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

Keegan Hall's drawing of Rory McIlroy's winning Masters moment. Keegan Hall 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.