1 pencil, 800 hours: How this viral Rory McIlroy Masters tribute came to life

Six years ago, artist Keegan Hall posted an image of one of his pencil sketches to Reddit. The drawing, which depicts Michael Jordan’s iconic free-throw line dunk from the 1988 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, went viral, for the mind-blowingly granular detail Hall captured with the tip of a mechanical pencil. “Those hundreds of tiny faces, all perfectly done,” one Reddit user commented, 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 the piece and was so taken by it that he commissioned Hall to create another drawing for him. When Hall had completed that work, Jordan summoned Hall to Jordan’s South Florida golf club, Grove XXIII — by way of Jordan’s private jet — to hand-deliver the piece to MJ himself.

The meeting went well. So well that it led to an introduction by Jordan’s team to another South Florida-based global superstar: Rory McIlroy. The golfer had seen the Jordan dunk drawing and wanted a Hall piece of his own. Before long, Hall got to work on an iteration of a photograph of McIlroy and his caddie and 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 couple of years later — in April 2025 — he completed the career Grand Slam with an emotional win at Augusta National, McIlroy didn’t need to think long or hard about how he would commemorate the moment. Hall was his guy.  

“As we were trying to figure out what was the right image to do for this project there were some that were a bit closer up of him, which would have been easier for me to draw,” Hall told me earlier this week outside the Augusta National clubhouse. “But they wanted this really wide angle, which is the hardest possible version. So that’s what we ended up going with.”

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HALL IS USED TO TAKING ON challenging — and high-profile — projects. President Obama. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder. NFL quarterback Russell Wilson. He’s sketched them all, and with such painstaking detail that you’d swear you’re looking not at a drawing but a black-and-white photograph. Some of his works take weeks to complete, others take months, all produced with a single mechanical pencil and more boxes of .5mm HB lead than he can count.

“It’s like putting together a puzzle, you start with the outside first,” Hall said. “I’ll size my paper to what I can draw so I at least kind of have that locked in on the dimensions and ratios. And then from there, it’s kind of like a very soft first pass to kind of like get things in place. Then I’ll kind of go back and add a little bit more and tighten up, and I’ll kind of almost like a typewriter, kind of just keep going over and over that same spot until it slowly comes to life. And then you just move on to that next section and kind of get that going. 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, Wash., just south of Seattle, in the days when young Keegan had dreams 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 quit 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 enjoyed some success with a couple of start-ups. Then came a massive life event. His mother died abruptly from complications with cancer. A few months later, Hall had an epiphany: his mother had always been so supportive of his art; as a tribute to her, 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, a different one from the version that went viral. Then came a sketch of then-Seattle Seahawk Kam Chancellor that got some attention on social media. That led to a commission from Chancellor and then another from Chancellor’s teammate, Richard Sherman. Hall was off and run … well, drawing. He began to build 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.

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HALL SPENT SIX MONTHS on his McIlroy masterwork, or somewhere in the range of 600 to 800 hours, employing only a single Pentel Graphgear pencil and fine-tipped Tombow erasers. “I don’t erase as much as I used to,” he said. “It’s more of, like, keeping things clean and white versus fixing a lot of mistakes.” If the process sounds grueling, that’s because it is. “It’s fun in the beginning, and it’s fun when you’re getting towards the end,” he said. “But in the middle, it’s just brutal, especially with this piece. When there’s just so many people and you don’t make progress very rapidly, you’re just like, ‘I’m tired of this thing, man.’”

A mental grind, and a technical one, too. One of the many challenges, Hall said, was capturing the thousands of faces in the gallery. “You can get so lost so quickly,” he said. “Like, where am I even, who am I on? Who am I drawing right now?”

The patrons weren’t the only headache (or handache).

“These damn buildings, man,” Hall said, looking back toward the golf shop and clubhouse. “Architecture is just really tough because it’s pure precision: straight lines, the windows, the window seals, the scale of it because it’s relatively small. These are relatively small in that shot. There’s zero margin for error in any of this stuff. And if you started erasing, now you’ve got like a little bit of a smudge, and the paper’s not white anymore. It’s a such a delicate process right there.”

Hall said accurately replicating the tightly mowed grass on the 18th green was also a stress point. “There’s just so many subtle shifts and shades and values, and with the light, there’s like a casting of a shadow across the whole scene,” he said. “I know every inch of all of 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 by way of a 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 all-caps thing.”

McIlroy gifted the original drawing to Augusta National, and he and Hall signed a limited-run collection of prints for the membership. Hall said he didn’t know if the original would find its way onto a clubhouse wall, but he’d be all for it.

“I’m hoping it’s going to live somewhere here,” he said. “It’d be cool to continue on a tradition like that, of being able to work with the club maybe moving forward, like an annual thing of, 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.