by Paul Teetor
When Gary Vitti was flying into LA to interview for the Lakers Head Athletic Trainer’s job in the summer of 1984, he received a jolt of adrenaline when he was told General Manager Jerry West would be picking him up at LAX.
“He was my hero growing up, and now he’s going to be picking me up at the airport. Wow,” Vitti told Easy Reader on Friday, two days after West passed at age 86. “They started to describe him as about 6-foot-4, but I said, don’t worry, I know what he looks like. But he didn’t know what I looked like.”
Vitti got off his plane – the Lakers had sent him first-class tickets — and headed for curb-side pickup, where he saw West chatting with some hero-worshiping cops.
“There he was in a blue Mercedes with a tan interior, just like they told me he would be. I walked up and introduced myself,” Vitti said. “I’ve been around pro athletes before and I’m not a star struck guy. But this was Jerry West and I was in awe. I couldn’t believe he was taking the time to pick up a potential employee at the airport.”
West drove Vitti to the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood.
Once there, West asked Vitti a series of questions and seemed to like the answers. He told Vitti he liked him and hoped that he got the job. But he said he was going to go with whoever Coach Pat Riley recommended. Riley was the guy the head trainer would be working with every day.
After several hours of talks with West and Riley about nutrition, strength training, flexibility and sports psychology — among many, many other topics — he found himself back in West’s office alone with the GM.
He could feel that his interview had picked up momentum and that the job was almost his after serving as an assistant trainer with the Utah Jazz.
But he still had one major concern and he spelled it out for West.
“I was on the Utah bench at the Lakers-Jazz game the night they fired Paul Westhead in 1981 – little more than a year after he won an NBA championship. I knew how unstable pro sports employment can be,” Vitti said. “So I asked him who will I be reporting to? Who will command my ultimate loyalty? The players? The coach? Or the general manager?”
West paused for several seconds and then spoke slowly and emphatically.
“If you get the job – and I hope you do because I like you – I want you to remember one thing,” West said. Leaning back in his chair, he pounded his chest with one hand as he spoke.
“I’m the f…ing boss.”
Vitti was amazed.
“That was the first time I heard him curse through six hours of meetings that day,” he said. “That’s how I knew he meant it.”
Vitti got the job, and for the next 16 years – from the 1984-85 season until August 7, 2000, when West resigned amid friction with coach Phil Jackson – West was Vitti’s boss.
“He was the best boss I ever had,” Vitti said. “A natural leader who commanded my respect and everybody’s respect just by who he was, the way he carried himself and the way he treated everybody with respect. I could always go into his office to talk about things, and he always had my back – unless I was wrong. And then he would tell me I was wrong.”
The LA print and electronic media have been filled with stories all week about West’s incredible career as both a player and a general manager. His twin accomplishments make him the single most important person in NBA history.
He was a 14-time All Star in his 14 seasons. An Olympic Gold Medal winner. And the only player from the losing team ever to be named the MVP of the NBA Finals.
That singular honor happened in 1969 when the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics for the sixth time despite West averaging more than 38 points on 50 percent shooting. And he was an NBA champion, winning the title with the 1972 team that won a record 33 consecutive games – a streak that will probably never be broken.
He was arguably even greater as a general manager, first as the architect of the Magic-Worthy-Kareem Showtime teams of the 1980s and then, a generation later, of the Shaq-Kobe three-peat champions from 2000-2002.
He’s the greatest talent evaluator ever to work for any NBA franchise, responsible for drafting such superstars as James Worthy, Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson. And then there was his knack for picking productive role players with lower draft picks, like relentless rebounder A. C. Green with the 23rd pick in 1985. Green won three NBA titles with the Lakers and set the all-time NBA record for consecutive games played with 1,192. Or point guard Derek Fisher, selected with the 24th overall pick in 1996. Fisher went on to win five titles with the Lakers and was the perfect Steady-Eddie complement to Kobe’s flashy brilliance in the Lakers backcourt.
Vitti pointed to another, less celebrated draft move by West that illustrated what made him so great as an executive. In 1989 the Lakers had the 26th overall pick in the draft. All the Lakers scouts were pushing for the team to draft big man Gary Leonard out of Missouri, but West was intrigued by a video tape that he had somehow gotten hold of that showed an unknown European kid named Vlade Divac.
The internal debate went on for weeks, until the night of the draft when the Lakers had only a few minutes to make their selection.
“Jerry put the phone down and said OK, let’s go around the room once more before we make the pick,” Vitti recalled. “One by one, the scouts all said to go with Leonard. So I was stunned when I heard Jerry pick up the phone and say we’re taking Vlade Divac. It wasn’t just that he was a great talent evaluator, he had guts, too. All he had to go on was that one tape, but he just sensed that this kid could be great.”
Divac went on to become the NBA’s first European superstar.
Leonard? He was drafted 34th overall by Minnesota, played 3 seasons in the NBA, and was never heard from again.
Then, seven years later, West traded Divac for a 17-year-old kid named Kobe Bryant on draft day 1996. That was the greatest trade in Lakers history.
But there was also a dark side to West, and that has to be factored into any appraisal of his long career. Not a dark side in terms of how he treated other people – his generous, supportive approach never wavered – but in terms of how he treated himself.
The title of his 2011 memoir is “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life.”
West grew up in rural West Virginia, with a physically abusive father who beat all the self-confidence out of the little boy. Even when West went on to incredible heights of success as both a player and a coach, he admitted that he was rarely able to enjoy it because of the hole in his heart caused by his father and by the death of his beloved older brother, David, in the Korean War.
Vitti recalled watching West hit one of the greatest shots in NBA history in the 1970 Finals against the New York Knicks.
In the final seconds of game 3, the Knicks had just scored to take a two-point lead. West took the inbounds pass, dribbled twice and launched a buzzer-beater that traveled more than 60 feet in the air.
Swish!
“If he hit that shot today, it would have counted for three points and won the game,” Vitti said. “But instead it only counted for two points to tie the game. People today remember the shot, but most of them forget that the Knicks went on to win the game in overtime.”
That series went all the way to the 7th and decisive game, the so-called “Willis Reed game” when the Knicks center – badly injured but willing to give it a try – came out for the opening tip, hit the first two shots, and led the Knicks to an inspiring victory.
Once again, after six finals losses to the Celtics, West had to taste the bitter wine of defeat when victory should have been his and the Lakers.
West’s charmed, tormented life had a third act after he left the Lakers in 2000. But their divorce after 40 years together always felt wrong. Credit to the franchises that hired him after he left the Lakers – Memphis, Golden State and the Clippers – but the blame for the ugly split falls directly on Phil Jackson and the Buss family.
Jackson did something so shocking – profanely ordering West out of the locker room in front of the whole team – that West felt compelled to write about it in his memoir. And since Jackson began “dating” Jeanie Buss almost as soon as he got to LA – and stayed “engaged” to her for 11 years before he broke it off when he left the team in 2011 – West felt the power dynamic shifting away from him within the Lakers headquarters. Also, he resented Jimmy Buss, Jerry Buss’s son, who was being given more and more power in personnel decisions even though he wasn’t remotely qualified.
At each of his next three stops he was successful. As the Memphis GM for four years, he turned the Grizzlies from a perpetual loser into a perpetual winner. As a Golden State executive board member, he helped shape the Warriors recent dynasty. And he was Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s personal advisor in the Clippers turnaround from league-wide joke to serious contender.
As the years stretched on there was a petty element to the divorce. Three years ago, Jeanie Buss rescinded the lifetime season tickets that her father had personally left to West before he died in 2013. The rationale for the despicable diss offered by the Lakers mainstream media minions was pathetic: West could use the tickets to spy on the team for the Clippers, now that he was working for them.
But the biggest insult came directly from Jeanie Buss herself a few years ago when she was asked to list the five greatest Lakers of all time. Her answer: Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, LeBron James and Phil Jackson.
No mention of Jerry West.
She didn’t have the class and dignity to say it, so All Ball will do it for her: Jerry West was the greatest Laker of them all.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER
