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Shortly after it was announced that Hall of Fame basketball player and executive Jerry West had died at the age of 86, the NBA sent an email to the media. a permit From league commissioner Adam Silver, he extols West’s virtues as a “basketball genius” who has contributed to all aspects of the league for more than 60 years.
Directly above the statement was an image of the league’s famous logo: a rectangle with rounded corners, blue on one side and red on the other, with the white silhouette of a dribbler in the middle.
Following one of the league’s strangest traditions, it was not acknowledged that the silhouette of the man who appeared at the top of the statement was in fact a Western.
It’s one of the worst kept secrets in sports. The NBA hired Alan Siegel—the branding expert who created the Major League Baseball logo—to create a logo for the league in 1969 and based the image on that of West, who at the time was a star player for the Los Angeles Lakers.
The NBA didn’t announce that the logo represented the player, but it was pretty clear to people in the basketball world that West ended up with a nickname that carried unusual weight: they called it “the logo.”
West often claimed that he did not like the assumption that the logo was made in his image, and for many years the league commissioners avoided the issue. But in Interview with the Los Angeles Times In 2010, Siegel, who was paid $14,000 for the logo, left no doubt: “It’s Jerry West,” he said.
Siegel claimed at the time that he had traced one of Wayne Roberts’ photographs to the photo, but would later qualify his opinion by saying that Interview with NBA.com “It is not him in the literal sense of the word, but he relies on his style of dribbling and movement.”
There have been pressures over the years to change the logo, some of it coming from West himself, but the image has endured. The closest the league has come to confirming that the logo represents West was in 2021, when Silver quipped: “Even though the logo was never officially stated to be Jerry West, it looks a lot like him.”
But on Wednesday, with news that the NBA had lost one of its greatest icons — and a literal icon — Silver went further, claiming that it was West who clearly inspired the image.
“The NBA logo was created long before I joined the league, but neither I nor Jerry West had any doubt that his image was the inspiration,” Silver said. “But Jerry also made it clear that he was uncomfortable with being known as ‘the logo.’ “He felt that the logo should represent something bigger than himself.”
“Typical Jerry.”
Benjamin Hoffman He is an editor-in-chief who writes, assigns and edits articles primarily at the intersection of sports, lifestyle, and culture. More from Benjamin Hoffman
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