As Blake McFarland came bounding through the doors of Gallery 85, Patrick Powell figured he was looking at yet another football player hoping to make a connection with his boss. In a way, he was right.
It was 2015, and Powell was managing the art gallery on behalf of his client Vernon Davis, an NFL tight end who was playing with San Francisco at the time. While their main clientele was art buyers, more than a few former college football and NFL practice squad players would pop in hoping that Davis could help them get another shot at the league. McFarland, at 6 feet 5 inches and 230 pounds with a granite jaw line and muscles testing the structural integrity of his T-shirt, looked the part.
For McFarland, those first commissions and sales were validation. They gave him the confidence to make a wildly unorthodox career transition from professional baseball player to professional artist. He turned to art, which at that point involved scouring Craigslist for broken surfboards, repairing them and painting murals on them — and then reselling them on Craigslist.
“I remember looking out at him on our balcony in winter and seeing him covered in tire grease and foam mold and thinking, ‘I’m never going to have a clean home,’” said Jessica McFarland, a doctor, whom Blake married in 2012. “At the same time, I was grateful that he had this outlet and this plan for his life after baseball. Sometimes when guys retire, they’re overwhelmed with what they’ll do next. Blake was able to let go of baseball more easily.
Will Clanfield, an executive at a public relations firm hired by Goodyear, which sponsored the bowl games, discovered McFarland’s website a few pages deep on Google search results for tire sculptors and was struck by how perfectly McFarland’s personal history fit with the project. “You’re talking about a guy who was in the minors, had an arm of a lifetime before an injury ended up cutting his career short,” Clanfield said. “He didn’t let that totally sink him.
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