Early Life
Jerry Alan West was born into a poor household in Chelyan, West Virginia. He was the fifth of six children of his mother Cecil Sue West, a housewife, and her husband Howard Stewart West, a coal mine electrician. West was a shy, introverted boy, who became even more withdrawn when his closest brother David died in the Korean War at age 22 when Jerry was 12. He was so small and frail that he needed vitamin injections from his doctor and was kept apart from children's sports, to prevent him from getting seriously hurt. Growing up, West spent his days hunting and fishing, but his main distraction was shooting at a basketball hoop that a neighbor had nailed to his storage shed. West spent days shooting baskets from every possible angle, ignoring mud and snow in the backyard, as well as his mother's whippings when he came home hours late for dinner; he played so often that the NBA acknowledged it as "obsessive".
Read more about this topic: Jerry West
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)