Did Jerry West Inspire the N.B.A.’s Logo? ‘There Was Never Any Doubt.’
The New York Times
After decades of the league having avoided the issue, Commissioner Adam Silver said what most people knew all along: It is Jerry West in the league’s iconic logo.
Shortly after the announcement that Jerry West, the Hall of Fame basketball player and executive, had died at age 86 on Wednesday, the N.B.A. emailed a statement to the news media from Adam Silver, the league’s commissioner, extolling the virtues of Mr. West as “a basketball genius” who contributed to every facet of the league over a period of more than 60 years.
Just above the statement was an image of the league’s iconic logo: A rounded rectangle, blue on one side, red on the other, with a white silhouette of a player dribbling up the middle.
In keeping with one of the league’s oddest traditions, no acknowledgment was made that the man dribbling at the top of the statement was, in fact, Mr. West.
It had once been one of the worst kept secrets in sports. The N.B.A. hired Alan Siegel — the branding expert who created Major League Baseball’s logo — to create a logo for the league in 1969 and he based the image off a photograph of Mr. West, who was a star player for the Los Angeles Lakers at the time.
The N.B.A. did not announce that the logo depicted Mr. West, but it was obvious enough to people in the basketball world for Mr. West to eventually be saddled with a nickname that carried extraordinary weight: The Logo.
Mr. West often claimed that he would not want to presume the logo was made in his likeness, and for years the league’s commissioners danced around the issue. But in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2010, Mr. Siegel, who was paid $14,000 for the logo, left no room for doubt: “It’s Jerry West,” he said.
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