How did the Rory McIlroy Masters charge live?

Six years ago, artist Keegan Hall posted a photo of one of his pencil drawings on Reddit. The painting, which depicts Michael Jordan’s iconic free throw from the 1988 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, went viral, thanks to Hall’s vividly detailed pencil tip. “Those hundreds of little faces, well done,” commented one Reddit user, speaking for the more than 280,000 users who have voted for Hall’s post. “This is probably one of the most impressive paintings I have ever seen.”

His Airness saw the piece and was so taken with it that he ordered Hall to make another painting for him. When Hall finished that job, Jordan called Hall to Jordan’s golf club in South Florida, Grove XXIII, to deliver the piece to MJ himself.

The meeting went well. So much so that it led to Jordan’s team being introduced to another world star based in South Florida: Rory McIlroy. A golfer had seen a Jordan dunk draw and wanted his own piece of the Hall. Before long, Hall began working on a replica of McIlroy and his childhood friend, Harry Diamond, on the 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 a career Grand Slam with an emotional win at Augusta National, McIlroy didn’t have to think long or hard about how he would remember the moment. Hall was her man.

“When we were trying to figure out which picture should be done in this project, there were those who were close to him, which would have been easy for me to paint,” Hall said earlier this week outside the clubhouse of Augusta National. But they wanted this really wide angle, which is a very difficult version.

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HALL IS COMMON TO TAKE challenging – and high profile – projects. President Obama. Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder. NFL quarterback Russell Wilson. He drew them all, and with the painstaking detail you could swear you weren’t looking at a painting but a black and white photo. Some of his works take weeks to complete, others months, all produced with a single mechanical pencil and more boxes of .5mm HB lead than he can count.

“It’s like putting a puzzle together, you start with the outside in first,” Hall said. “I’ll size my paper to what I can draw so I can at least have that locked in between the dimensions and proportions. And then from there, it’s like a soft first pass so it’s like getting things in place. And then I’ll go back and add a little bit and tighten it up, and I’ll be almost like a typewriter, kind of keep going slowly and to that next stage and then slowly come forward and to that next stage and slowly come. to make that continue but yeah, it’s a very slow process.

Hall, 44, is used to challenges, period. He and his younger sister grew up in a trailer park in Sumner, Wash., south of Seattle, in the days when young Keegan had dreams of becoming an animator for Disney. He later received an art degree from the University of Washington but was told that he could not make a living in the art field, so he gave up painting. He took a job in sales with the Seattle Supersonics (before moving to Oklahoma City and becoming the Thunder), then got an MBA and enjoyed some success with the startup. Then came a great event in life. His mother died suddenly of complications from cancer. A few months later, Hall had an epiphany: his mother had always supported his art; out of respect for him, he felt compelled to pick up the pencil again. “At that time,” he wrote on his website, “I just wanted to sit down and draw.”

Jordan’s version appeared first, which is different from the version that went viral. Then came the sketch of Seattle Seahawk Kam Chancellor that got attention on social media. That led to a commission from the Chancellor and then another from the Chancellor’s partner, Richard Sherman. The hall was closed and running … well, drawing. He began to build a business that not only made a living but also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity by selling prints of his work.

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THE HALL SPENT SIX MONTHS on his McIlroy artwork, or somewhere in the 600 to 800 hour range, using a single Pentel Graphgear pencil and Tombow erasers with fine pucks. “I don’t wipe as much as I used to,” he said. “It’s like keeping things clean and white versus correcting a lot of mistakes.” If the process sounds difficult, it is because it is. “It’s fun at the beginning, and it’s fun when you get to the end,” he said. “But in the middle, it’s just brutal, especially with this piece. When there’s so many people and you’re not progressing quickly, you’re just like, ‘This is boring, man.’

Mental grinding, and technology, too. One of the many challenges, Hall said, was capturing the thousands of faces in the gallery. “You can get lost very quickly,” she said. “Since where am I, who am I? Who am I drawing now?”

Sponsors were not the only headache (or hand management).

“These are ugly buildings, man,” Hall said, looking back toward the golf shop and clubhouse. “Architecture is really difficult because it is pure precision: straight lines, windows, window seals, its scale because it is relatively small. These are very small in that shot. There is a margin of error in any of these things. And if you start erasing, now you are like a small smudge, and the paper is no longer a white process.”

Hall said fairing the tightly mowed grass on the 18th green is also a point of stress. “There’s a lot of subtle shifts and shadows and values, and with the lighting, it’s like casting a shadow across the scene,” he said. “I know all this stuff, it’s 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 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 as crazy as that,” Hall said. “That’s the best way I could ask for, like, a short caps thing.”

McIlroy gifted the original painting to Augusta National, and he and Hall signed a limited collection of membership prints. Hall said he doesn’t know if the first one will go on the clubhouse wall, but he will do it all.

“I hope it stays somewhere here,” he said. “It would be nice to continue that kind of tradition, to be able to work with the team maybe going forward, as an annual thing, like, let’s highlight the winner. That would be a project I would like to do.”

If you think that Hall’s system (and the pencil) can handle another 800 hours.

The author welcomes your comments at alan.bastable@golf.com.