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 West was a shy, introverted boy, who became even more withdrawn when his closest brother David died in the Korean War at age 22 when Jerry was 12.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:
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)