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.
Mr. Siegel claimed at the time to have traced one of Wen Roberts’s photographs for the image, but he would later soften that stance, saying in a Q. and A. with NBA.com that, “It isn’t him literally, but based on his style of dribbling and moving.”
There have occasionally been pushes to change the logo over the years — some of them coming from Mr. West himself — but the image has endured. The closest the league had previously come to confirming that the logo depicts Mr. West was in 2021, when Mr. Silver playfully said, “While it’s never been officially declared that the logo is Jerry West, it sure looks a lot like him.”
But on Wednesday, with the news sinking in that the N.B.A. had lost one of its greatest icons — and its literal icon — Mr. Silver went further, saying that Mr. West had clearly inspired the image.
“The N.B.A. logo was created long before I joined the league but there was never any doubt in my mind, or in Jerry West’s, that his image was the inspiration for it,” Mr. Silver said. “But Jerry also made clear that he was uncomfortable being known as ‘The Logo.’ He felt that the logo should stand for something bigger than him.
“Typical Jerry.”
Source Agencies
