Artist’s tribute to Chiefs is made up of every Mitch Holthus call from Super Bowl
Reilly Michael is a huge Eagles fan, so he happily made a wager with a close friend on the outcome of Super Bowl LVII.
Both are artists, so there was no money on the line in the bet Michael made with his buddy, Evan.
“He’s a Chiefs’ fan and he’s a very gifted woodworker,” Michael said in a phone interview. “So if the Eagles won, he was gonna make me a really nice frame for my Eagles print.
“And now that the Chiefs have won, I was unfortunately stricken with the task of creating an art piece depicting my own team’s spectacular downfall. So it wasn’t the most fun but you know, we got it done.”
It’s an impressive piece of work, and it includes every play call from Super Bowl LVII made by Chiefs radio voice Mitch Holthus. Those words are used to create the image of Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.
Michael said he found a YouTube video that had Holthus’ entire radio call from the game.
“I had my laptop next to me while I was writing,” Michael said. “I put in a little bit of the color and a little bit of the ground crew commentary. But the vast majority of the piece itself is just the play by play because I think that’s the most important part. But every single play call that Mitch made is in there like, ‘Kadarius Toney makes the catch,’ which was a nice thing to read actually, for once.”
Michael estimated it took him around 50 hours of work spread over a month to complete the project.
“A lot of people make a bigger deal out of that than it needs to be. It’s just a simple math problem,” he said of the work. “At this point, I’ve been doing it for six years, and I know exactly how big my handwriting is, or I know if I write this size, I know how much space I can take up with this amount of words. But with a football game, I have all the plays from the box score right in front of me. So I know what’s coming. I know if a big play or not is coming and I can guess how much they’re going to talk about any specific play.
“Outside of that, you have four quarters. So if I write all of the first quarter, and I’m 26% down the page, I’m on track. That’s pretty good. Once I get to the bottom, it gets a little more neurotic and my wife knows to stay away from me for a day or two. But I’ve never gotten to the bottom of one of my pieces and had too many words or too few words. I’ve never had to skip any words. It all just kind of rolls together at this point.”
Michael created a similar piece of art after the Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV. He donated the original to the annual Red Hot Night charity event that benefits Children’s Mercy Kansas City.
It’s the only piece of his artwork that Michael has lost track of.
“I know all my clients, know everybody else who has my originals, and that one might be worth quite a bit more than what they paid for it. And whoever has it, might not know what they have,” Michael said. “But since then I got a little bit of publicity for that.
“And Chiefs fans have just been consistently the nicest people I’ve ever interacted with. Like they’re just consistently so sweet, so patient, very kind, even with me being an Eagles fan. It’s such a culture shock. If this was Philadelphia they’d be tearing me apart.”
There are a limited number of the first editions of the Super Bowl LVII print available on Reilly’s website.
