Jerry West doesn’t want to be on the NBA’s logo anymore
When it comes to sports nicknames, Jerry West may have them all beat — it doesn’t get much cooler than “The Logo.” But the man whose silhouette adorns the NBA’s graphic representation thinks it’s high time someone else was handed the honor.
“I wish that it had never gotten out that I’m the logo,” the 78-year-old West said on ESPN’s “The Jump” Friday. “I really do. I’ve said it more than once, and it’s flattering if that’s me — and I know it is me — but it is flattering.
“But to me, I played in a time when they first started to try to market the league. There were five people that they were going to consider, and I didn’t find out about it until the late commissioner [J. Walter Kennedy] told me about it.
“Again, it’s flattering. But if I were the NBA, I would be embarrassed about it. I really would.”
The logo was created in 1969 by a designer and former high school basketball star named Alan Siegel, who told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 that none of the “40 or 50 designs” he showed Kennedy featured anyone other than West. A childhood friend of the legendary sports reporter Dick Schaap, Siegel was allowed access to Sport magazine’s photo archives and found what he wanted in a photo by Wen Roberts.
“It had a nice flavor to it,” Siegel told the Times, “so I took that picture and we traced it. It was perfect. It was vertical and it had a sense of movement. It was just one of those things that clicked.”