Mural of Buck O'Neil on wall of downtown building to be unveiled July 24
SARASOTA — Thanks to Matt McAllister, John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil will remain larger than life.
Friday, the Sarasota artist completed work on a mural of the former Sarasotan and Negro League player and manager measuring 45-feet-by-50-feet. It will be displayed on a wall of the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering building, 1468 Boulevard of the Arts, and will be unveiled to the public on Sunday, July 24, when O'Neil earns posthumous induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The media gets an early peek on Thursday morning at 9. A Hall of Fame induction party will take place at 1 p.m. that day at the headquarters of DreamLarge, 513 Central Ave.
Born in Carrabelle, Florida, but raised in Sarasota, O'Neil joined in 1937 the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League after one season with the Memphis Red Sox. O'Neil played 10 seasons before taking over as manager of the Monarchs for eight years, winning two league titles.
But it was through Ken Burns' 1994 PBS documentary on baseball that O'Neil gained national recognition as the colorful spokesperson of the Negro League. In 1990, he led the effort to establish the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. O'Neil remained its honorary board chairman until his death in 2006 at 94.
With help from the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, the Walt Gilbert Mural Initiative, the Baltimore Orioles Foundation, DreamLarge, Newtown Alive, RADD, and the Sarasota African-American Cultural Coalition, McAllister was commissioned to paint O'Neil. The 40-year-old, life-long Sarasota resident, who began drawing with a pencil at 5, knew a little about O'Neil.
"But I didn't know all the history about him," said McAllister, who began work on the project three weeks ago, painting daily from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The mural depicts O'Neil leaping to catch a baseball, an image McAllister got from an old photo.
"It was a black-and-white and I had to convert it to color," he said. "The reference was really hard to work with. I was painting the face and it took me six hours to get to the point where I thought it looked satisfactory."
On the days he worked, McAllister, standing on a lift, either had the photo on a clipboard or on his phone.
"A photo in the left hand, the paint brush in the right hand," he said.
McAllister used four gallons of paint for the mural's main colors, and two quarts for the minor hues. It's the biggest wall he's ever painted, thus, it required the most paint.
He began his career painting on canvass. When asked by someone to paint a wall, McAllister discovered he enjoyed it while earning more money than he did in four months working for an auto vinyl wrap business.
"Since then," he said, "I've been doing it full time. The visibility (for the O'Neil mural) for the amount of people in downtown Sarasota will be nice. I know thousands of people will be seeing it. It's just a new client every single time. And living in Florida, with the way this place is growing, murals are becoming more and more popular."
Because McAllister has worked on the mural in public, next week's unveiling won't be a complete surprise. "It's not like we're going to drop a curtain to reveal it," he said, "but so many people don't even know it's there. There still will be a lot of people seeing it for the first time."
McAllister once painted a mural of a giant octopus. The one of O'Neil will be, he said, "probably my most important one. Because it's downtown Sarasota and I've always wanted to have a mural down there.
"It's also the most meaningful, not just for me, but for the people who knew Buck. Buck meant something to this town."
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Mural of Buck O'Neil on wall of downtown building to be unveiled July 24
