This article originally appeared in Forbes Czechoslovakia.

The NBA was founded exactly eighty years ago. The competition, which is one of the most valuable and profitable sports leagues in the world and which brings together teams worth billions of dollars, was founded on June 6, 1946 under the name Basketball Association of America.

Three years later, it merged with the rival National Basketball League and continues to operate as the National Basketball Association, or NBA, to this day. However, the NBA did not get its famous logo with a white silhouette of a basketball player on a blue and red background until twenty years later. In 1969, it was created by designer Alan Siegel based on a photograph of legendary point guard Jerry West.
 
During the first twenty years of its existence, the NBA used several variations of the basketball-shaped logo. The fundamental change to the form in which the NBA is presented today occurred in the late 1960s. At that time, the league was fighting for attention, spectators and money with the newly formed rival ABA, and also had to deal with reputational problems associated with the drug problems of some players.

Then-NBA Commissioner James Walter Kennedy decided that a rebranding was necessary. The inspiration was the MLB, which in 1969 introduced a new logo by Jerry Dior with the silhouette of a batter for the league’s 100th anniversary, which was a huge success.

Kennedy therefore turned to designer Alan Siegel, who also worked on the MLB logo, to design a new visual identity for the basketball league that referenced baseball’s MLB and had the potential to appeal to as many Americans as possible.

Siegel, who was close to basketball as a former player, teamed up with his childhood friend Dick Schaap, who worked as a journalist at Sport magazine and who gave Siegel access to the photo archive, to create the logo.

In it, the designer was attracted by a photograph by Wen Roberts, which captured the star point guard of the Los Angeles Lakers and the now legendary player Jerry West, who passed away almost exactly two years ago, while dribbling.

“It had the right vibe, so I took the photo and traced it,” Siegel told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “It was perfect. It was vertical and it had a sense of movement,” Siegel described.

Once he found the right photo, he said, the job was easy. With his business partner Bob Gale, he created the blue-and-red logo with a white silhouette of Jerry West in an hour and presented it to NBA executives the next day. And they were thrilled.

Later, West himself, a basketball player, was a little less enthusiastic, and he had a ambivalent relationship with the logo. The Hall of Famer, who won the NBA championship with Los Angeles once as a player and five times as a general manager, described in interviews that his silhouette in the logo of the most famous basketball league in the world was flattering on one hand, but on the other hand, it made him feel out of place.

And he felt like his athletic achievements and hard work had been reduced to a single image. “I wish it never got out to the public that I was the logo,” he said on ESPN West in 2017, noting that he didn’t like the nickname “The Logo” given to him by the basketball public.

Perhaps that’s why the league has never officially confirmed that Jerry West is the one on the logo. According to the NBA, the logo is a symbol of the entire institution, and that’s why it’s still reluctant to associate it with an individual. What has been unofficially known for a long time, however, was confirmed by the logo’s creator himself in 2010. “It’s Jerry West,” Siegel said bluntly in the aforementioned interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Siegel charged $14,000 for the now-unmistakable logo, which has undergone only one minor font change since its creation in 2017. Today, Jerry West’s silhouette on a blue-and-red background generates over $3 billion in royalties annually and is known worldwide.

“Iconic logos endure because they can condense a brand’s story into a form so simple and memorable that they become part of the culture itself. We started with the NBA—and we’re still working with icons today,” said Jason Miller, executive creative director of Siegel+Gale, the agency behind the logo.