There Will Never Be Another Jerry West #jerry #west #basketball #game

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Yesterday began like any typical sunny, lazy day in the summertime.

Show up for work at 9 am, scan your social media pages to check up on your friends, and then begin thinking about an early afternoon exit to walk your dog. At least that was what was going through my mind when my boss, Michael Fragale, walked into the office to tell me that Jerry West had just died.

"Better get to work," he said.

Talk about having a basketball fly through your front window!

As someone responsible for writing obituaries for the department, oftentimes you have some things prepared in case one of the school's living legends passes. That was the case with Hot Rod Hundley and Sam Huff, both of whom had been experiencing declining health prior to their deaths.

But Jerry West, the man who always exhibited such energy, vitality and vigor?

Peter Pans just don't die, until they do.

Where to start with a man who accomplished so much? What do you include and what do you leave out?

It's impossible in a short amount of time to write about all of Jerry West's achievements from his 86 well-lived years on Earth.

How can you encapsulate all that he has meant to the people of this great state and those who love and adore West Virginia University?

Who do you talk to when he meant so much to everybody?

When you don't know where you are going, the best place to start is always at the beginning, and for me the beginning is a file cabinet of interviews that I've kept through the years, including some conversations with West. My interviews with him amount to about a half-dozen transcribed telephone calls spanning in length from roughly 20 minutes to a half hour.

Some people will give you 10 or 15 minutes of their time before their attention wanes and they want to end the interview and get on to more important things in their day. I've had people much farther down the pecking order do that to me.

But not Jerry.

He was always willing to spend as much time as needed to answer any questions I had, particularly regarding West Virginia, West Virginia University and his Mountaineer basketball teammates. I immediately realized the easiest way for me to get interesting responses from Jerry was to get him talking about his dear friend Willie Akers or his fellow classmates.

I recall once asking him why there were so many outstanding basketball players in the state in the mid-1950s when he was playing at East Bank High.

I repeated to him the story the late Eddie Barrett had told me about Virginia Tech coach Chuck Noe looking at the box scores of the high school games in Virginia and the scores being in the 40s and 50s, and then looking at the West Virginia box scores and seeing the scores in the 80s and 90s and Noe deciding that he wanted those West Virginia players.

That naturally got Jerry going.

"We played the Kentucky all-star team, and they were supposed to have the best players in America," he recalled. "Well, as it turned out we had the better players. We played them twice and beat them twice. It was just a very high-caliber group of guys that we had in West Virginia at that time.

"Style of play was a big part of it," West explained. "I think coaches were a little bit restrictive than some coaches in certain areas. Most coaches probably inherit their coaching philosophy from coaches that they played for. In that point in time, when I was being recruited for college, Maryland played a very slowed-down game, and I kind of liked that school a little bit, but I just couldn't go there and play that way. It just didn't look like it would have been fun for me to play like that."

At the time, West Virginia coach Fred Schaus had recently retired from the professional ranks, and with first-time assistant coach George King, they were still young and athletic enough to get out on the floor and give the guys some pointers and tricks that most other coaches couldn't.

King played on an NBA championship team with the Syracuse Nationals and West recalled going up against him many times in the old Field House.

"Maybe where I developed a little bit of confidence was because George King was there, and I used to play against him," he noted. "He was very experienced and very smart, and I found out that I could play against him okay, and that it wasn't going to be embarrassing for me.

"It was a great environment for any of us who wanted to learn, and more importantly, to engage two people that had played basketball at a different level than any of us had ever played."

Team building was the secret to Schaus' and King's successes in coaching, something Jerry clearly learned during his career.

The great things West accomplished later with the Los Angeles Lakers, Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers as an e