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Shortly after the announcement that Jerry West, the Corridor of Fame basketball participant and govt, had died at age 86 on Wednesday, the N.B.A. emailed an announcement to the information media from Adam Silver, the league’s commissioner, extolling the virtues of Mr. West as “a basketball genius” who contributed to each side of the league over a interval of greater than 60 years.
Simply above the assertion was a picture of the league’s iconic brand: A rounded rectangle, blue on one facet, crimson on the opposite, with a white silhouette of a participant dribbling up the center.
In step with one of many league’s oddest traditions, no acknowledgment was made that the person dribbling on the high of the assertion was, actually, Mr. West.
It had as soon as been one of many worst stored secrets and techniques in sports activities. The N.B.A. employed Alan Siegel — the branding skilled who created Main League Baseball’s brand — to create a brand for the league in 1969 and he primarily based the picture off {a photograph} of Mr. West, who was a star participant for the Los Angeles Lakers on the time.
The N.B.A. didn’t announce that the emblem depicted Mr. West, but it surely was apparent sufficient to folks within the basketball world for Mr. West to finally be saddled with a nickname that carried extraordinary weight: The Emblem.
Mr. West usually claimed that he wouldn’t need to presume the emblem was made in his likeness, and for years the league’s commissioners danced across the concern. However in an interview with The Los Angeles Occasions in 2010, Mr. Siegel, who was paid $14,000 for the emblem, left no room for doubt: “It’s Jerry West,” he stated.
Mr. Siegel claimed on the time to have traced certainly one of Wen Roberts’s pictures for the picture, however he would later soften that stance, saying in a Q. and A. with NBA.com that, “It isn’t him actually, however primarily based on his type of dribbling and transferring.”
There have often been pushes to vary the emblem over time — a few of them coming from Mr. West himself — however the picture has endured. The closest the league had beforehand come to confirming that the emblem depicts Mr. West was in 2021, when Mr. Silver playfully stated, “Whereas it’s by no means been formally declared that the emblem is Jerry West, it certain seems to be lots like him.”
However on Wednesday, with the information sinking in that the N.B.A. had misplaced certainly one of its biggest icons — and its literal icon — Mr. Silver went additional, saying that Mr. West had clearly impressed the picture.
“The N.B.A. brand was created lengthy earlier than I joined the league however there was by no means any doubt in my thoughts, or in Jerry West’s, that his picture was the inspiration for it,” Mr. Silver stated. “However Jerry additionally made clear that he was uncomfortable being generally known as ‘The Emblem.’ He felt that the emblem ought to stand for one thing larger than him.
“Typical Jerry.”
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