Growing up, I collected baseball cards. It seemed to seven-year-old me the coolest thing in the world that the heroes whose feats I witnessed on TV could be held in my hand— their essence encapsulated in their cards; it had a magical quality. I longed someday to be on a baseball card of my own— to be worthy of such a mystical object, my own hand-held identity.

Nike asked me to draw portraits of the participants in “Project 101,” a relay race from New York to Philadelphia. For each of the thirty runners I combined a drawing of their likeness with their running statistics. To me, there seemed no more noble a task than to craft so sacred a talisman for other athletes, using art to brand them as heroes.