That iconic NBA silhouette can be traced back to him

NEW YORK — Jerry West claims he's not so presumptuous as to assume his image is depicted on one of the most recognizable emblems in sports: the NBA logo.

The NBA too is coy.

Alan Siegel is not.

"It's Jerry West," he says.

Siegel, 71, designed the familiar logo in 1969, taking a Wen Roberts photograph of the Lakers star and turning it into an iconic image.

In red, white and blue, it shows a player in silhouette purposefully dribbling the ball upcourt with his left hand.

Siegel, a branding expert and lifelong basketball fan, believes he knows why the NBA is reluctant to acknowledge the obvious.

"They want to institutionalize it rather than individualize it," he says during an interview over lunch near his office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. "It's become such a ubiquitous, classic symbol and focal point of their identity and their licensing program that they don't necessarily want to identify it with one player."

NBA Commissioner David Stern, through a spokesman, declines to comment, saying he doesn't know whether West is on the logo.

"There's no record of it here," spokesman Tim Frank says.

Siegel's original artwork has been lost over the years through several office moves, but the designer recites the story of the logo in detail. In 1969, Siegel and his business partner, the late Robert Gale, opened their branding consultancy.

In a previous job, Siegel says, he oversaw development of Major League Baseball's logo, which was developed in 1968 and introduced during baseball's centennial in 1969. It too is red, white and blue and features a player -- a batter -- in silhouette.

It's no accident, Siegel notes, that the logos are similar.

He says that J. Walter Kennedy, the NBA's commissioner from 1963 to 1975, told him that "he basically wanted to have a family relationship with baseball and to use red, white and blue to position basketball as an All-American game."

Siegel says he came up with 40 or 50 designs, none of which featured any players other than West, but Kennedy gravitated toward the derivative of the baseball logo.

"And in those days," the designer says, "it was top down. He made the decision. There was no research. There was no discussion. He said, 'We're doing this.' "

Siegel, 6 feet 2, was a star basketball player at Long Beach High on Long Island. He says he turned down dozens of basketball scholarships to attend Cornell, where he left the basketball team after one season to concentrate on academics.