team, and that maybe he should have played somewhere else where he was more appreciated. It’s a shame that such an important individual in Lakers history could feel so at odds with the franchise. But maybe it makes perfect sense. For all their glory, the Lakers have been a pretty messy franchise. It stands to reason that a guy who helped engineer that glory would also be a big part of the mess. Maybe in Lakerland, you can’t have one without the other. (soft music)

The great Jerry West is perhaps the definitive Laker — a legend with a hand in building almost all of that franchise’s glory. However, in his latter years, West developed a bit of a feud with Lakers management. The seeds of that beef were planted many years prior, but took a while to fully blossom. All told, it’s a fascinating but pretty typical story for a franchise that ranks among history’s greatest *and* among history’s most complicated.

Written and produced by Seth Rosenthal
Directed and edited by Jiazhen Zhang

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