Gone West

America called him Zeke from Cabin Creek, way back when. 

He was a shy, skinny kid from West Virginia who could shoot out every light in little old Cabin Creek, and he did it there and in Morgantown for the University, and later in the footlights of L.A. And by the time Jerry West was done, people called him a lot of things.

Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain and bunch of other Los Angeles Lakers -- hell, maybe even their nemeses on the Boston Celtics -- called him The Man. 

The NBA called him All-Association 12 times, and an All-Star every season of his career, and its NBA Finals MVP in 1969.

Kareem and Magic and Kobe and Shaq and many, many others called him boss.

The Basketball Hall of Fame called him a member in three different categories.

How good was Jerry West, who died this morning at 86?

He was so good he won that aforementioned Finals MVP in '69 as a member of the losing team. In 55 years, it's never happened since.

How giant a shadow did he cast over his game as a player, coach and executive?

The freaking NBA logo is his silhouette. Or so virtually everyone agrees.

West never beat the Bill Russell/Sam Jones/Red Auerbach Celtics, but neither did anyone else in the 1960s. Year after year he'd show up in the Finals, and year after year the best he could manage was to be brave in the attempt. Until he finally won with Wilt, Gail Goodrich and that crowd in 1972, he was the living embodiment of nobility in the face of defeat -- so much so that even though he lost and lost and lost, no one anywhere regarded him as a loser. 

He was just the guy who didn't win. The man who didn't win.

That maybe makes up for the unfairness of his last years on our mortal coil, the mean twist of fate that defaced his legacy for those who didn't know any better. In the sunset of his life, see, a bunch of hacks from HBO made a limited series called "Winning Time" that chronicled the early years of the Lakers' 1980s dynasty.

Now, there are a million directions they could have gone with that tale, but they chose to make it a cartoon, or the next-door neighbor to a cartoon. And no one suffered for that decision more than West, who was portrayed as a bitter, ranting lunatic for the sake of comic relief.

Hell of a sendoff for the man, that was. Because anyone who watched it whose institutional basketball knowledge began with LeBron 'n' Steph 'n' them would have come away believing that was Jerry West. Dear God, what a kick in the teeth.

And now the man has gone West, to pun terribly. And the only upside to that is maybe, in the perspectives on his life sure to pour forth in the coming days, the LeBron 'n' Steph generation will discover the circus-clown Jerry West from "Winning Time" was as fictitious as Forrest Gump or Jimmy Chitwood.

One can only hope.