West’s path to Spurs took more than few twists and turns

When David West gave up $12.6 million in guaranteed salary from the Indiana Pacers to sign with the Spurs for just below $1.5 million, the reaction around the NBA bordered on astonishment.

Who gives up more than $11 million and a spot in a starting lineup, especially at age 35?

Larry Bird, the Boston Celtics Hall of Famer who now serves as president of basketball operations for the Pacers, admits West’s decision to leave the Pacers stung.

“When it happened it was, ‘What?’” said Bird. “But if he thinks it’s best for him, good for him. Who are we to tell him he’s crazy?”

West is no mad man. His decision to forego guaranteed millions was rooted in foresight many retirees would envy.

Since the start of his NBA career, West has been in firm control of his financial destiny, pre-planning a path to fiscal stability that began with his selection by the New Orleans Hornets with the 18th selection in the 2003 draft.

“When I came in the NBA 13 years ago, on Day 1 my financial guy and I treated my first year like I would never play another year,” West said. “We treated the second year like I would never play another year of basketball. Third year, too.”

Eventually, when he had established himself as one of the better power forwards in the league, West began thinking strategically about the end of his career.

“At that point, I’m saying when we get toward the end, let’s keep being strategic and the last few years I’ll be able to make the decisions solely based on basketball, nothing else,” he said. “I think that’s just forward thinking. There are a lot of people making a whole lot less than we make that live comfortable lives so I’ve always kept that in perspective. So when it came down to year 13, knowing you’ve got more yesterdays than tomorrows, you say, ‘Take the money off the table … where do you want to go play some good basketball? San Antonio.’”

Even Bird had to admire West’s rigorous adherence to his goals.

“I always say guys have to do what they think is best for them,” said Larry Legend. “Their careers aren’t that long and whether they make the right or wrong decision, who are we to judge that?

“He’s a good man and he will fit in there great. Pop will love him and they’ve got a great team. He decided to go chase a ring. Some guys do that. I’m not surprised by anything in this league.”

One thing is certain: Those who know West well, especially the folks in Garner, North Carolina, his home town, simply shrugged their shoulders at his decision to give up millions for what he believed was his best chance at a championship ring.

“That’s the David West we know,” said Eddie Gray, the 66-year-old head coach at Garner Magnet High School, where West completed his junior and senior years in high school and continues to make his off-season home.

Gray admires everything about him and understands his motivation.

“He’s a heck of a player, but he’s an even better person and he wants to win a ring,” said Gray, whose persistence and powers of persuasion played a prominent role in West’s basketball development.

Rough start

Moving through the crush of teenagers changing classes one morning in 1996, Gray spotted a head bobbing along above the crowd. He figured the head belonged to a youngster at least 6-foot-5, a student he never had seen before on campus.

Gray wondered: Could this be the new big man for his team?

Catching up with 16-year-old David West, Gray introduced himself and blurted out something he now recalls as inane.

“The way I remember it I said something like, ‘You’re really tall so I hope you’re coming out for basketball this year and what’s your name?’” Gray said in a phone interview.

West’s response was like a pail of ice water.

“He informed me that he had come to our school from Teaneck, New Jersey, and explained he’d had a bad experience with basketball in New Jersey and didn’t like the game and didn’t want to play any more,” Gray said.

Now a valued veteran on a retooled Spurs roster that is expected to contend for another NBA championship, West smiled while remembering the horrified look on Gray’s face in their introductory meeting.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” West said, laughing. “Right, right, right. That’s the real, absolute truth.”

West’s decision to give up on basketball had been rooted in typical teen-age angst. A growth spurt between his freshman and sophomore years had taken him from 5-11 to 6-5 but his weight didn’t keep up with his length. He was rail thin, about 135 pounds. Worse, his feet had grown to size-17. Running up and down the court typically included tangled feet and, often, an embarrassing fall.

His New Jersey teammates could be cruel. They laughed at his awkward gait. There were unflattering nicknames. When he did play on the varsity, they wouldn’t pass him the ball.

Mostly, he felt abnormal: Too tall to be anything but a basketball star; too awkward to achieve success on the court.

“I was just big feet, big hands, no weight, just awkward,” West said. “I knew I could play but I just didn’t get on the floor so I took myself off the varsity just so I could play JV. Coach had an issue with that.”

In fact, West knew his coach had a legitimate reason for not playing him more.

“I was just terrible,” he said.

He was also miserable.

Relieved when the season finally ended, West vowed never to play again. When his mother told him the family would be moving to North Carolina, he was relieved.

“My mom told me we were moving South because my grandparents were getting older and my grandmother was sick so we wanted to get closer to them,” West said. “And I said to myself: ‘Thank God I can just be regular.’”

West had grown another inch, to 6-6, by the time school started at Garner Magnet High. He knew tall schoolboys who don’t play basketball have a rough time being “regular.”

“It’s hard to be normal when you’re 6-6 and walking around a new school,” he said.

But he didn’t care. He had decided he could be a “regular guy” if he didn’t play basketball, so when Gray approached and urged him to try out for the basketball team he was unmoved.

Sales job

Politely, but firmly, West said he was done with basketball. Gray asked him to think about it. West shook his head but agreed to keep an open mind. That was all the coach needed to hear.

Not about to let a potential star walk away because of a bad experience, Gray gave an assistant coach an assignment: Follow West from the minute he arrived at school to the time he went home after his last class. Every chance the assistant had, his job was to convince West that basketball could be a positive experience.

The assistant, Drew Cook, was a studious, 6-6 teacher with big ambitions for his career in education. A former high school player of some note, he also enjoyed his role as Gray’s assistant. Gray gave him plenty of motivation for his recruiting assignment.

“I told him if (David West) doesn’t come out for basketball I would fire him,” Gray said, laughing at the memory.

Cook went to work on West with a daily list of reasons he should reconsider quitting basketball forever:

People in the South are more laid-back than what West experienced in Teaneck.

Like West, when Cook was 16, he was too tall for my body and also could relate to falling over his feet. Cook could show him how to deal with it.

Cook pledged to work with West and teach him how to play, the very same way Cook learned.

Their meetings turned into a game of hide-and-seek. West ignored notes from Gray and Cook that were handed to him by his homeroom teacher. He rushed from class to class to avoid being seen by Cook. He ran to the bus when classes ended for the day.

One day, with prearranged permission from a teacher, Gray walked into a classroom and ordered West into the hall. Basketball practices were about to begin and he made one final entreaty, promising West that if he would give it one more try he would discover a game he could love.

West agreed to try, a moment he now describes as a U-turn in his life.

When they finally got him on the basketball court, Gray and Cook began teaching West the fundamentals he hadn’t learned in Teaneck.

“We just did basic drills with David every day,” Gray said. “We did all the old drills we had done for years in basketball, like the Mikan drill.”

The Mikan drill, named for Hall of Fame center George Mikan, the NBA’s first dominant 7-footer, was used to develop confidence in simple post moves. It involves making a layup with the right had, taking the ball out of the net with the left hand and turning to make another layup with the left hand and then catching with the right and repeating. Over and over and over.

Quick study

There were other fundamental drills and West showed up early to do them. After practice he asked to do more drills.

“We did them every day and he just got better and better and better,” Gray recalled, “and then we saw that he could play facing the basket too. He just had a great work ethic and it didn’t surprise us because we knew he also had a tremendous family structure, a great mom and dad.”

West became a starter for his high school team right away, with instructions to look for his own shots.

“He was playing on a team of mostly seniors,” Gray said. “Of course, he was an outsider and none of the kids would pass him the ball. I told him, ‘They’re not going to pass you the ball but I want you to just go get the ball because they’re not going to put it in the basket.”

West got the ball enough to lead the team in scoring. By the time he was a senior, Gray had built the team’s offense around him.

“We went to the Regional finals and lost by three points in a game that would have put us in the state tournament,” Gray said. “David scored 40 points but I just didn’t have any guards that year.”

His solid senior season should have had West on the major college recruiting radar. But as a latecomer to the game, he had not participated in AAU ball and missed out on the elite camps where blue chip recruits are identified.

Additionally, there were academic problems. Having blown off studying in his freshman and sophomore years in Teaneck — “I was just one of those kids walking around, no books,” West says — he came to Garner with a grade point average too low to improve enough to satisfy NCAA Division I scholarship requirements.

Two years of solid academic work at Garner didn’t help enough. Even after getting a very good SAT score, his overall GPA made him ineligible for a Division I school.

Junior college looked like his only option.

Then, Gray found a loophole. He spoke with a friend on the faculty at Hargrave Military Academy, a private prep school in Chatham, Virginia, and learned that if West did not graduate from Garner, he could spend a year at Hargrave, raise his GPA and qualify for a Division I “full ride.”

Not graduating from Garner Magnet was the problem.

“David had became a really good student at Garner and all he needed to do to graduate was pass honors English, a course he really loved,” Gray said. “I had to go to the teacher of that Honors English class and tell her to fail David. He had a B average in that class, but she reluctantly gave him an F.”

Accepting a failing grade in his favorite class, one in which he had done solid work, was rough on West but he saw the bigger picture.

“Having to fail and not graduate, wow, that was tough,” he said. “It was a thing where I had made some mistakes early on, ninth grade and tenth grade, and there wasn’t enough time to make them up. If I kept that ‘B’ in English I would have to go to (junior college) two years and cut into my college eligibility.

“Then the thing was you go to junior college and be free but you also realize you need some discipline, some everyday regimented stuff. So I went to military school for a year.”

Rapid rise

At Hargrave West discovered another teacher who made an impact on his life.

“Oh, yes, Miss Blair,” West said. “Helped me with my reading and communication. Miss Blair was the one to say, ‘The better you read, the better you speak, and if you’re going to be playing basketball you’ve got to be able to communicate.”

It took only one semester at Hargrave to raise West’s grade-point average enough to qualify for a Division I scholarship but he finished the full adademic year and led the prep school’s basketball team in scoring and rebounding. Then West accepted a scholarship to Xavier, in Cincinnati, where he encountered another coach, Skip Prosser, who had a big influence on his life.

Prosser began practice sessions talking to his players about current events and life, in general. “Carpe diem,” — Latin for “Seize the Day” — was his motto.

West fully embraced the philosophy. He played his first two seasons for Prosser and led the Musketeers to the 2001 NCAA tournament, averaging 17.8 points and 10.9 rebounds per game.

Prosser left Xavier to become head coach at Wake Forest after the 2000-01 season but his effect on West was indelible. When Prosser suffered a heart attack and died in 2007, West had “Carpe” tattooed on his left calf; “Diem” on his right calf.

By the time West completed his senior season at Xavier he had scored 2,132 points, grabbed 1,308 rebounds, been named Atlantic Ten Conference Player of the Year three times and Associated Press National Player of the Year as a senior.

Not bad for a player who once was so awkward he had decided to give up the game until Gray and Cook intervened.

On March 14 of this year, Garner Magnet High School reached a milestone West never got to experience. Scoring a 70-64 victory over Charlotte Ardrey Kell High School in the championship game of the North Carolina Class 4A state tournament at the Dean Smith Dome on the campus of the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, Garner Magnet won the state title.

West would have been in the stands cheering for his old school if the Pacers had not been playing that same night against the Boston Celtics.

Instead, he got occasional updates, relayed via text message, from the Dean Dome.

“My best friend, William Dudley, was there with my specific instruction to be at the game because I wanted to be a part of it,” said West, who sponsors a successful AAU basketball team comprised mostly of Garner Magnet players.

In the bedlam of the celebration on the court that followed Garner Magnet’s win, Dudley found Gray and handed him a cell phone.

“He put the phone in my hand and it was David,” Gray said. “He wanted to congratulate me and share in the moment. That’s the kind of person he is.”

It was a special moment for the man who helped West find a path to the NBA and, now, the Spurs.

“He was pretty excited,” West said. “It was a long, long time for him to get to that championship and I wanted to share that moment with him.”

Gray is convinced the shared joy played a part in West’s decision to sign with San Antonio.

“I’ve got this theory that the fact he came close but missed out on that state championship still motivates him to win a ring,” said Gray, still coaching at Garner Magnet at age 66.

And if the Spurs finish the season by winning their sixth championship, West can expect a call from the coach who made him change his mind about giving up the game.

mikemonroe@express-news.net

Twitter: @Monroe_SA