“My junior year in college, I wasn’t living up to anyone’s standards, and I get a call and it’s Jerry,” said Mazzulla, who was teammates with Jerry’s son, Jonnie, at West Virginia from 2007 to 2011. “A lot of (expletives), but he essentially told me that I was an F-up and was ruining an opportunity to be great at something and just let me have it for like 10, 15 minutes. I thought it was one of the most impactful phone calls that I had, really, in my life.
“I stayed at his house once, and overslept, for a UCLA open gym. I went down for breakfast and got another ass chewing because I wasn’t being competitive enough. The thing I remember about him is that he had a tough way of showing that he loved you. But he was super, super, competitive, and he really, really cared about you. And he showed it in a way that kind of spoke to my language.”
from Joe Mazzulla last week. referenced in Amick's piece from today:
by sewsgup
27 Comments
Jerry: Hey Joe, you’re a lazy, no-good sack of shit!
Joe: [He loves me]
twist – it was a wrong number
Jerry was trying to call his local Pizza Hut
It’s cool how many people over several generations have mentioned Jerry West being an important mentor for them. Seems like he genuinely cared about seeing people reach their potential.
Jerry didn’t love me, I guess. 🤷🏻
Not once a call or ass-chewing…
Explicatives is actually better. Thanks Joe
So Winning Time was accurate.
Jerry chewed me out once when I was fitting him for a sport coat. I brought 5 different fitting jackets and he hated each one more than the last. He told me that if I couldn’t bother to bring options that had a chance of fitting he might as well just not go to the NBA 75 team brunch because obviously none of us cared if he looked like an idiot in the jacket. So I guess you could say Jerry really really cared about me too, in his own way of course.
The more of these stories that come out about Jerry West proves to me he was a special person
How did he know Jerry West personally?
That competitiveness came out later that season when my beloved Mountaineers beat Kentucky. He was a dog at the bottom of the 1-3-1, turning Cousins in a toddler.
Damn Jerry really loved basketball didn’t he
I love the survivorship bias with this kind of stuff. I know for a fact there are just as many people who this kind of abuse just breaks but we think it’s okay because of a player or coach’s greatness when it comes to a game.
Edit: for all the triggered macho men this is also an example of cognitive dissonance. You have two conflicting thoughts with an abusive coach. My coach is an asshole that’s affecting my mental health, and I don’t want to fail at playing this sport. So instead of rationalizing the latter thought you rationalize the first one that you can’t really change anyway by saying it’s tough love and it’s actually beneficial to my success. It’s why the frat-stars that get hazed the hardest are the most proud ‘I would not have subjected myself to that kind of humiliation unless it was worth it’
I’d shit myself if Jerry West called me.
A lot of education research emphasizes the students’ relationship with the teacher as the single most important in-classroom factor driving success, and finds that the ideal teacher is a “warm demander” who drives students hard in a caring manner.
West seems to have had the demander part, anyway.
[What would I like for people to think about me? He was a good guy and he cared. – Jerry West](https://youtu.be/OGtH9mGsVww?t=5050)
With all the stories of how people remember Jerry West I always come back to this clip in PG’s podcast. The NBA most certainly did right selecting Jerry West as their logo, even if it was just luck.
All I heard from Joe was being connected is more important than being committed to being successful
Jerry west had a son when he was 56?
So I guess they didn’t go that far off in Winning Time
I’m an An F-up myself
Jerry West, the tough love whisperer of NBA. Guess that’s why he’s considered a legend!
You don’t need to put expletives in parenthesis when that’s the actual word he said lol
It was at that point that he decided to become a coach
This is the second time I’ve said this in the span of a month about a question/answer clip of Joe. I’m a life long Knick fan so I want the Celtics to lose but I don’t want Joe to lose.
“Hey Joe. I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, the way that you dress.”
Good to see from Jerry West there. Very sad he died.
While the portrayal of West on Winning Time was obviously exaggerated so that it’d work better for screen, these are the types of stories that tell me that the portrayal may not have been as far from reality as certain people have suggested. A lot of people have described West as a tough-love kind of guy who absolutely hated losing and losing mentality. The show just seemed to externalize a lot of things that West mostly internalized, because again, that works better for a visual medium like Television.
I always doubted that many people associated with the Lakers, including West, watched more than the first episode or some sporadic clips, and thus missed the full character arc portrayed. I genuinely think the show potrayed him really positively.
Losing in 7 will be pretty impactful, too. 🙏🏻