Officially, the NBA logo is a silhouette like any other: a hypothetical, unreal, anonymous and faceless player dribbling the ball. However, unofficially, Everyone knows that the logo is the image of one of the league’s first great legends: Jerry West, who died on Wednesday at the age of 86..
In 1969, the NBA hired Alan Siegel to design a logo. A year before, he had done it for the baseball league and the images are very similar. The MLB logo is also a player in white on a red and blue background, although the image has no distinguishing features. In 2010, Siegel admitted the truth to the Los Angeles Times. “It’s Jerry West.”he confessed.
Specifically, an image of West taken by Wen Roberts in 1969 was used. “It had a nice flavor,” Siegel said in 2010, “so I chose that photograph and we traced it. It was perfect. It was vertical and had a sense of movement. It was just one of those things that fit.”
In that same 2010 interview, Siegel shared an explanation for why the league has refused to recognize West’s status as its logo: “They want to institutionalize it instead of individualize it,” the designer reviewed. “YesIt has become a classic and omnipresent symbol at the forefront of its identity and their licensing program that they don’t want to identify with a single player.
In a 2017 interview with Aaron Dodson of ‘The Undefeated,’ Siegel offered another explanation: “Maybe they thought West would want a fee“, he said. In 2021, Adam Silver, the NBA boss, gave in: “Although it has never been officially stated that the logo is Jerry West, it looks very similar to him”Silver acknowledged.
Jerry West, for his part, did not want his position as the logo of the American basketball league to be known: “I wish it had never been known that I am the logo, really” West said. “I didn’t find out until the late commissioner, Walter Kennedy, told me about it, and then the ‘New York Times’ did a big article about it. If it were the NBA, I would really be embarrassed. I don’t like doing anything to attract attention. I’m just not like that, period. If they wanted to change it, I wish they would.“.
