COPYCENSE

“The NBA logo is, outside of the Olympic rings and the Nike “swoosh,” the world’s most recognizable sports emblem. For years, players, fans and journalists have assumed that the figure depicted within the familiar NBA logo is Jerry West, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Hall of Fame guard and the current president of basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies.

“And yet, in a league with a well-deserved reputation for hyping even the most mundane milestone, the NBA did not celebrate the recent 35th anniversary of the logo’s unveiling. The league has also refused to acknowledge publicly that West is the player in the logo. A high-ranking NBA official who asked that his name not be used told me that the identification of West is an ‘urban myth’ and that the league has ‘no definitive records’ about who designed the logo.”

David Davis. If West Is the NBA’s Logo, Should He Be? Fox Sports. Feb. 18, 2006.

Attribution: CopyCense first learned about this story from a post in The Trademark Blog, edited by Marty Schwimmer.

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