Ben Hammond saw enough of Dwight Freeney bearing down on quarterbacks to have an idea of what he wanted to express in bronze.
“Dwight, he was a killer and I loved watching him play,” Hammond said. “He had an unstoppable move , no one could stop him one-on-one, so I was thinking, ‘we’re going to do this laser-focused, intense … I remember this great shot of him on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and I’m like, man, I want to capture that undersized, bad-ass sort of expression.'”
But Hammond, who has fashioned more than 50 bronze busts for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, has learned that not every player wants their game face to greet future generations of visitors in Canton, Ohio. When Freeney, the defensive lineman from Bloomfield High, who left a lasting mark on the NFL with his signature spin move, came to Hammond’s studio in Utah, it was apparent his look would have to be different. The glowering Freeney, Colts helmet perched atop his head, that appeared on SI’s cover in 2005 wouldn’t do.
“As I’m sitting there with him, he’s just a super-nice guy,” Hammond said. “And he was much more cerebral than I thought. I thought, ‘this guy is focused like an animal, going out there to spring off the line,’ but oh, no, he’s super kind-hearted. He wanted this real, sort of kind expression of confidence. He wanted a look that said, ‘I’m not a killer, I’ve done my homework and I can do this because I put in the work.’ That was tricky to capture.”
So the challenge was there, to bring Dwight Freeney to life in a way that will make fans smile back at him, but old quarterbacks cringe when they walk past his bust. And Hammond, like the players he casts in bronze, rose to it. He got his hands on the clay brought in from California, and came up with something, then he’d send Freeney a picture. There’d be feedback, ‘it’s not quite there,” Freeney would say, and back and forth they’d go.
Then, finally, Hammond got it, the way artists get it. “Oh, now I see it,” he thought. He went back at the clay, sent this version to Freeney and got back, in so many words, what a portraitist needs to hear: “I don’t know what you did, but you nailed it, ” Freeney told him. “There it is.”
The football world will see the finished product on Aug. 3, when Freeney’s bust will join the others in Canton, along with Class of 2024 inductees Devin Hester, also sculpted by Hammond, and Randy Gradishar, Andre Johnson, Steve McMichael, Julius Peppers and Patrick Willis.
It’s a painstaking process, as you can imagine, and one doesn’t come to do it overnight. Hammond’s high school teacher in Idaho took him to a sculptor’s studio, and it happened to be Blair Buswell’s , who has been the head sculptor for the Hall of Fame since 1983.
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“I didn’t know sculptors’ studios even existed,” Hammond said. “I thought it was crazy. Then I started looking around, and I was like, ‘Is that Terry Bradshaw? Holy cow!'”
Hammond was fascinated, hooked. He got a job at a foundry that did bronze casting, and he asked Buswell for a job, even if it was sweeping his studio floor. Eventually, he became the apprentice.
“It was an inability to hear the words, ‘no, you can’t do that,” Hammond says.
In 2007, after about seven years, Buswell thought Hammond was ready to try a portrait for Canton, and he went to work on Gene Hickerson, a Browns offensive guard who opened holes for Jim Brown.
Hickerson was aged, and Hammond had to work from old photos, with input from his family. Eventually he created a bust of a handsome, clean-cut young man of his era. Hammond has since done several posthumous inductees.
“It’s almost like a forensic understanding of the skull, what makes that person look like that person,” he said. “It’s an understanding the architecture of the human head, because the skull is what makes you look like you. When I have good feedback from family members, it always makes the sculpture better. They can’t always say what’s wrong, to fix this or that, but they’ll tell you something seems off. So I’ll keep spinning my wheels, and eventually a light bulb goes on, and it’s, ‘oh, there you are.'”
Freeney, 44, is only a few years removed from his playing days. He came to Hammond’s studio for about 10 hours, an evening, then the next morning, as Hammond worked on a clay model. Hammond took numerous photos, and a video panning around Freeney that he would later play on a large TV monitor as he continued working.
“The clay we dig out of the ground in Southern California,” Hammond said. “I mold that until I get it just right. Then before it dries or cracks, we paint silicone rubber on it, put plaster on top of that. The plaster sets up, we take the plaster off, and the silicone and now we have a mold. That goes to a foundry and they pour wax into that. Now you have a wax copy, like a chocolate Easter Bunny that’s hollow on the inside.”
A ceramic shell is made around the wax, which is then discarded — this is called “lost-wax casting” — and molten bronze is poured into this ceramic mold.
“The bronze cools and they take a hammer and break off the ceramic,” Hammond said.
Most of the busts in Canton weigh about 35 pounds. Hester, who wanted his large head of hair captured, will have a heavier one, but Hammond is certain Troy Polamalu’s bust, with his long, flowing coif cast in 2021, is the heaviest in the Hall.
Freeney, 6 feet 1 and 268 pounds, was considered undersized for the D-line, even after leading Bloomfield High, where he lettered in four sports and set a state record for sacks, to the Class S football title before he graduated in 1997. He then played at Syracuse, and was drafted by the Colts in the first round of the 2002 NFL Draft. In 16 seasons for six teams , Freeney had 125 1/2 sacks, forced 47 fumbles, helped the Colts win the Super Bowl and was picked for the Pro Bowl seven times. He was elected to the Hall of Fame last February, in his second year of eligibility. “You go into football heaven,” he said at the time.
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At the Super Bowl, where the new inductees are announced, Buswell took preliminary head measurements, starting the process.
“You’re a right-brained artist, but you have to have a left-brained approach to be a portraitist,” Hammond said. “You have to have a different mindset, the mathematics of it to get it right. Hopefully, (Hall of Fame visitors) see that it’s not just a statue, it’s a person. My greatest compliment anyone pays me isn’t, ‘wow, it’s really good,’ or ‘it looks just like him.’ But when they say, ‘oh, my gosh, I thought it was going to talk to me, it looked so real.’ If you do it right, they say, ‘I swear, I saw it blink.'”
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