It’s early in the morning in Seattle’s Mt. Baker neighborhood. Depending on the route and the time of day, it’s about 10-15 minutes southeast of downtown Seattle, tucked snuggly between I-90, Lake Washington and Beacon Hill. Before the work day begins, 33-year-old Matthew Hollister is settling into his pre-work routine of illustrating every player in the NBA framed in a basketball card border.
The project is appropriately titled Every Player in the League. He blocks off time to work on a couple players each day and they take around 45 minutes each. Over 400 players appeared in the league this season so that puts Hollister’s time investment somewhere north of 300 hours. And while he has made one of the prints available for purchase, my conversation with him on a Saturday afternoon at a corner café made it crystal clear money or personal gain weren’t the motivators. Matt has an easygoing, approachable demeanor that exudes and invites trust and opened the door wide to explore how he arrived here, across from me at this table drinking coffee in this city and talking about the greatest project alive. (I admit my hyperbole, but the project is damn cool on many levels.)
Way before Mt. Baker, there was, and still is Honesdale, Pennsylvania which sits on the Lackawaxen River in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania. The same area is roughly equidistant from New York City and Philadelphia and produced players like Bobby Sura and Gerry McNamara, but was somewhat of a no man’s land for a young NBA fan without cable. And Matt Hollister could’ve used cable growing up in Honesdale. The rural community there has seen its population steadily declining since the 1960s and when Matt was growing up in the 80s and 90s, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. With his only sibling a sister five years younger, there were plenty of opportunities to explore new and innovative ways to fill the time. With the same easy natured tone he used to describe his work process, he told me that the two that stood out were basketball and illustrating. His dad Tom worked a swing shift at Moore Business Forms from where he would bring home stacks of dot matrix paper (you know the kind, those folded over stacks with the holes on the side that people would shove in old school printers) on which Matt could practice drawing. An avid illustrator, he had enough paper that it lasted him for four years after his dad had moved onto a new job. Four years and a stack of paper that stretched up from the floor to the ceiling of his closet … and every sheet was used.
When he wasn’t drawing or illustrating, he was soaking up the world of the NBA through any medium available: recording games on TV, listening on the radio, scanning box scores in the morning, and even memorizing player biographical and statistical information via encyclopedia-thick basketball almanacs that used to be released annually. Sitting across from him, I could almost imagine a skinny young version, 20 years earlier, without beard and the fullness of a 33-year-old’s face, thumbing through the pages, reciting player colleges, heights, weights, ages. Like so many of us who grew up before the arrival of the omniscient internet, Matt resourcefully learned the game offline. Instead of adopting the Knicks or Sixers, it was the Run-TMC Warriors and particularly Chris Mullin with whom he fell in love. That affair started early and he’s clung to it tightly across time and his different homes in America.
Between Honesdale and Mt. Baker was New York City where Matt earned his BFA in Communications Design at the Pratt Institute. He stayed in the city for 12 years, carving out a niche working for companies and brands with which he identified. His work can be found anywhere from The New York Times and The New Yorker to Men’s Health and Wired. Given the breadth of his freelance work, it’s likely you’ve come across his clean and colorful designs without knowing it. Familiarizing yourself with his portfolio is seeing social and environmental issues laid out powerfully, yet subtly (a piece on gun control includes the cylinder of a gun with a single bullet in the chamber) and appearing in pieces ranging from gun control to public health issues and immigration. As Matt fine-tuned his professional career, his NBA passion never dimmed, but it wasn’t until he arrived in Seattle in 2011 that he first merged his hoop fandom with his art.
“On a whim,” he created the “Euro Stars,” a six-card collection of European-born NBA players that included Darko, Nenad Krstic, Sasha Vujacic, Linas Kleiza, Gortat, and Batum. Matt described the project in positive terms: “I don’t have a huge online following, but I probably sold 20 to 30 sets of them so I was thrilled with that. It was definitely positive” he told me over the phone, three years later still conveying a genuine enthusiasm.
There were a handful of zines that included “The Hair up There,” “Pro Basketball Tattoos” (a collaborative project with his brother-in-law Colin Matsui), and “The Blake Griffin Effect” which catalogues the awe-inspiring reactions humans have to Griffin’s already legendary dunks. In an interview from 2011, Matt describes his zine work and even then, before his latest project had been conceived, you can pick up on some of the motivations of his future project:
Making zines is something I first started doing with friends when I moved to Brooklyn, and it has always been an outlet that allows me to focus on my own interests and just having fun. It also feels great to make things that are multiples so you can hand them out to people.
He’s serious about handing out his work to people. When we met, before diving into any questions, this stranger gave me two sets of the “Euro Stars” and “The Hair up There,” but rest assured that hasn’t skewed any journalistic integrity. This side work, the “fun” stuff picked up more attention. There was a Double Scribble event in Boston titled “Not So Great White Hypes of Celtics History,” that featured Bird/McHale antitheses like Eric Montross and Greg Kite and also used the 1989 Hoops basketball card borders that have become a signature of sorts.
When we spoke, he continually lit up when discussing why he was doing this unpaid basketball work and without prompting described it as something that was fun, something he truly enjoyed doing. The merger of career (something he enjoys doing) and hobby (the NBA) has made him a “happy man … a fortunate man” which seems necessary to embark on a project like Every Player. But before we get there, it was a project for Portland Monthly Magazine that created the inspiration for it.
In the fall, just before the season started, NBA SI writer, Ben Golliver was putting together a piece for Portland Monthly with our guy Matt providing the artwork. Matt submitted a couple options and while the magazine went with his basketball card portraits of Lillard, Aldridge, and Coach Terry Stotts along with front office guys Chris McGowan and Neil Olshey (this time using a 1990 Fleer border), it was art that wasn’t selected that spawned the big project. Matt describes it:
One of the sketches I sent for that feature was a full spread layout with portraits of each Blazers players face floating in empty space. The sketch didn’t end up getting chosen, but I showed it to my friend Richard Gin who then joked that I should just do every player in the league and print it out as a huge sheet. So since then it was in the back of my mind and I built up the courage to start it.
This was back in the fall and the pre-work on the project began in January/February. In order to develop a process, Matt drew out all players whose last names started with A before posting anything. Through that trial and error he was able to figure out whether or not it was feasible – which, thankfully he deemed it was.
Intentionally, the portraits aren’t done as cartoons or caricatures. They range in simplicity, from the bald head close up of Keith Bogans and a simple Bradley Beal possession to complexity like Matt Barnes’s body covered in tattoos or Chris Andersen’s neck and spiky Mohawk shown in profile. Andersen, with inky collages blanketing his skin took a couple attempts and it’s easy to see why. Hollister’s attention to detail and minutia make the project both more authentic and timely. But it’s not enough to just make sure Barnes’s neck tattoo of his child’s feet are accurate, but to speak to the conceptual reality that that little boy’s feet which were once small enough to fit on a grown man’s neck will someday be big padded and calloused things the length of an adult’s forearm. The presence of mind to intellectually acknowledge that meaning creates a sensitivity to each player that gives the project – from the Ronnie Brewers to the Kobe Bryants – a touch of authenticity that the viewer can see without maybe even recognizing it.
Over the course of our Saturday afternoon conversation, Matt returned to Andrea Bargnani’s illustration on more than one occasion. The Bargnani photo was a snapshot of an ill-fated attempt at smashing on a couple Philly players, but Hollister’s amusement wasn’t mean spirited. Rather, he was clear that Bargnani’s illustration was emblematic of his entire clumsy experience with the Knicks this season – and, in my interpretation, of the Knicks’ season in general. Looking at the illustration alongside the original picture, it’s clear where he took liberties (the enhanced stage-like background lighting) and where he focused on details (Bargnani’s puffed out lips, his compression shorts). The result is a true to life representation of an entire experience captured in a single moment which segues into his vision of the project:
My overall concept for Everyplayerintheleague is to create an online catalogue of every player. Design wise I want to create a solid likeness for each player, and also illustrate a scene or movement that is associated not only with the player but hopefully with a specific aspect of their game or a specific moment that fans will notice and appreciate.
At the time of posting this piece, there are over 60 players posted on Every Player and we’re still in the B’s. That gives us a long summer to enjoy everyone from Nick Calathes to Tyler Zeller and relive all those idiosyncratic players between (personally, I can’t wait for Hibbert, JR Smith, Steph Curry, Joakim Noah [already glimpsed in the Leondro Barbosa card] and a bunch more). I don’t think there’s a closet full of dot matrix paper sitting in his house in Mt. Baker, nor does Matt have to scour the box scores and read almanacs to get his NBA fill. But even now, over 20 years later, the passions that passed the time on quiet days and nights in Honesdale are filling mornings at a drawing table in Seattle.
Special thanks to Matthew Hollister for his participation and taking the time to meet. Follow him on Twitter @keystonematthew and keep up with Every Player on tumblr.
Kris. I think you have met your soul-mate. Loved your story. Great art work!