Los Angeles Lakers Legend Jerry West Reveals Lifelong Battle with Depression

"Your father is too busy being a genius," Orson Welles's wife would stolidly tell her children, when the family was faced with another night without the famous cineaste's presence.

The quiet contentment which so many can enjoy in domesticity often eludes the great ones, or the immortals, as Sports Illustrated's Gary Smith so brilliantly writes in his Oct. 24 piece on Los Angeles Lakers legend and inspiration for the timeless NBA logo—Mr. Clutch himself, Jerry West.

Smith's story is one of searing heartbreak and unbearable pain. It is a language the writer waxes with unflinching honesty and a singular poetic flourish.

He once brought openly gay Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas's lifelong ordeal with masking his sexuality to the confines of SI's pages, and with West, he's expressed just how lonely it can be for the truly phenomenal to perch atop Mount Olympus.

The trophies and accolades provide little solace as they peer down at the ant-like shapes beneath them. Happiness emanates from those figures, but it seems forever unattainable. So they add on layers of armor, becoming less able to relate to others by the day as they push farther from the majority of humanity.

"I'd rather have moments of genius than a lifetime of mediocrity," actor Steve Coogan laments in "The Trip." Those words never rang truer than for West, who could readily empathize with Coogan's insatiable desire to pursue perfection in those brief, brilliant snippets provided by divine inspiration.

Consistency, such a hallmark of West's game, constantly evaded him off the court. It was there that he could never calm his hyperactive mind enough to enjoy simple moments of repose.

Instead, it was his perceived failures that riddled him for his entire life, wringing him dry on a nightly basis. West would "duct-tape the blinds of his hotel windows" (Smith, Oct. 24) in an effort to induce some semblance of the "welcome sleep" Homer once wrote about in The Odyssey.

But how could he ever shut his mind off when it was churning at a whirlwind pace throughout the day? Was that ever possible?

The great ones know that comfort is often as foreign as another country once the stadium lights have shut down for the night, the ensuing blackness seeping into all corners of their being. They are helpless to stop the cancerous growth filling them up with despondency.

West was never more at home than when he was pushing his body to its physical limit, forcing his arms to memorize that vintage and aesthetically perfect shooting motion with the high release point that would inspire so many youngsters to head out to their own gravel courts and practice for hours.

It was something far more wondrous than mere practice—here was a young man concocting symphonies in the darkness of a West Virginia coal mining town. It would take years for the world to be introduced to the maestro that was being honed by surrounding quarries, but once they were, he would give them performances they would—and could—never forget.

Maybe those kids did it because they found a sport they loved. But West, as he told Smith, was never quite sure if he did, in fact, ever really love the game he spent a lifetime around. The old adage of familiarity breeding contempt.

Because how can you love something through a child's eyes—the way all sports are meant to be perceived—when all you can see when you pick up a basketball is the reason you took to it in the first place: an escape from the domestic hell that was served up on a nightly basis in your small house in the shadow of the Allegheny Mountains.

A father who beat you, a mother so lost in a crippling daze of depression after the death of her son David that she couldn't bring herself to smile, instead slinking into the blackness you tried so hard to rail against. A house bereft of hope. Basketball was an escape from that. Could it ever be anything more?

What does that say about you—when you feel that your parents would rather it had been you in the coffin sent home from Korea than your brother? Do you embark on some lost-cause charge into the face of certain death like Faramir in The Lord of the Rings, survivor's guilt propelling the less-loved brother in a desperate attempt to prove his self-worth.

Or do you set out for the most remote basketball hoop you can find and proceed to shoot until you can shoot no more, so convinced are you to avoid ever having to step foot in that house ever again.

In the darkness, we teach ourselves to hate. And West didn't hate—he loathed. Mental steroids, he called the red-hot fire that would engulf his mind—so powerful, yet so taxing. At 73, one wonders if West will ever completely kick that tendency.

Basketball became a calamine lotion for the quick-tempered West, who could never embrace it—instead hooking himself on the maddening bouts of ecstatic, euphoric adrenaline that would shoot into his body when he stepped onto that court.

The kids perceived to be better than he was—he binged on the slight, fueling his obsessive desire to be the unequivocal No. 1 player in the state of West Virginia.

And he beat them all. But it wasn't enough to quench his insatiable thirst. He'd become trapped in the singular furor of perpetual competition. He had no exit plan. Maybe he never really wanted one.

The subsequent NBA career after his storied stint at West Virginia.

All those losses in the NBA Finals with the Lakers—each one pricking West's ego in some dastardly version of death by a thousand cuts. When basketball is abusing you in such a painful way, do you turn away from the game? Can you ever leave it?

Marriages dissolving like sugar in hot coffee, West forever seeing himself passing his spouses on a slippery down slope.

How can domesticity ever compare to the drug he'd injected into his body 1,085 times during his 14-year career—regular season and playoffs combined? The endorphin-laced tinge that swept through his body—did he begin to hate himself for his reliance on it? Or did he eventually make his peace, accepting that it was the only thing that led to the "click" Brick Pollitt once spoke of in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

For Brick, it was alcohol that did the "trick." For West, it was relentless activity. Anything that could keep his mind from focusing on the pervading sense of emptiness filling his life outside of basketball. The female conquests began to add up, extramarital activity putting his mind at ease for wondrous, but never enduring, periods of time.

He was voracious in every active part of his life to distract himself. From reading to managing—the latter of which he took to after his playing days.

Creating the Lakers dynasties of the '80s and late '90s—teams that will go down as some of the best to ever play the game.

The day-to-day grind was the checklist he required to thrive. The tinkering with lineups, the activity keeping his mind humming, the "Stop" button safe from being pressed. Sure, he didn't want, and he certainly didn't embrace, the limelight that came with the job description, as unnatural to him then as it was as a player.

West could empathize with stars in ways most general managers could not. His wealth of playing experience, gleaned from years as one of the best guards to ever grace a hardwood court, earned him immediate respect with his charges. When he talked, they listened.

He excelled at creating cohesive groups, casting a discerning eye for what combinations worked best. That on-court vision, so impressive during his playing days, proved perfect for an executive role.

Stars no one could have foreseen playing together seamed thanks to his managerial acumen. It's little wonder why the Kobe-Shaq experiment burst into flames once West had left the Lakers in 2000. He was no longer there to put out the egotistical bursts of fire.

There are a thousand reasons I plan on reading West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life. There's something uniquely powerful about reading a story that you feel such a strong affinity toward—like shooting alone in a gym as early-morning light streams through the rafters, each successive bounce from that ball pushing worry farther from your mind.

As Rabbit Angstrom says in John Updike's Rabbit, Run, "The naturals just know." They recognize. They relate.

When a story brushes up so closely to your own, Venn diagramming to the point where it can no longer be coincidence, you take notice. The ensuing adrenaline rush, accompanying that wonderful feeling of solidarity, is not easily reproduced. 

Kind of like the furor of a basketball game.

And in a cold, cruel world, sometimes that solace can make a world of difference between pain and salvaging some small sliver of salvation.