Lecture Date: February 12, 2026
The Stephen Gaske and Patricia Powers Gaske ’75 Lecture
Jerry West has been the Logo of the NBA since 1969, one of the greatest players and executives the game has ever known, the only person to be inducted three times into the Naismith Hall of Fame—as a player for the Los Angeles Lakers, as a member of the gold-medal-winning 1960 Olympic Team, and as the mastermind behind numerous championships. In 2008, he approached Jonathan Coleman to collaborate with him on the story of his life, a life of darkness in many ways, a probing and provocative exploration of perfectionism and competitiveness and how one makes one’s way in the world. The result of that collaboration was WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life, considered by many to be one of the sports books of all time, in large part because it is not really a “sports book” per se. (“Exceptional,“ said Gay Talese, and from The New Yorker: “Deeply thoughtful in a way rare among books by former athletes.”) In the wake of West’s death in 2024, Coleman revealed that the relationship between subject and author was “a marriage of sorts,” based on complete trust, and that they were, in their own way, “undivorceable.”
Speaker: Jonathan Coleman
Jonathan Coleman is the author of five critically acclaimed works of narrative nonfiction (three of which have been New York Times bestsellers), and he has published in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The American Scholar, Time, Newsweek, and The Washington Post, among other publications. He taught narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia for many years, and has been a visiting writer at many other universities. He was a book editor at Knopf and Simon and Schuster, a broadcast journalist at CBS News, is a contributing editor to The Sunday Long Read, and a consultant to the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. He lives in New York City.