Jerry West had always been a taut rope emotionally, the aftershock of growing up with a physically abusive father in a West Virginia home so absent of warmth that one of his sisters named it “the ice house.” It got worse when an older brother he looked up to was killed in combat in the Korean War when Jerry was thirteen. The constant emotional anguish of early life turned him into a future superstar.
A kid who would stay outside shooting baskets even in the worst winter weather to avoid being home, until he turned himself into an all-time great with a smoldering, haunted soul.