Six years ago, artist Keegan Hall posted an image of one of his pencil sketches on Reddit. The drawing, which depicts Michael Jordan’s iconic free-throw dunk from the 1988 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, went viral, thanks to the fine grainy detail Hall captured with the tip of a mechanical pencil. “Those hundreds of little faces, all done perfectly,” commented one Reddit user, speaking for the more than 280,000 users who have since upvoted Hall’s post. “This is probably one of the most impressive drawings I’ve seen.”
His Airness himself saw this piece and was so taken with it that he commissioned Hall to make another drawing of it. When Hall finished that job, Jordan invited Hall to Jordan’s South Florida golf club. Grove XXIIIto deliver the piece to MJ himself.
The meeting went well. So well that it led to an introduction by Jordan’s team to another global superstar based in South Florida: Rory McIlroy. The golfer had seen Jordan’s drawing and wanted a piece of his from Hall. Before long, Hall began working on a reproduction of a photo of McIlroy and his childhood friend, Harry Diamond, on a green at Congaree Golf Club in South Carolina, where McIlroy won the 2022 CJ Cup. McIlroy was impressed with the result, so when a few years later – in April 2025 – he completed his Grand Slam career with an emotional victory in Augusta NationalMcIlroy didn’t need to think long or hard about how he would commemorate this moment. Hall was his son.
“As we were trying to figure out what was the right image to do for this project, there were a few that were a little closer to it that would be easier for me to draw,” Hall told me earlier this week outside Augusta National’s clubhouse. “But they wanted this really wide angle, which is the hardest version possible. So we ended up with that.”
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HALL IS MORE USED FOR GOOD challenging — and high-profile — projects. President Obama. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder. NFL quarterback Russell Wilson. He’s sketched it all out in such painstaking detail that you’d swear you’re not looking at a drawing, but a black and white photograph. Some of his works take weeks to complete, others months, all produced with a single mechanical pencil and more cases of 0.5mm HB lead than he can count.
“It’s like doing a puzzle, you start on the outside first,” Hall said. “I’ll size my paper to what I can draw so I can at least have it locked in to the dimensions and proportions. And from there, it’s like a very gentle first pass to get things in place. Then I’ll go back and add a little more and tighten it up, and go on almost like a typewriter until the slow life comes. go on to that next section and go on that way, but yeah, it’s just a very, very slow process.
Hall, who is 44, is used to challenges, period. He and his younger sister grew up in a trailer park in Sumner, Washington, south of Seattle, in the days when young Keegan dreamed of becoming a Disney animator. He later earned an art degree at the University of Washington, but was told he could never make a living in the art world, so he gave up drawing. He took a sales job with the Seattle Supersonics (before they moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder), then got an MBA and had success with several start-ups. Then came a massive life event. His mother died suddenly of complications from cancer. A few months later, Hall had an epiphany: his mother had always been so supportive of his art; as a tribute to him, he felt compelled to pick up a pencil again. “At that moment,” he wrote on his website, “I just wanted to sit down and draw.”
First came a rendering of Jordan, different from the version that went viral. Then came a sketch of then-Seattle Seahawk Kam Chancellor that got some attention on social media. This led to a commission from Chancellor and then another from Chancellor’s teammate Richard Sherman. Hall was off and running … well, drawing. He began building a business from which he could not only make a living, but also donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity by selling limited edition prints of his work.
Keegan Hall and Rory McIlroy with Hall’s drawing of McIlroy at the 2022 CJ Cup.
Keegan Hall
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HALL KENZEN SIX MONTHS on his McIlroy masterpiece, or somewhere in the 600 to 800 hour range, using only a single Pentel Graphgear pencil and fine-tipped Tombow erasers. “I don’t sweep as much as I used to,” he said. “It’s more, like, keeping things clean and white versus fixing a lot of mistakes.” If the process sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. “It’s fun at the beginning and it’s fun when you’re going towards the end,” he said. “But in the middle, it’s just brutal, especially with this part. When there’s so many people and you’re not progressing very quickly, you’re just like, ‘I’m tired of this, man.’
A mental and technical fight as well. One of the many challenges, Hall said, was capturing the thousands of faces in the gallery. “You can lose so quickly,” he said. “Exactly, where am I, who am I with? Who am I drawing with now?”
Defenders weren’t the only headache (or hand pain).
“These damn buildings, man,” Hall said, looking back from the store and golf club. “Architecture is very difficult because it’s pure precision: the straight lines, the windows, the window seals, the scale of it because it’s relatively small. These are relatively small in that view. There’s zero margin for error in any of these things. And if you’ve started erasing, now you’ve got like a little blob of white paper and so on. right there.”
Hall said accurately replicating the tightly mowed grass on the 18th green was also a point of stress. “There’s just so many subtle changes and shadows and values, and with the light, there’s like casting a shadow across the scene,” he said. “I know every inch of all this stuff, like it’s burned into my brain. I’ve studied it, I’ve digested it, and I can’t get it out of my head.”
When Hall sent the finished product to McIlroy’s team, he didn’t hear back directly from the champion, but he did hear from one of McIlroy’s representatives via text. “I think the response was like, ‘HOLY S—,’ something crazy like that,” Hall said. “That’s the best reaction I could ask for, like, a short thing in all caps.”
McIlroy donated the original drawing to Augusta National, and he and Hall signed a limited collection of membership prints. Hall said he didn’t know if the original would find its way onto a club wall, but it would be all for him.
“I hope it will live on here somewhere,” he said. “It would be nice to carry on a tradition like that, to be able to work with the club maybe moving forward, as an annual thing, like let’s highlight the winner. That would be a project I would love to take on.”
Assuming Hall’s schedule (and pencil) can handle another 800 hours.
;)
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