Rory McIlroy commissions drawing of Masters win that took over 600 hours

Jim Nantz made the iconic call last year as Rory McIlroy dropped to his knees on the 18th green at Augusta National: "The long journey is over! McIlroy has his masterpiece!"

Nantz was referring to the Career Grand Slam, of course, but now McIlroy has a masterpiece of artwork to commemorate the occasion, and the making of it has gone viral.

In the wake of his Masters victory, McIlroy commissioned artist Keegan Hall to draw a portrait of the emotional scene. Hall spent six months on the project, estimating he spent anywhere from 600 to 800-plus hours on the pencil drawing.

Hall, a lefty, uses a Pentel GraphGear mechanical pencil, noting on Reddit that it takes too long to sharpen a regular pencil.

"The original is smaller than 30x22 so each face is like the quarter of the size of a fingernail," wrote Hall. "It’s truly challenging to pack this much detail into such a small area."

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Hall adds his own face to the crowd in most of his pieces, and he did that for this one too. Brad Faxon said on a recent Fried Egg podcast that McIlroy gifted the drawing to Augusta National and sent 300 prints to the club for members.

"I have a very disciplined schedule that I follow," Hall said on Reddit. "Typically up and working by 5am and try to get a solid 5 hours to uninterrupted work in. Then, I’ll take a break for exercise (I’ll either go play basketball, go for a 5+ mile run, hit golf balls in the sim, etc. Then lunch and back to work for 4+ hours and typically end the day will biz related work. But for a piece of this size and scale, I know it will take a long time to complete so my goal is to make progress every day, often 6-7 days a week."

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Pencil drawing of Rory McIlroy's 2025 Masters win goes viral