MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – At least Jerry West never had to follow Jerry West. For Rod Thorn, the guy who did so here at West Virginia University and later as a player and an executive in the NBA, the comparisons were always unfair.
 
It was unfair that he was given jersey No. 44 at WVU – Jerry's number. When West was presented No. 33, Hot Rod Hundley's number, he wore it for one year on the freshman team before switching. 
 
It was unfair that Thorn was roughly the same height and build as West, and it was unfortunate that Thorn chose to sport a crewcut-style haircut similar to West's.
 
Jerry didn't really become well-known until his senior year in 1956 when he led East Bank to a state title, beating Willie Akers' Mullens High team along the way. Until then, Akers was considered the top player in the state.
 
Once Hundley and West enjoyed enormous success and popularity at WVU, Thorn became the next one in line. Rod was already well-known throughout the state by the time he was a seventh grader growing up in Princeton, West Virginia.
 
Rod actually lived on his own street – Thorn Street – because of his accomplished family that included father, Joe, Princeton's police chief, and mother, Jackie, an esteemed educator.

 
So, when Rod finally visited West Virginia's campus during his junior year as Princeton was facing Parkersburg High in the semifinals of the state high school basketball tournament, it was a major, major deal to West Virginians. The State Legislature declared Thorn a "natural resource" when it became known that Thorn was seriously considering attending Duke. 
 
Photo ops were arranged with Jerry West greeting the next Jerry West when the meeting finally took place at WVU.
 
"That's the way of the world," Thorn, laughing, recalled last Friday morning from his son's home in Midlothian, Virginia. "The next best thing, you know how that is. People are always getting compared. They are comparing Anthony Edwards to Michael Jordan now. Saying the next Jerry West is just part of it."
 
But his next words were more telling.
 
"I'm in high school, so I don't know what I don't know. It was a struggle for me in that I was a little bit like Jerry from the fact that I was a perfectionist and wanted to do all the right things, but Jerry was just one of a kind," he said.
 
Indeed, there was and will only ever be one Jerry West.
 
Thorn realized this the moment he faced West once the Mountaineer freshmen began scrimmaging the varsity during West's senior season in 1960.  Thorn fared about how you would expect he would fare against West.
 
"Not very well," Rod chuckled.
 
West had 38- or 39-inch arms, which made getting off jump shots very difficult. When you add his incredible athleticism, it just made things impossible.
 
"He had the whole package," Thorn explained. "He made the All-NBA defensive team four or five times.
 
"When he went into the NBA, he was in that one percentile of athletes," Thorn continued. "He was really athletic, and his game changed over time as (Michael) Jordan's game changed over time. Jordan was more athlete than shooter when he came into the NBA, just as Jerry was a tremendous athlete. 
 
"But as they matured and got some experience, their games changed," he said. "They didn't rely on their athleticism as much as their knowledge and their understanding of what they needed to do without having to kill themselves to play."
 
Interestingly, when Jerry played in college, he wasn't considered a great ballhandler because he didn't have to be. Coach Fred Schaus always wanted West on the left side of the floor to attack the basket with his dominant, right hand.
 
It wasn't until he got into the pros when West developed the ballhandling aspect of his game.
 
"In college, that was one thing he needed to work on," Thorn admitted. "You wanted him out on the wing on the break because he was always so adept at attacking the basket and finishing, but over the course of his NBA career, he became a point guard when he played with Gail Goodrich. 
 
"The thing about Jerry, from the time he came into the NBA, and he was an all-star his first year, but he continued to get better and better and around his fourth year he had really gotten a lot better."
 
Years later, when West took on the general manager role with the Los Angeles Lakers, he went from being one of the game's greatest players to one of its greatest team builders.
 
"He's one of the best GMs in the history of the NBA - he, Red Auerbach and pick one other one," Thorn noted. "He was incredibly well-read and just a very, very intelligent guy. He could talk to you about anything because he was so well-read and so aware of what was going on. He was a very caring person, and he was just an unbelievable, one-of-a-kind person."
 
Like West, Thorn was the No. 2 player taken in the NBA Draft following his senior season in 1963, but unlike West, Thorn bounced around from team to team before eventually catching on with the expansion Seattle Supersonics and averaging a career-high 15.2 points per game in 1968. However, injuries limited Thorn's NBA career to just eight seasons before he finally retired in 1971. 
 
And like West, Thorn moved into an executive role and eventually in 1984 he was able to draft North Carolina's Michael Jordan. Thorn isn't usually given much credit for the Chicago Bulls' amazing success in the 1990s, but it was his deft handling of Chicago's position in the draft that year and his unwillingness to trade the draft rights that enabled the Bulls to land Jordan. 
 
By doing so, Thorn put in place the key piece to Chicago's six NBA titles.
 
Thorn, like West, also understood the great responsibility of wanting to perform well and wanting to make all West Virginians proud.
 
"That's something that was part of me in that even today, you want to do the best that you can and not let people down," he explained. "I think that's just part of some people's nature, if you will. You were constantly trying to do better and constantly trying to prove that you were deserving of whatever.
 
"Not to (West's) extent, but I was a little bit like him in that regard – wanting to make people happy and presenting the right image and trying to do the right things," Thorn admitted. "He was a real perfectionist in whatever he did. When he finished playing, he became a top-flight golfer. He had talent, and he became a plus-handicap in golf."
 
Their perfectionism and desire to conduct themselves properly carried over into their professional lives, West living and working in Los Angeles and Thorn living and working in New York City. One of the things Jerry greatly resented was the moniker "Zeke from Cabin Creek" because he felt it was incredibly unfair to him and the people he grew up with in West Virginia.
 
Thorn dealt with similar things in New York as well.
 
"I just ignored it," he explained. "When you are in the public eye you are going to be critiqued from time to time, and sometimes presented in a way that you don't think you should be, but that's part of it today.
 
"As you go along and you become a little more mature, you become whoever you are. From that standpoint, I was brought up to try and do the right things and you treat people with respect, and you work as hard as you can. That's what my parents emphasized to me when I was a young kid, and I was very lucky to have them help me along those lines.
 
"You understand that there is an obligation to present yourself and your family to the best of your ability. You do that by trying to do the right things," Thorn added.
 
As for West, Thorn believes Jerry never lost his Mountain State roots despite living most of his adult life in Los Angeles.
 

"He was unbelievable, and he always loved West Virginia and was always so proud of being a West Virginian," Thorn said. "As far as I'm concerned, that's one of the great things about him. He never lost who he was. He always knew who he was."
 
Thorn, now 83, said the last time he talked to Jerry was a couple of weeks ago, and despite ailing, West still managed to dominate the conversation the same way he once dominated his opponents on the hardwood.
 
"Oh, Jerry could talk now," Rod laughed. "He never lost that capacity. You have a 10-minute conversation with Jerry, and you might get to talk a minute.
 
"Jerry had been ill for six months. He didn't want many people to know, but not many people knew that he was getting ready to pass," he added.
 
That's because the public never saw Jerry West at less than his best, which is how we will always remember him following his death last Wednesday morning.
 
Now, only Thorn remains among Mountaineer basketball's royalty that began with Hundley in the mid-1950s and continued with West and Thorn before culminating with Ron "Fritz" Williams in the late 1960s.
 
All four were homegrown, immensely proud of their West Virginia roots and understood the great responsibility that entailed.
 
In this regard, these guys never let us down!