Holiday Cheer

A few months ago, while looking through the magazines at McNally Jackson on a Sunday evening, I happened to notice one of the zines on a featured rack. It was about Tyson Chandler, the basketball player, and it was called “Tyson Chandler.” The zine cost $10. The next morning, I tried to track down Ari Marcopoulos, one of the two artists responsible for the publication. That took about a month. He forwarded my emailed questions to Camilla Venturini, his collaborator. At the time, they simply hoped Chandler wouldn’t be mad at them for making this 20-page black-and-white tribute.

It took another month to track down Chandler himself. He was walking around Chelsea, visiting galleries, and he stopped by Printed Matter and bought out the bookstore’s supply of “Tyson Chandler.” I spoke with Chandler immediately after he had called Marcopoulos, who was in Italy at the time, and the piece ran a few days later.

But the story didn’t end then. Not a month later, Chandler signed with the New York Knicks—in part, I like to believe, because the zine’s last page gave him the idea—and phoned Marcopoulous to tell the photographer that they would be hanging out soon. Now they trade frequent emails and text messages. On Wednesday afternoon, Chandler surprised Marcopoulos by telling him that there were tickets to the Knicks’ final preseason game waiting at the Garden if he wanted them. He did.

Before the game, during warmups, Chandler pointed at Marcopoulos and thumped his chest, pointing to his heart. And after the game, he invited him into the bowels of Madison Square Garden. It was their first meeting. This time, the professional basketball player was the photographer.