Uni Watch's Friday Flashback: The man behind the Kings logo

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When the Sacramento Kings unveiled their new logo in late April, it marked the resurrection of one of the most improbably durable designs in sports history.

The Kings' logo, showing a stylized crown perched atop a basketball, was originally created for the 1971-72 Cincinnati Royals. After one season the team changed its name and moved west, becoming the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, but the logo was retained. Additional franchise relocations followed, including the move to Sacramento in 1985, and the team was sold to new owners several times, but the crowned-ball logo somehow endured. It was finally mothballed in 1994 but later became popular as a throwback logo, leading to its recent revival as the team's primary mark.

The crowned ball isn't the sports world's only logo to have survived across different eras and cities. The Los Angeles Dodgers' familiar script, for example, is relatively unchanged from the team's days in Brooklyn. But the Kings' logo has managed to endure some unusually choppy waters. Its 45-year lifespan had covered two team names, four cities, and six team owners. The logo itself is now in its fifth incarnation.

All of which leads to a simple question: Who designed it?

It's a trickier question than you might think. Sports designers are rarely credited by name. Logos and uniforms are usually attributed to institutions (a team, a league, a uniform manufacturer), not to the human beings who did the creative work. And although a few teams are very good about archiving and documenting the details of their visual history, those clubs are the exceptions. Most teams -- including the Kings, in this case -- have no idea who created their graphics.

And besides, the original version of the Kings' logo was created 45 years ago. Even if we knew the designer's name, would that person still be alive?

As it turns out, yes.

Shortly after the updated was logo was released, an email from a Cincinnati designer named Robert Grove arrived at Uni Watch HQ. Grove said he had designed the original version of the crowned ball for the Cincinnati Royals back in 1971, and he had old newspaper clippings to prove it.

Grove is now 70 years old, which means he was only 25 when he created the original Royals logo. He grew up in Lima, Ohio, and has lived in and around Cincinnati since attending college there in the 1960s. Aside from those early newspaper clippings, the story of his role in the NBA's visual history has never been told until now.