Stephen Pacheco, a Memphis University School graduate now living in New York as a script writer for an advertising agency, is happy to have two of the following three:

1. Friends? Check.
2. Fun? Check. 
3. Sleep? Negative. 

For someone who has spent hundreds of hours creating artwork of the Memphis Grizzlies over the past year, that’s not too bad.

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“Hey, I’ll take that,” he said Thursday. “I don’t sleep anyway; I never have.”

What was once a casual hobby has become a borderline obsession. For Pacheco, he says his art is a creative escape from the daily grind – one that often keeps him up for hours at night long after each Grizzlies game has concluded.

He is a Ja Morant super fan. But he never thought his appreciation for both art and dunks would become such a critical part of his new lifestyle. 

“Advertising is a super fun industry, but for every 200 scripts I write at work, one might make it to air,” Pacheco said. “You almost feel like by the end, what you have written has gone through so many layers of revision and feedback that it doesn’t really feel like it’s yours. It feels like an amalgamation of all these different ideas and input. 

“So, I wanted to do something that was purely mine. I wanted something that was my vision and the way I want it to look and feel. And I have always been a huge Ja Morant fan.”

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Last season, Pacheco created 110 individual pieces of Grizzlies art, mostly of Morant. He draws the artwork by hand on his iPad, creating lifelike images of his favorite players and the rest of the Grizzlies. 

The talent, Pacheco says, runs in the family. His mother is a successful artist. So is his brother. Pacheco took art classes at MUS, from which he graduated in 2014. He went on to get an art scholarship at Davidson University before changing course to study advertising.

“Davidson, of course, is where Steph Curry went to college,” Pacheco said. “That is people’s only real indication of what Davidson is. I’m a huge Ja fan, and I can’t stand Steph. 

“I think I was the only person at Davidson who hated Steph. I went to college during his huge run where it felt like he was bringing the trophy back every year. But I was always more of a LeBron guy and a Grizz guy.”

His loyalty paid off. 

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Some of his work is so impressive and so popular that it has drawn Morant’s attention. 

Drawing Morant’s eye

Among the first pieces in Pacheco’s Grizzlies art portfolio is a portrait of Morant made from 8,000 pairs of hand-drawn Kobe Bryant Nike sneakers.

By layering and coloring Kobe 1, 5 and 6 Protro as well as Kobe 9 and 10 Elite models, Pacheco was able to almost identically recreate Morant’s image.

“That was the first piece that really took off,” Pacheco said. “This was around his rookie year, and back then, he was wearing Kobe shoes almost exclusively. ... I started noticing that all my favorite Ja performances were ones where he was wearing a significant pair of Kobe’s. I charted out the five that he wore the most, and then I just repeated it like 8,000 times until I had the image that I was looking for.

“When I shared it, (Morant) retweeted it and he replied. Then his agent contacted me and wanted to work out something to get the piece to him.”

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The tweet has more than 300 retweets and 2,800 likes. Before that, Pacheco had created all kinds of Grizzlies art, but he never shared it on the Internet. 

“This has always been something that I just enjoy doing, but I think that Ja piece was the first one I thought might actually get some traction,” Pacheco said. “When (Morant) retweeted it, a bunch of other accounts were messaging me asking for permission to put it out.”

Morant’s agency offered to send a signed jersey for the work. Pacheco explained that he created the entire piece digitally. All they needed to do was print it out.

“That was the first time that I realized how much people like this and that there is an audience for it,” Pacheco said. “I realized it was something I could be working on as a side project but also something I could be putting out every day and checking myself to try to create something new.”

#JaADay

Last season, Pacheco took his passion for art, particularly Grizzlies artwork, to a whole new level. 

“I set out to draw a picture of Ja after every single game,” Pacheco said. “It would have the game number, his full stat line, the score and who we played. So the idea would be at the end of the year you could look back and see this huge piece that encapsulates his entire season.

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“Obviously, the season didn’t turn out the way that we wanted it to, but there were some really incredible Ja moments throughout that are fun to look back and remember like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened.’ 

“Like, for example: Do you remember when Ja let the ball roll up the court against the Nets and Ben Simmons and he basically taunted him to pick the ball up? That was the win poster for that night. The goal was to take the iconic picture that could represent that game in a snapshot.”

Pacheco admits to being a little bit obsessive about the work. He never expected it to get to this point, but it consumed his time during basketball season. 

“It started as me just saying, ‘I’ll sketch Ja for an hour after every game,’” Pacheco said. “But once it started to become too uniform and similar, I said, ‘All right, let me try to innovate.’

“It turned into spending six or seven hours on these pieces after the game. That’s when I had to tell myself, ‘OK, this is getting a little bit too intense.’”

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He powered through, he said, mostly because of his fandom. If the game ended on the West Coast, Pacheco might get only a couple of hours to sleep before waking up and going to work the next day. 

“I think, for me, the intrigue was always the fact that (he) is the first player we’ve had on our team that is legitimately worthy of a poster every single night,” Pacheco said. “I remember back in the day when you would get one James Johnson dunk a year and that would be your big signature moment. We have never had a guy as consistently entertaining and marketable.

“It was a challenge to me, and that was the hardest part. Sometimes there would be nights that there were images of him that were super close ups or moving to me, and then you would have to say, ‘Well, he did dunk over three people, I should probably draw that part.’”

When Morant served his suspension late in the season, Pacheco pivoted and started to draw other players. Ahead of the playoffs, he spent several hours constructing a much larger piece that included every player on the team. 

As he shared his work, it continued to grow in popularity. People started reaching out trying to collaborate on a clothing line. Pacheco said he’s sent off a set of hoodies for a test run.

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Perhaps that is for next season. For now, he’s happy with the way his latest project turned out. 

“When I look at it in totality, 110 pieces that each took anywhere from six to eight hours to complete, it was a bit much,” Pacheco admits. “I’m glad the year is over. I’m excited to figure out what will be my way to dive in next year to the Grizzlies.”